Window mode follows your eyes with your camera, in this browser only: no picture or position leaves your device.
Portrait of an Old Man
attributed to Giulio Campi (Italian, c. 1500–1572)
mid-1500s
- Medium
- oil on wood
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Framed: 120.7 x 91.4 x 11.4 cm (47 1/2 x 36 x 4 1/2 in.); Unframed: 92.4 x 63.5 cm (36 3/8 x 25 in.)
- Culture
- Italy
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, European Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Holden Collection
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
Part of a distinguished family of Northern northern Italian painters, Campi depicts his sitter with an unidealized face dominated by carefully observed wrinkles. He stares out intently while grasping what may be a letter with its paper seal broken in his right hand. Despite this intense gaze the figure does not establish a lively connection with the viewer, and his mood remains distant and reserved, in keeping with Renaissance ideas about elegant comportment. Though his costume appears plain, the sumptuous black fabric was indicative of high status in some parts of Europe. --Michele Frederick (December 2011)
