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Rare 16th Century Antique Oil Painting on Copper Portrait of a Young Man

Offered by: European Antiques & Design

Description
Dimensions with frame
Height: 11.42 in (29 cm)
Width: 9.45 in (24 cm)
Depth: 1.19 in (3 cm)
Beautiful and rare antique oil painting on copper portrait of a young man. Excellent pictorial quality great attention to detail. Italian school of the 16th century. Not signed. The young man is represented with typical Renaissance clothes and hairstyle. the greatest interest of artists for copper painting is found in the mid-sixteenth century, especially starting from 1560.
The increase in the production of the metal support is due to several factors: from the improvement of extraction techniques in the quarry to the invention of the rolling mill (first examples of roller presses, powered by water mills, appear in Leonardo's Codex Atlanticus) which, with the mechanical beating, it allowed to obtain, quickly and without fusion, regular laminae.
The copper foil proved to be ideal for oil painting as it constituted a non-absorbent, rigid, smooth support characterized by the same reddish color that was used for the preparation of the bases. The major production centers were Antwerp, Hamburg and Amsterdam; the quality of the material made in Italy, on the other hand, is poorer.
In Italy, the Florence of Francesco I de Medici was one of the major centers of copper painting.
To be executed were refined paintings of reduced dimensions - landscapes, still lifes, religious and mythological subjects, battle and genre scenes - destined to enrich the studios of the new bourgeois public, while in more rare cases the painting on copper was experimented in large altarpieces.
The need to render the minutiae of the clothes and the physiognomic details in the creation of the portraits was largely satisfied precisely by the use of the copper support.