Portrait of Tommaso Salini (ca. 1578-1630)
Medium
Black chalk and charcoal, red chalk, white chalk on brown paper (faded from blue?). Framing lines in pen and brown ink
Dimensions
8 7/8 x 6 7/16 in. (22.6 x 16.4 cm)
Classification
Drawings
Department
Drawings and Prints
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Gift of Mrs. Charles Slatkin, 1954
Accession Number
54.612.1
Tags
Art Historical Context
In the vibrant artistic circles of early 17th-century Rome Ottavio Leoni (1578–1630), known as "Ilovano," captured the likeness of fellow artist Tommaso Salini (ca 1578–1630) in this intimate 1620 portrait drawing. Leoni, a master portraitist celebrated for his precise yet expressive chalk studies of Roman intellectuals, nobility, and painters, immortalized Salini—a Caravaggesque still-life specialist and member of Caravaggio's contentious circle—during a time when dramatic tenebrism and naturalism dominated Italian art. Executed on brown paper (possibly faded from blue), the work employs a s...