Francesco Cairo

Willard B. Golovin (1908-2001);

By whose Estate sold (‘Property from the Estate of Willard Golovin’), New York, Sotheby's, 23 January 2003, lot 52, for $140,000;

Where acquired and subsequently sold to the present owner.

Drawing inspiration from Van Dyck and playing on contrasts of light and dark, this arresting portrait of the distinguished military commander Marchese Giovan Francesco Serra di Cassano (1609-1656), is one of four recorded versions, of which only two can be said with any certainty to be autograph. All depict him dressed in armour holding the baton of command. The present work is closest to the version still in the Serra di Cassano collection, Rome, first recorded in the inventory of 1740 drawn up in Naples.¹ The family moved there from Milan in the years following the death of the Marchese. A second portrait of Serra is recorded in the artist’s inventory of 1665: ‘Ritratto del Eccl.mo Marchese Serra originale del Cauagl.e largo Br. 1. on. 8. alto Br. 2. on. 1.’²This autograph version, like the canvas that remained in the Serra collection, is likely to have been commissioned in Milan. A letter dated 20 August 1648 from the artist to Madama Reale Maria Cristina, Duchess and Regent of Savoy, refers to a visit he paid Serra, who was suffering from an injury probably sustained in battle at Cremona, where he had led Spanish troops against the French.³ It has been suggested that the portrait commission is datable to around this time. By December 1652 Serra had left Milan for Spain; a date prior to this accords stylistically with Cairo’s work in the late 1640s. A third portrait, presumed lost, is known through a copy in the Galleria Nazionale di Palazzo Spinola, Genoa;⁴ quite close to the design of the Serra version, it shows the sitter full-length, wearing the medal of the Ordine di San Giacomo. A fourth portrait of the Marchese is recorded without an attribution in the seventeenth-century inventory of the collection of the Marqués de Leganés, Spanish Governor in Milan, who in 1635 had appointed Serra as Fieldmaster; the latter portrait may be the same as the one listed in the nineteenth-century collection of Madrazo.

At the time of the sale in 2003, both Francesco Frangi and Mina Gregori endorsed the attribution of the present work to Cairo. Indeed, this version’s subtle articulation of the armour corresponds most closely to the engraving by Giacomo Cotta (1627-1689), which reverses the design, names the artist and includes a lengthy inscription identifying the sitter.⁵

¹ Recorded in the inventory as Van Dyck; F. Frangi, Francesco Cairo, Turin 1998, pp. 265-66, no. 67, reproduced fig. 75. Compared to this lot its dimensions are slightly taller and narrower (121 x 91 cm.) and there are differences in the armour.

² 29 July 1665, Inuentario de Quadri del Sig.r Cauaglier Cairo ritrouati nella sua Casa, no. 127, transcribed by S. Colombo in Francesco Cairo (1607–1665), exh. cat., Varese 1983, p. 244. Frangi translated its dimensions as approximately 129 x 99.5 cm.

³ S. Colombo in Francesco Cairo (1607-1665), exh. cat., Musei Civici di Varese, 1983, p. 232.

⁴ M. Cataldi Gallo, ‘Ritratto e costume: status symbol nella Genova del Seicento’, in Bollettino ligustico per la storia e la cultura regionale, I, 1989, pp. 95-96 (as a copy); according to Frangi, who agrees it is a copy, it is probably posthumous.

⁵ Civica Raccolta A. Bertarelli, Milan; reproduced in Varese 1983, p. 253. A second engraving, of lesser quality, by Giacomo Piccini (c. 1617–1669) also carries inscriptions that confirm the identity of the sitter and the original artist.