Portrait of the painter Ludovico Lipparini

Cremona painted this in 1858, when he was 21 and only two years past the death of the man he was portraying. Ludovico Lipparini had been his painting professor at the Venice academy, a respected Romantic who had taught there since the 1830s, so this is a likeness set down from memory of a teacher already gone. For a long time nobody knew that. The museum bought the canvas in 1911 simply as the head of an unknown man, and only in 1933 did a scholar recognise Lipparini's features in it. Cremona would soon help lead the Scapigliatura, the loose bohemian movement of Milanese artists, and his later faces melt into a hazy, breathed-on light. Here the handling is still firm and direct.