Portrait of Galileo Galilei — an Inscribed and Dated Florentine Copy after Justus Sustermans (Antwerp 1597 – Florence 1681), Presented by the Artist to the Risorgimento Jurist Oreste Regnoli in 1882.
Florence: Luigi Pompignoli, 1882. An oil on canvas portrait of Galileo Galilei by the Florentine painter, copyist, and restorer Luigi Pompignoli, after the celebrated prototype by Justus Sustermans in the Uffizi (inv. 1890 no. 745, c. 1635–36), inscribed and dated on the verso and presented by the artist to the distinguished jurist and patriot Professor Oreste Regnoli in Florence in 1882. The painting shows Galileo bust-length, his torso turned slightly to the right and his head turning to the left with a grave, sidelong gaze directed upward past the viewer. The high forehead, thinning reddish-brown hair, long divided beard fading from grey to white, dark academic robe, and pale standing collar emerging from the surrounding darkness faithfully follow the Sustermans composition — the single most influential portrait of Galileo ever painted. The handling is consciously restrained, seeking the tonal gravity of the seventeenth-century original rather than any nineteenth-century bravura. Yet the painting is not merely a gallery exercise. Its significance lies on its reverse, where an inscription in the artist's hand on the upper stretcher bar reads: L. Pompignoli al suo carissimo amico Prof. Oreste Regnoli / Firenze 1882. That dedication — identifying the maker, the recipient, the place, and the year in the language of personal affection — transforms the canvas from an anonymous repetition of a famous image into a precisely datable and historically legible document. The prototype behind the painting belongs to the final chapter of Galileo's life. In 1635, during his years of house arrest at Arcetri following the condemnation of the Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo, Galileo arranged for his portrait to be painted by Justus Sustermans, the Flemish-born court painter of the Medici. The commission originated with Elia Diodati (1576–1661), a Genevan jurist of Lucchese descent who had orchestrated the Latin translation of the Dialogo as the Systema Cosmicum (Strasbourg, 1636) and who wished to possess and disseminate an authoritative likeness of the philosopher throughout northern Europe. A letter from Roberto Galilei dated 21 January 1636 confirms the portrait was already completed by that date, placing its execution in late 1635 or very early 1636. The painting was dispatched northward to Diodati, but after Galileo's death in January 1642 it was offered back to Grand Duke Ferdinand II through the mediation of Galileo's last pupil, Vincenzo Viviani. As Filippo Baldinucci records in the Notizie dei professori del disegno, Viviani presented the portrait to the Grand Duke c. 1645. It entered the Palazzo Pitti collections, was transferred to the Uffizi c. 1678, and by the eighteenth century hung in the celebrated Tribuna — the most prestigious room in the gallery — where it appears in Johann Zoffany's painting The Tribuna of the Uffizi (1776). The Diodati portrait and the present Uffizi painting are one and the same: painted from life at Arcetri, returned to Florence within a decade of Galileo's death, and continuously held by the Medici and their successors ever since. It is the image through which later generations learned to imagine the aging philosopher. That image was copied repeatedly from the eighteenth century onward, and by the 1870s and 1880s the Sustermans Galileo had become one of the most frequently reproduced paintings in the Florentine galleries. The practice of copying masterworks in the Uffizi and Pitti was regulated, supervised, and professionally codified. A formal permit system had existed since at least 1763, requiring copyists to register, to work under supervision, and to produce their copies at a size differing from the original by a fixed proportion — a requirement with which the present painting, at 55 × 45 cm against the original's 56 × 48 cm, is precisely consistent. Within this system a cadre of professional copyists operated as intermediaries between the old-master canon and the collectors, scientists, and public institutions that wished to possess painted likenesses of great figures. Among the documented Florentine gallery copies of the Sustermans Galileo from this period are those by Niccolò Cecconi (1879, now at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich) and A. Susan Zileri (1884, now at the Science Museum, London). The