The Painter's Painter: Diego Velázquez's Cristoforo Segni

Velázquez painted this striking portrait of Cristoforo Segni, Maggiordomo to Pope Innocent X, around 1650, during his second trip to Rome, a period in his career when he created some of his greatest work in the realm of portraiture. As Maggiordomo to His Holiness from 1645 to 1653, Cristoforo Segni was a high-ranking member of the clergy appointed by the Pope to oversee the apostolic palaces. This perceptive portrayal of a man well known to Velázquez is testament to the artist's ability to capture character and to his technical virtuosity. Leading scholars think it likely that the work was conceived entirely by Velázquez, with the composition and figure mapped out by him, and that he was responsible at the very least for the execution of the head, its painterly modelling and engaging expression strong indicators that it was painted from life. Other subsidiary parts of the painting were executed by the Cremonese painter Pietro Martire Neri, who according to Antonio Palomino worked alongside Velázquez during his second sojourn in the Eternal City, perhaps because the portrait was left unfinished when Velázquez left Rome.

In his celebrated Museo Optico of 1725 the biographer and painter Palomino recorded that Velázquez painted Pope Innocent X's Majordomo, and it was Cruzada Villaamil in 1885 who first established the clear link between Palomino’s reference and the present work. Segni was one of the first members of the Pope’s entourage with whom Velázquez came into contact, for as Palomino noted, the artist stayed at Segni’s family house in Bologna in 1649 during his journey to Rome. Segni was also a patron of the sculptor Alessandro Algardi, from whom Velázquez had commissioned works on behalf of Philip IV, and as such the two had various matters in common.

The exact chronology of Velázquez’s Roman portraits is not known for certain but they are all thought to have been painted in a short period between his arrival in the city in May 1649 and his departure in November 1650. According to Palomino, his first work was his magnificent likeness of his mulatto servant Juan de Pareja (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Its astonishing intensity of expression and bravura technique provoked universal admiration when exhibited at the Pantheon in 1650. Whether from the success of this work or more likely from the access Velázquez had to the Papal court as a result of his position as painter to the King of Spain, it was soon followed by one of the artist's most celebrated masterpieces: his portrait of the pontiff himself, Pope Innocent X (Galleria Doria Pamphilij, Rome; fig. 1). Presumed to be Velázquez’s first ‘official’ commission in Rome, it won high praise, with even the Pontiff himself admitting that the piercing likeness was almost ‘too truthful’. Its legacy across the centuries is profound.

This portrait of Cristoforo Segni belongs to a small group of likenesses of sitters drawn from the ranks of the papal court that no doubt followed on from the success of the portrait of Innocent himself – indeed, the present work echoes the overall arrangement of the Doria Pamphilj painting. These include portraits of the Pope’s adopted nephew Cardinal Camillo Astalli, known as Cardinal Pamphilij (Hispanic Society of America, New York; fig. 2) and Monsignor Camillo Massimi (National Trust, Bankes Collection, Kingston Lacy; fig. 3). Astalli’s portrait can be dated to shortly after September 1650, when he was raised to the rank of cardinal. Like Segni, the papal Chamberlain Massimi was a friend of the artist, and a man of considerable learning as well as a collector, who would eventually come to own no less than six works by him.¹ Common to all of these portraits is Velázquez's ability to capture the essence of the sitters' features without outline or drawing but through colour alone; as such they proclaim his newfound maturity and complete mastery of style.

Relatively little is known about the life of the Cremonese painter Neri, even less in regard to his relationship and workings with Velázquez. He may have been in Rome briefly in about 1629 and is then documented there between 1647 and his death in 1661. The first time that the two names are mentioned together is when they both attended a meeting of the congregation of the Virtuosi al Pantheon that took place on 9 March 1650. This was a society founded in Rome in the sixteenth century, whose artist members – the virtuosi – were painters, sculptors and architects. Their aim was to carry out charitable works and promote the fine arts to the glory of the faith. Velázquez is recorded as participating in the congregation’s meetings since 22 February of that year. Giuseppe Bresciani, in his La virtù ravvivata de Cremonesi insigni pittori, ingegneri &c… of 1665, is the first to document his association with the Spanish painter. The precise nature of his relationship and of his work with Velázquez is unclear. Neri is known to have executed at least three copies of the celebrated portrait of Pope Innocent X painted by Velázquez in 1650.²

Palomino named only Velázquez as the painter of Segni’s portrait; and indeed the sitter holds in his right hand a letter indicating Velázquez's authorship: party hidden in the shadow cast by the sitter’s thumb is his name; and squeezed in below it, and seemingly as an afterthought, Neri’s name is also inscribed. Aside from his own workshop activities in Madrid, this is the only known example of a collaborative work by Velázquez and provides an interesting insight into the artist’s modus operandi and artistic freedom during his second trip to Italy.

The degree of participation by Velázquez within the painting has over the years been the subject of debate among scholars. Justi praised the quality of the head, while considering the remainder of the portrait to be by Neri, an assessment broadly supported by Mayer, who also accepted the signature as being that of Velázquez. Voss believed the work to be by Velázquez, in particular the head, the inscription and the overall composition, inspired by his celebrated portrait of Pope Innocent X. When exhibited at the Casón del Buen Retiro in 1960–61, the author of the exhibition catalogue suggested the painting was begun by Velázquez and retouched by Neri, who added his name at the bottom of the letter in the sitter’s hand. Harris, however, rejected the attribution and considered the work to be entirely by Neri: either the painting recorded by Palomino, or a copy after a lost original by Velázquez (it is unclear whether she ever saw the painting in the original); and López-Rey took a broadly similar view, ascribing the painting to Neri and believing it to be a copy after a lost sketch by the master.

