Portrait of a Knight of the Order of Saint Stephen Pope and Martyr

The painting shows a man of mature years seen in a three-quarter pose in a dark room, with his torso, shoulders and arms protected by steel armour. On his head he wears a large grey wig with curls falling to his shoulders, and a light white tie tied around his neck. His right hand rests on his dark steel helmet, set on a table, while his right hand rests on his hip. The front of the shining armour protecting his breast has a large red star with forked tips, seen here from an oblique angle.

This is the eight-pointed red cross bordered in gold of the Religious Order of Chivalry of Saint Stephen Pope and Martyr, also known as the Insigne Sacro Militare Ordine di Santo Stefano Papa e Martire. Established by Cosimo I de’ Medici, the first Grand Duke of Tuscany, in Pisa in 1562, the Order was approved the very same year by Pope Pius IV who placed it under the Benedictine rule, conferring the title and habit of Grand Master on Cosimo I and his descendants. In order to become a member, that is a knight, postulants not only had to take an oath of charity, marital chastity (i.e. fidelity) and obedience, they also had to have no fewer than four degrees of nobility on both their mother’s and father’s side.

Regarding the sitter’s identity, researchers have hitherto been misled by a red wax seal on the back of the painting’s wooden stretcher frame. For a long time this was mistakenly thought to be that of the Florentine Guicciardini family. However, the stretcher was probably replaced during an old restoration and, as in-depth archival investigations have clearly shown¹, while it features the same elements as the Guicciardini coat of arms, namely three hunting horns, the seal is probably that of a German or Flemish family and thus simply testifies to the fact that the picture once formed part of a certain collection rather than pointing to a commission, given the painting’s unquestioned Tuscan origin².

So we do not know the identity of our sitter portrayed in full armour. Even the attempt to identify him as Francesco Maria, a member of the Medici family, intriguing though it might be, is not entirely convincing³.

It is reasonable, however, to argue that Crespi must have painted it around the first decade of the eighteenth century, when he enjoyed strong bonds with the Grand Prince Ferdinando de’ Medici and consequently with the latter’s Tuscan court, which he visited regularly.

So we need to seek the identity of Crespi’s knight in official attire amongst the members of the Grand Prince’s entourage or his highest-ranking military commanders.

In addition to the prestigious ecclesiastical commissions and the mythological paintings avidly sought by international courts, as his biographer Giampietro Zanotti recalls, Lo Spagnuolo enjoyed a prolific career as a portrait artist.

Zanotti in his Storia dell’Accademia Clementina (History of the Clementine Academy, printed in Bologna in 1739) – an Academy of which Crespi was an active member – recalls how the artist created «infinite excellent portraits, both of men and women […] Cardinal Urighi, Cardinal Giorgio Spinola […], Cardinal Giacomo Boncompagni, Count Fulvio Grati, and a hundred others of people of various conditions, and all ingeniously expressed, according to their condition, and everything that is most suitable to make them similar»⁴. Only a page further on, to stress how active he was as a portraitist, Zanotti repeats himself: «He made again not a few portraits, and always similar, and always beautiful»⁵.

Crespi’s success as a portrait painter was also due to his skill and shrewdness in satisfying the wishes of ladies and princesses so that they could «appear profusely delicate and gentle and, although his style might seem too strong and frank for the task, this excellent man always knew how to please them»⁶. He was therefore able to soften his sitters’ forms and features, just as a modern photographer might do when using software to correct his photographs where necessary.

The intensity with which the painter conveys his sitter’s gaze with consummate skill, the blue pupil floating in the white of the eye, the thick paint with which he investigates the mature man’s slightly plump face and the touch of red on the pursed lips all point to Crespi’s mature style. Taken as a whole, they suggest and confirm a date around the first decade of the eighteenth century, when Crespi was Italy’s leading portrait painter, in the same years, we should remember, in which portrait artists of the calibre of Nicolas de Largillière (Paris, 1656-1746) and Hyacinthe Rigaud (Perpignan, 1659 – Paris, 1743) were working in France at the court of Louis XIV, alongside whom a portrait of an unknown knight such as this does not look at all out of place.

The genre of portrait painting with the sitter clad in official clothing spread throughout the 18th century in very similar ways. It was common, in fact, for portraits, especially official portraits, of courtiers or of high-ranking members of the military or the church, to be reproduced in print. Such prints, being very cheap, travelled easily, so we cannot rule out the possibility that Crespi and other painters like him, intent on painting portraits in Italy and elsewhere, might, for instance, have had access to engravings reproducing the works of their English or French counterparts. It is worth pointing out in that connection that Lo Spagnuolo himself was very active in printing, and produced at least fifty etchings that achieved great commercial success.

But while in his prints he almost always preferred a light, almost white background, on which he made the figures stand out by contrast (as, for example, in the famous series with the Stories of Bertoldo, Bertoldino and Cacasenno), in the painting under examination here the artist appears to look to northern European examples and, in particular, to the paintings of Rembrandt, to whom many critics have compared him. But then Crespi was able to study the Dutch and Flemish paintings in the Medici’s formidable collection in Florence very closely, which he would not have been able to do in Bologna. The vaguely “Rembrandtian” air of some of his mature and later paintings is also likely to have earned him a few commissions from foreign clients, mostly German princes.

That is why this portrait of an as yet unidentified knight, with its northern European flavour and the sitter’s typically Italian, sanguine vibrancy, marks one of the highest points in Crespi’s career as a portrait artist.