Pompignoli copy belongs squarely within this cluster and adds a precisely dated and inscribed example to the corpus. Luigi Pompignoli was a figure formed at the very intersection of academic painting, gallery copying, and reproductive culture. Born at Forlì in 1814, he enrolled at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence in 1838 and studied there until 1841, simultaneously working as a copyist in the galleries. By the late 1830s he was already engaged as a draughtsman for the monumental folio publication L'Imperiale e Reale Galleria Pitti illustrata per cura di Luigi Bardi (Florence, 4 vols., 1837–42), a series of approximately five hundred large-format engravings reproducing paintings in the Galleria Palatina, dedicated to Grand Duke Leopold II. At least nine documented plates bear Pompignoli's name as disegnatore, covering works after Paris Bordone, Palma il Vecchio, Giulio Romano, Domenichino, Cigoli, Bachiacca, and Jan Van Den Hoecke. One plate reproduces a portrait of Eleonora de' Medici, Duchess of Mantua, then catalogued under the name of Justus Sustermans — direct evidence of Pompignoli drawing from a painting attributed to the same artist whose Galileo he would later copy. His studio and residence were at 3 Piazza Santa Croce, Florence, as documented in a signed inscription on the verso of his 1878 portrait Mary A. Leavis. Among his original portraits, a watercolour of the Cesenate physician Maurizio Bufalini (1875), held at the Pinacoteca Civica di Forlì, is cited in the Bénézit Dictionary of Artists. Among his copies, an Annunciazione after Guercino was described by contemporaries as particularly successful. He appears in Bénézit, in the Istituto Matteucci Dizionario degli artisti dell'Ottocento, and in the British Museum person records (for his work on the Galleria Pitti illustrata). Auction records document over twenty works by his hand passing through European and American sale rooms. The present canvas, dated 1882, is one of his latest known works; he died in Florence the following year. The recipient was a figure of considerable public standing. Oreste Regnoli, born at Forlì on 23 February 1816 and dead at Bologna on 20 February 1896, was a jurist, patriot, parliamentarian, and professor of civil law at the University of Bologna, whose biography is treated in full in the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (Vol. 86, 2016, by Roberto Balzani). He studied law in Rome from 1835, graduated in 1839, and practised as an avvocato rotale before the upheavals of 1848–49 drew him into the political struggle for Italian unification. During the Roman Republic of 1849, he was elected to the Constituent Assembly from the Orvieto constituency and remained at the Assembly through the defence of Rome against the French siege until the capitulation of 4 July. Years of exile followed — first in Florence, then in Genoa, where he contributed to political journalism, assisted cholera victims, and published the foundational tract Sulla formazione di un nuovo codice civile italiano (Genoa, 1859), arguing for the creation of a unified Italian civil code. In 1859 Luigi Carlo Farini briefly appointed him Minister of Grace and Justice in the Provisional Government of the Romagne. On 25 October of that year he was named Professor of Civil Law at the University of Bologna, a chair he held until his death. He served as a Deputy in the Italian Parliament through four legislatures (VII, VIII, X, XIII), consistently aligned with the Left. In 1880 Prime Minister Cairoli proposed him for the laticlavio — senatorial appointment — but Regnoli refused. He served as Dean of the Faculty of Jurisprudence at Bologna (1872–78 and 1885–96) and from 1882 as President of the Consiglio dell'Ordine degli Avvocati di Bologna, a post he held until his death. His legal studio trained the future Prime Minister Alessandro Fortis and the socialist leader Leonida Bissolati. Both men were natives of Forlì, of nearly the same generation, and both had long-standing Florentine associations — Pompignoli through four decades of gallery work, Regnoli through his years of exile in the early 1850s and his continued connections to Tuscan political and intellectual circles. A further social bridge links them: the surgeon Giorgio Regnoli (Forlì, 1797 – Pisa, 1859), almost certainly a kinsman of Oreste's from the same Forlì-based Regnoli clan, was a close friend and colleague of Maurizio Bufalini, the physician whose portrait Pompignoli painted in 1875. The warmth of the verso