Portrait of a Knight of the Costantinian Order

The gentleman wears a three-cornered black felt hat, edged with silver braid, pulled low over his forehead. He has a white shirt and a magnificent coat, richly embroidered. A grey striped sash is tied around his waist. His metal waistcoat displays an order of knighthood, the Sacred Constantinian Order of Saint George. The distinctive feature of the knight’s face are the purplish lips, which seems to emphasize the ambiguity of the sitter, evident in the contrast between the pompousness of his garments and the emptiness of his expression.
The painting, one of Ghislandi’s masterpieces, has been dated to about 1740. The dense pigment on the face may be due to the fact that the painter, now very old, abandoned the brush and began to spread the colour with his fingers, perhaps because he suffered from an arthritis.
The whole portrait tends towards a dusty monochrome in which stand out the violet of the lips, the gleam of the cross and the red of the ribbon of the stick.