Pietro Ligari (Ardenno 1686 -Sondrio 1572)

Portrait of a middle-aged man, of popular or petty bourgeois extraction, as indicated by the simple knot in his tie, the jacket with large buttons, and the loose hair (with a furtive 'comb-over'). Only upon closer observation do we notice a hump that deforms his back - perhaps a 'gibbus' from scoliosis - which the painter represents with graceful adherence to reality. With a courteous gesture, the character turns towards us, holding in his right hand an object alluding to his identity, of a curved shape and proportions such as to resemble a horn, which in popular belief has a propitiatory meaning equal to that of the hunchback; in doing so, a hint of melancholy veils his gaze and allows us to glimpse his state of mind in showing himself in the role of a hunchback, confirming Pietro Ligari's capacity for psychological penetration, always extremely refined in his portraits. In the painting, unpublished, we can grasp the calm naturalism and sober realism of the Lombard portrait tradition, alien to any emphasis and fused in the pictorial drafting by a soft nonchalance of touch. Everything suggests a dating in the artist's Milanese years (1710-27), before the definitive return to his Valtellina. Oil on original canvas of cm.73x54, with relining and new frame applied in the second half of the twentieth century, when small restorations were also carried out in margin areas, for no more than 2 percent of the painted surface. Frame in style and tone of the period, of current manufacture.