Reverend Father Giovanni Antonio Philippini

In 1651 France was in the middle of the Fronde, the civil wars in which great nobles and the Paris parlement turned against the regency of Anne of Austria and her minister, Cardinal Mazarin. That year a Roman churchman came to Paris and sat for Philippe de Champaigne. Giovanni Antonio Filippini had been prior general of the Carmelite order since 1648, and Champaigne set him behind a stone parapet, a device made popular by Venetian portrait painters a century earlier. The Latin lettered on the stone gives his name, his office over the whole Carmelite order, his age, in his 52nd year, and the date, 1651, the year in which he came to France.

Champaigne painted two versions. One went home with the sitter to Rome, to San Martino ai Monti, the Carmelite church whose renovation Filippini had paid for, partly out of his own fortune, and it is still there. The other stayed in Champaigne's house until he died in 1674 and probably went to his pupil Nicolas de Plattemontagne. It turned up again in Paris in 1951, three centuries after it was painted, and came to Boston in 1993 with the bequest of the collector William A. Coolidge.