More recently however scholars have been unanimous in their support for the painting as a collaborative work between Velázquez and Neri. Following the portrait's inclusion in the exhibition at the Grand Palais, Paris, held in 2015, there is an overwhelming consensus in support of the authorship of Velázquez and Neri among scholars that include the late Dr William B. Jordan, Guillaume Kientz, Gabriele Finaldi, Javier Portus, endorsing opinions previously expressed by Salvator Salort Pons and the late Alfonso Pérez Sánchez. Velázquez’s highly expressive and distinctive brushwork is clearly evident in the head of the sitter. It seems plausible he also painted the collar and some scholars have speculated whether, in addition, he may have painted at least part of the sleeves, while the rest of the costume, the hat, the hands, the chair and curtain were probably added or worked up by Neri.³ The distinctive and fluid rendering of the whites of the sleeves in the painting would certainly seem to reflect the influence of painters such as Domenico Fetti (1589– 1623), with whom Neri seems to have been associated during a period of nearly two decades that he spent in Mantua, and suggest that these parts were in all probability largely by him.

Note on Provenance

During the mid-nineteenth century the painting belonged to the distinguished collection of the Marqués de Salamanca (1811–1883) in Madrid, who owned several works by the great Sevillian master. A highly successful businessman and financier, the Marqués became the Spanish Minister of Finance in 1847. A passionate collector and patron of the arts, he assembled one of the finest private collections of paintings in Spain, which he kept at his newly built mansion, the Palacio de Recoletos in Madrid. First opened to the public in 1858, the paintings collection was largely composed of works from the seventeenth century, principally drawn from the Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Flemish schools. These included works by or attributed to Raphael, Reni and Correggio. Alongside the Velázquez, his notable Spanish works included Murillo's series of the Prodigal Son (National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin) as well as Zurbarán’s Annunciation of 1650 (Philadelphia Museum of Art), and no less than eight paintings by Goya, including the Bullfight of 1808–12, which he purchased directly from the artist’s son Javier (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). The Dutch and Flemish pictures featured works by or attributed to Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Van Dyck, Teniers and de Hooch, including Rubens’s Wrath of Achilles and Death of Achilles today in the Courtauld Institute in London. His collection of antiquities were housed in the Palacio de Vista Alegre which he acquired in 1859, and the collection of Roman sculpture and Greek and Etruscan objects was later bought en bloc by the Museo Arqueológico Nacional in Madrid. His paintings collection was largely dispersed at auctions in Paris during the 1860s and 1870s after he ran into financial difficulties. The Portrait of Cristoforo Segni was included in his first sale in Paris in 1867, when it remained unsold, but was subsequently bought in his second auction in 1875 by Luisa Gonzaléz (1847–1924), wife of the French businessman and financier Auguste Dreyfus (1827–1897).⁴ The painting is likely to have remained in Paris until it was acquired in 1958 by the late father of the previous owner, where it remained largely out of public view. The painting emerged only recently from obscurity and was included in the exhibition dedicated to Velázquez held in 2015 at the Grand Palais, Paris.

At the time of his 1924 monograph, August Mayer stated that this painting was in a Parisian private collection. Twelve years later the same author named the owner of the painting as the Duchesse de Dreyfus-Gonzales [sic]. The most likely identification for the Duchess would be Anne de Talleyrand Périgord, Duchess de Premio Real (1877–1945), the wife of Auguste Dreyfus's second son Edouard Dreyfus-Gonzalez, Duke of Premio Real (1846–1941). It is possible that the painting went unsold at the Dreyfus sale of 1889 and remained in the Dreyfus-Gonzalez collection until it is recorded there in the 1930s. It is not among the paintings sold from the Dreyfus-Gonzalez collection in Paris on 8 June 1896. At the time of the Madrid exhibition of 1960–61 it was said that the lender had recently acquired the picture from the Duchess de Dreyfus-Gonzalez, which may indicate that it remained in the possession of the family until that time, perhaps in the collection of the Duchess' sister Félicie de Talleyrand Perigord, Marquise de Villahermosa (1878–1981). López-Rey (see Literature) cites a specific date of 3 March 1958 as the point of sale, but if this were an auction then no catalogue of it has yet been found.

¹ His own portrait, that of Donna Olimpia, and portraits of the Spanish King and Queen and the two Infantas, the last three probably acquired when he was Papal Nuncio in Madrid between 1654 and 1658.
² Marquess of Bute, Mount Stuart House, Isle of Bute, Scotland (López-Rey 1963, p. 272, no. 444, pl. 363); El Escorial, Madrid, where the same figure is shown full-length with a prelate in attendance (López-Rey 1963, p. 272, no. 445, pl. 361; exhibited Paris 2015, pp. 266–67, no. 78); and a third copy, signed and inscribed by Neri, sold London, Christie’s, 9 December 1989, lot 119. A portrait attributed to Neri of Velázquez, with Galerie Canesso, Paris, was exhibited Paris 2015, pp. 344–45, no. 114.
³ The curtain has suffered damage in the past, perhaps during an earlier campaign of restoration, and this area was partially reconstructed during restoration in 2017.
⁴ A nineteenth-century copy after the painting was recorded in a French private collection; the copy includes the double signature and seems likely to have been executed at the time of the great Salamanca sales; Salort Pons 2002, reproduced in colour on p. 373, pl. 1.