Portrait of Giuseppe Poldi Pezzoli

The painting, made around 1830, depicts Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli’s father, Giuseppe, then in his early sixties. At an already advanced age he had inherited from the two branches of his family, the Poldi of Parma and the Pezzoli d’Albertone of Bergamo, a considerable economic patrimony, consisting among other things of the noble seventeenth-century palace in Via del Giardino, today’s Via Manzoni. A man of secure economic substance, Poldi Pezzoli was to marry Gian Giacomo’s mother, Rosina Trivulzio, in 1819, whose noble family, even in the 18th century, could boast one of Milan’s finest art collections. Giuseppe, on the other hand, would never be a true collector: the purchases Giuseppe made for his home mainly involved furniture and furnishings, chosen without particular attention to artistic or antiquarian value.
In Giuseppe Molteni’s portrait, the Poldi Pezzoli is depicted in a sober and elegant manner. All attention is focused on the man, with his serious and thoughtful gaze, without any reference to his surroundings that somehow also reveals the social level to which he belongs. And yet the clothes, the chair on which he sits-still owned by the Museum-and the posture itself betray his upper middle-class origins. Giuseppe Molteni was a specialist in the genre: a renowned restorer as well as a painter, he was best known as a fashionable portraitist of the Lombard aristocracy and upper middle class. A sumptuous carved and gilded wooden frame frames Poldi Pezzoli’s portrait: its aristocratic opulence creates an effective contrast with the painting’s sobriety, giving the effigy a position of prime importance.