The Image of the Artist and the Self-portrait
The great painters on whom Fra'Galgario modelled himself, either directly or indirectly, Rembrandt, Salomon Adler and Crespi, worked on their own images. Fra'Galgario represented himself as his double, a young man painting (fig 26 ?), also known as Le Cerighetto. The self-portraits of Fra'Galgario (only one was able to be sourced for the exhibition) reveal his true nature without artifice or disguise.
The portraits of artist friends, both his and those of other European painters, evoke the bonds of friendship and the alliances between colleagues in a natural, spontaneous manner. In the 18th Century, the social status of a painter and the nobility of his art were firmly established. Thus, portrait painters could immortalise their friends in all their human frailty.
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