The painting portrays Pietro Fontana, one of the most brilliant exponents of the culture of Spoleto in the first half of the nineteenth century, closely linked to the Roman artistic and literary environment, as well as a far-sighted politician and scholar of art and local reality.
To him we owe a serious and careful campaign of recovery and preservation of the city’s rich cultural heritage and the strong impulse given to the City Picture Gallery, thanks to the detachment of the frescoes by Lo Spagna from the Rocca, which ran serious risks of conservation, and were moved to the City Hall where they are still preserved today.
As stated by the inscription on the back of the canvas, the portrait presented here was made by Giuseppe Sereni, a “painter from Spoleto” with a purist orientation who probably trained in his hometown following the examples of Pietro Gagliardini and Cesare Mariani as well as the most famous of the nineteenth-century Spoleto painters, Giovanni Catena.
In 1845 he was documented in Rome, where he probably moved to study and where he joined the circle of Tommaso Minardi‘s students, later obtaining a commission for a fresco in the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls (Conversion of Chancellor Philippi, 1857).
The painting of the Madonna with the Child and Saints in the sanctuary of the Madonna della Stella, made at a mature age by Sereni, built on heterogeneous sixteenth-century models combined with a gentle purist form, gave the painter a certain fame and various commissions also in Rome.
The portrait of Pietro Fontana, made by a still very young Sereni, is the only work that bears witness to Sereni’s activity in Spoleto. Fontana is portrayed here in typical nineteenth-century clothing and with austere features that show an advanced age.
Livio Agresti detto Ricciutino | Forlì 1508 ca – Roma 1579
The painting, which has come down to us much damaged, comes from the former hospital of St. Matthew and is part of a series of works that in 1873 were given to the Picture Gallery at the request of mayor Tommaso Benedetti by the Congregation of Charity which managed the property of the city’s religious guilds.
The graceful figure of the Saint, represented according to traditional iconography in the act of holding the cross of Christ that she found, holds a handkerchief with three nails in her right hand and has a golden crown on her head resting on a transparent veil.
The saint is depicted as a richly dressed young woman.
The stylistic requirements of the painting, with its appreciable chromatic qualities, led scholars, starting with Guardabassi (1872), to attribute its execution to Livio Agresti, a painter who worked for a long time in southern Umbria soon after the mid-16th century, as demonstrated by the numerous evidences in Amelia, where she painted the Crucifixion with Saints Firmina and Olympiad, Narni, with an Annunciation now at the Civic Museum and a Key Delivery in the Cathedral, Terni, with a Circumcision in the Cathedral, and Collescipoli with the Baptist.
Giorgio Vasari in his second edition of Le Vite dedicates a few pages to Livio Agresti at the end of Primaticcio’s biography, giving back a lively image of him as “a good and proud draughtsman, a practical colourer, copious in his writing of stories, and by the universal ways”.
The painter from Forlì moved to Rome, where he “studied drawing with a great deal of attention and became a good practitioner” (Vasari) and left numerous examples of his art in the Eternal City, participating in two of the most important construction sites of those years, the decoration of Villa d’Este and the Oratory of the Gonfalone next to Federico Zuccari and Girolamo Muziano.
Following in the footsteps of his patron, Cardinal Otto Truchsess, he also worked in distant Germany in the small village of Dillingen where he painted a cycle of frescoes, now lost, in the castle’s private chapel.
Possibly taking advantage of his fame, Agresti moved to Amelia in his seventies with his family and started a small shop to meet the demands of the local client.
