Description

Carlo Dolci (Firenze, 1616 – Firenze, 1686)

Ecce Homo

The prince biographer of the seventeenth century in Florence, Filippo Baldinucci, was a pupil of the painter Carlo Dolci; to him we owe much of what we know today about this extraordinary Florentine portrait painter. After an initial training with Jacopo Vignali, he inextricably linked his production to the theme of the sacred and to portraiture, conceiving his gifts as a real “gift of God”.
Introverted and devoted, he will leave Florence only on one occasion, in 1672, when Archduke Ferdinand Charles of Habsburg invited him to Innsbruck to portray his daughter Carla Felicita and Anna de ‘Medici, future wife of Emperor Leopold I.
His hand can be seen, in particular, in the delicacy and sharpness of the faces, typical of Florentine portraiture and which are influenced by the Corresque lesson; what we observe here, however, looks quite different.
Highlighting the sweetness of the features and the attention to the expressiveness of the depiction, here the Christ appears as charged with a strong pathetism, highlighted by the dark colors and the very close cut of the composition. To reinforce the attribution to this master there is also the presence of an iconographically very similar work attributed to Dolci, today at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich.

Bibl.: C. McCorquodale, A Fresh Look at C. D., in Apollo, XCVII (1973), 135, pp. 477-88;

Our reference: BF00103