Portrait of the Miniaturist Abbot Camillo Tacchetti

Subleyras painted this portrait in Rome around 1744, and it did not stay private for long. In 1745 the printmaker Felice Polanzani made an engraving of it, and the Musei Reali keep an impression of that print as well. The sitter, Camillo Tacchetti, was an abbot and a painter of miniatures, and Subleyras painted him almost at a miniaturist's scale, in oil on a sheet of copper barely 32 cm high. It was a world the painter knew from home. In 1739 he had married Maria Felice Tibaldi, a celebrated miniaturist in her own right. Turin owns a second Subleyras portrait of a miniaturist abbot, Felice Ramelli, painted some years earlier and bought by the Italian state only recently. This one came to the gallery in 1892, purchased from the Cibrario family.