Modesto Faustini “Portrait of an Elegant” Oil on Canvas Figurative Italian Painting of the 19th Century

Modesto Faustini (1839-1891), “Portrait of an elegant man”, oil on canvas in a gilded frame signed lower right “M. Faustini – Rome”.

Measure

canvas cm 62 x 46

frame cm 88 x 73

This splendid portrait belongs to one of the most flourishing periods of the Italian nineteenth century, in a Rome invaded by young painters from all over Europe in search of new inspirations and new artistic models. Faustini excels in female portraiture, preceding and inspiring painters of the caliber of Boldini. The young woman depicted is one of his favorite models, who also appears in “Pompeian Idyll” of 1864; she could be Niny Manziana, model and muse of numerous painters. A woman of great intellectual vivacity as well as great beauty, an exhibition was dedicated to her in 2021 for her contribution to Brescian art between the 19th and 20th centuries.

Modesto Faustini was born in Brescia on May 27, 1839.
Orphaned at the age of six, he was welcomed into the Pio Luogo Orfani of Brescia, where in 1855 Don Eugenio Dallola was appointed director, who immediately noticed the boy’s artistic talent; he decided to take care of his scholastic education and had him admitted to the School of Drawing in Brescia. Here his abilities earned him numerous medals to the point that in 1861 he was able to enter the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Milan. Here too, his successes were numerous and his first known paintings date back to this period. In 1869, thanks to a competition announced by the Municipality of Brescia, he obtained a two-year specialization pension in Rome.
Modesto arrived there in 1869; he was already thirty years old and had an artistic career that was not without satisfaction. Rome is still part of the small Papal State, the Roman artistic environment is decidedly conservative and behind the innovative instances that are emerging in other Italian cities (the Tuscany of the Macchiaioli, the Naples of Resina and Palizzi, the “scapigliata” Milan) but it still continues to be in the imagination of many young people an essential destination and the meeting point of European artists. Faustini lives a delicate historical moment and the transition from the old generation of romanticism to the young scapigliati who during the century will completely detach themselves from academicism to follow the creed of a free painting. In Rome he begins to compare himself with artists from all over Italy and European countries, in an environment rich in artistic and intellectual stimuli. His era immediately links him to the current of historicism, an example for all “The arrest of Luisa Sanfelice” which, presented at the Turin Exhibition, is purchased by the royal house. But there is no shortage of subjects from Roman tradition, a long series of Ciociare, Ciociarelli and
Cardinals who had fascinated him. His ambitions and a higher idea of ​​painting brought him closer to the newborn Pre-Raphaelite movement. Thus began the important commissions of sacred painting, imbued with a fifteenth-century purity in both color and design and concept, so much so that true modern Pre-Raphaelite
ism can be connected to him more than to others. He died prematurely in 1891, without managing to reach that twentieth century that would be the springboard for many Italian artists, Boldini first and foremost.
Numerous museums and public and private collections host Faustini’s paintings, first and foremost the Civic Museums of Brescia which in 2003 hosted a monographic exhibition dedicated to the painter.