Gaetano Callani

It was 1802 when Maria Callani painted the portrait of her father Gaetano, painter and sculptor, perhaps the most famous artist of the Bourbon dukedom at the end of the 18th century.

Born in Parma in 1736 and died in 1809, he also worked in Piacenza and Milan where he moved in 1774 to carry out the stucco decoration of the hall of the Caryatids at Palazzo Reale.

He was also a passionate collector of drawings, engravings, plaster casts and paintings; in fact, the small painting of the Scapiliata by Leonardo, which enters the National Gallery in 1839, following the sale made by his son Francesco.

The most significant nucleus of the collection, which included 18 paintings by ancient and modern artists, is precisely that of Leonardo's artists, testifying to the great interest aroused by Leonardo in the climate of cultural renewal that developed in Milan at the end of the eighteenth century due to the reforms carried out by Austro-Hungarian government.

Callani had opened a studio in the Lombard capital in 1777, and it is there that his collection purchases are probably made, perhaps also on the advice of his brothers-in-law Carlo Giuseppe and Agostino Gerli, also painters, who shared the artist's passion for Leonardo and perhaps acted as mediators for the purchase of the Scapiliata.

In the portrait made by his daughter Callani, he is depicted with a painter's jacket, palette and brushes intent on working in his studio, with his gaze turned towards the viewer.

The image is striking for its physiognomic objectivity and intense expressive realism, also in the rendering of the fluid and loose brushstrokes, which however also reveals the influence of the neoclassical taste that was establishing itself in the academic circles of the time, also underlined by the presence of the neoclassical sculpture visible in the background of the painting.