697. PORTRAIT OF A TAILOR.
Moroni (Bergamese: 1525-1578).
Giambattista Moroni is one of the greatest of the Italian portrait-painters, and this picture is perhaps his best-known and most popular production.[169] The works of Moroni appeal alike to the general public and to the painter. He gave to his figures a vitality and ease, and impressed upon them a verisimilitude which appeal to every spectator. His works (adds Sir F. Burton) "will always be highly estimated by the painter, as they exhibit rare technical merits, perfect knowledge and command of means, facility of execution without display of dexterity, truth of colour, and the finest perception of the value of tones." "No portrait-painter ever placed the epidermis of the human face upon canvas with more fidelity, and with greater truth than Moroni: his portraits have all a more or less prosaic look, but they must all have had that startling likeness to the original which so enchants the great public, who exclaim 'The very man! just how he looks!' And it was with the eyes of the great public that Moroni did look at his subjects; he was not a poet in the true sense of the word, but a consummate painter. Yet, now and then, he manages to go beyond himself, and to pierce the surface till he reaches the soul of the sitter. In such cases his portraits may rank with those of Titian" (Morelli's German Galleries, p. 48). His colouring varied at different periods of his life. For examples of his manner before he came under Il Moretto's influence see 1023 and 1316—the reddish hue of his flesh-tints being characteristic. In his second period he adopted the "silvery" manner of Il Moretto: seen here and in 1022; whilst for his third, or naturalistic manner see 742. Moroni is a distinguished ornament of the school of Bergamo—a provincial school characterised, says Morelli, by "manly energy," but also by "a certain prosaic want of refinement." See, for other Bergamese painters, Previtali (695) and Cariani (1203). Palma Vecchio, the greatest of them, is represented by the "Portrait of Ariosto," 636. Giambattista Moroni was a painter without honour in his own country, and when people from Bergamo came to Titian to be painted, he used to refer them to their own countryman—no better face painter, he would tell them, existed. Moroni is believed to have entered the studio of Moretto at Brescia when fifteen years of age. His religious pictures are inferior reflections of his master's. Upon one of them, still preserved in the church of Gorlago (between Bergamo and Brescia) he was engaged at the time of his death. No admirer of Moroni should omit to visit Bergamo: a splendid series of his portraits is to be seen in the Carrara gallery of that town. There too, as also in the gallery at Verona, is a pretty portrait by him of a little girl.
A "speaking portrait." "The tailor's picture is so well done," says an old Italian critic, "that it speaks better than an advocate could." A portrait that enables one, moreover, to realise what was once meant by a "worshipful company of merchant tailors." Tagliapanni—for such is his name—is no Alton Locke—- no discontented "tailor and poet"; neither is he like some fashionable West-End tailor, with ambitions of rising above his work. He is well-to-do—notice his handsome ring; but he has the shears in his hands. He does the work himself, and he likes the work. He is something of an artist, it would seem, in clothes: his jacket and handsome breeches were a piece of his work, one may suppose; and the artist has caught and immortalised him, as he is standing back for a minute to calculate the effect of his next cut.