Fra Galgario’s portrait of the founder of the Accademia Carrara, Count Giacomo Carrara (1714–1796), is a sympathetic informal representation of a young man, captured at a moment of dreaming—a dream of transforming the artistic culture of Bergamo, where he created one of the first public galleries in the world well before national galleries were even imagined. He modelled his ideas on the princely gallery at Dresden and on the new hang of the Medici galleries in the Uffizi, Florence.

The painting is described with affection by Francesco Tassi as that ‘beautiful portrait [of the count] in house clothes with a shaven forehead’.[1] It is one of Galgario’s last works, painted in the style defined as ‘magic impressionism’, which he adopted from Venetian and Lombard artists of the late sixteenth century, notably Titian and Giovan Battista Moroni.2[2] Galgario was the most brilliant and popular European portrait painter of the late Baroque. His subjects included patricians, intellectuals, priests, artists and young boy apprentices learning to be sculptors and painters. (He avoided portraying women.) They present an extraordinarily lively documentation of Northern Italian society. Galgario was admired for his formidable ability as a colourist, his thick impasto application of paint and an unparalleled ability to portray faces with genial, natural expressions, as shown in his portrait of Carrara.

As a young man Carrara studied literature, especially art historiography and philosophy. Following the death of his father in 1755 he was liberated and able to travel to create his own collection.[3] On his first excursion to Rome from 1757 to 1758 he proved to be something of a connoisseur, identifying important works by Moroni and others in the Borghese Gallery—then misattributed to others. He believed passionately in the values of the Renaissance in Northern Italy, whether in Milan, Venice or Bergamo.

At the time of his death Carrara’s collection consisted of some 1,300 paintings displayed in his purpose-built gallery, and subsequently recorded in drawings and an intelligent inventory by Bartolomeo Borsetti.[4] Carrara had bequeathed everything to the museum and for the creation of an academy which would lead to a revival of the local Bergamo school by providing the means of educating young artists in an institutional structure. To create a literature on the Renaissance in Northern Italy, Carrara commissioned a book from Francesco Tassi on the lives of Bergamo’s painters, sculptors and architects (published posthumously in 1793); Tassi’s volumes remain an invaluable source for Northern Italian painting of the period.

Jaynie Anderson

[1] Francesco Maria Tassi, Vite de’pittori, scultori e architetti bergamaschi, Bergamo: Locatelli, 1793, vol. 2, p. 69.

[2] Titian (1488/1490–1576); Giovan Battista Moroni (1520/1524–1578).

[3] For the best account of Carrara’s life, see Rosanna Paccanelli, ‘Tra erudizione e mecenatismo: itinerario biografico di un collezionista illuminato’, in Giacomo Carrara (1714–1796) e il collezionismo d’arte a Bergamo, Bergamo: Poligrafiche Bolis, 1999, pp. 95–162; also Giovanni Valagussa, ‘The Accademia Carrara: Collections, collectors and community’, supra, pp. 46–48.

[4] Paccanelli, pp. 259–319.