Portrait of Giuseppe Antonio Petrolini

The painting comes from the antiques market in Milan and is attributed to Giuseppe Mazzola, confirmed by an examination of the work by Francesca Dalmasso.
The subject of the painting is Giuseppe Antonio Petrolini (Cannobio, 1750-Paris, 1806), an official of the Kingdom of Italy and a figure for whom Mazzola signed and dated a post mortem portrait commissioned by his widow in 1807, now preserved in the gallery of the Ospedale Maggiore in Milan. Mazzola was in great demand as a portrait painter among the noble families of Lombardy, but Francesca Dalmasso has noted affinity with the work in question, particularly in the portrait of a painter friend signed and painted in 1809, in which Mazzola adopts the same type of composition and the same unified background. In the portrait of Petrolini from the GAM collection, the exceptional pictorial quality can be seen in both the expressive power of the face, and the refined execution of the clothing and objects.