inscription — al suo carissimo amico, 'to his dearest friend' — therefore reads not as a formula but as a socially plausible expression of genuine attachment between two men from the same small Romagnol city who had both made their careers in Tuscany. The subject of the gift was anything but arbitrary. In post-Risorgimento Italy Galileo functioned as a civic emblem of reason, experiment, intellectual liberty, and resistance to coercive authority. His story — the philosopher persecuted by the Inquisition and vindicated by posterity — was the founding myth of Italian secular liberalism, and it resonated with particular force in Florence, where the 1737 reburial in Santa Croce had been staged by the city's scientific elite, where the Tribuna di Galileo at La Specola had been inaugurated in 1841 for the Third Congress of Italian Scientists, and where the 1864 tercentenary of Galileo's birth had been celebrated as a national event. For Regnoli — a man who had defended the Roman Republic, demanded the separation of church and state, advocated the abolition of Article 1 of the Statuto (the established-religion clause), and belonged to the Grande Oriente d'Italia as co-founder of the Loggia Universo in Florence and a member of the Loggia Rizzoli in Bologna — a portrait of Galileo was a fitting object of admiration and an intelligible statement of shared values. The year 1882 was pivotal in Regnoli's life: his wife Maddalena dei marchesi Salvago, vedova Loero, whom he had married in 1875, died that year, and in the same year he assumed the presidency of the Bologna Bar. A gift of a Galileo portrait from a carissimo amico in Florence at such a moment carried overtones at once consolatory, congratulatory, and ideological. The painting's later history is consistent with the private character of the gift. A picture explicitly dedicated to a friend was more likely to remain in a study or domestic interior than to enter a published record. The most plausible path leads from Regnoli's household to his stepson Attilio Loero (Genoa 1860 – Bologna 1935), a lawyer and Deputy who published Regnoli's posthumous legal writings (Scritti editi ed inediti di diritto civile, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1900) and who preserved his stepfather's personal effects. Regnoli's personal archive survives at the Biblioteca dell'Archiginnasio, Bologna, with further papers at the Biblioteca Saffi, Forlì (Raccolte Piancastelli). A commemorative marble bust by Alfonso Borghesani stands in the Certosa Pantheon; a plaster bust by Diego Sarti is in the Museo Civico del Risorgimento, Bologna, donated by a later member of the Loero family. An auction record on Artnet lists a work by 'L. Pompignoli' described as a portrait of Galileo Galilei, half-length — almost certainly the present painting, catalogued from the stretcher-bar inscription rather than a front signature. What distinguishes this canvas from the many surviving nineteenth-century copies of the Sustermans Galileo is the density of its documentation. Most such copies survive stripped of context: competent repetitions of a famous image, visually attractive but biographically mute. The present work preserves the names of both maker and recipient, the place and year of execution, and the language of personal attachment. It can be situated within the regulated culture of copying in the Florentine galleries, within the late career of a documented painter-copyist whose involvement with the Galleria Pitti illustrata extended to works catalogued under Sustermans's name, and within the intellectual world of a prominent Risorgimento jurist for whom Galileo embodied the values of reason, liberty, and secular progress. Federico Tognoni's Iconografia Galileiana (Florence: Giunti, 2013), the definitive modern census of Galileo portraits with 335 catalogue entries, does not record this copy; the present canvas, with its precisely datable inscription and identified provenance, constitutes a significant addition to the documented corpus. The standard scholarly references for the Sustermans prototype and Galileo iconography are Tognoni (ed.), Iconografia Galileiana, Le Opere di Galileo Galilei: Appendice, Vol. I (Florence: Giunti, 2013); Tognoni, I volti di Galileo: Fortuna e trasformazione dell'immagine galileiana tra XVII e XIX secolo (Lugano: Agorà & Co., 2018); Galluzzi (ed.), Galileo: Images of the Universe from Antiquity to the Telescope, exhibition catalogue, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence (Florence: Giunti, 2009); Fahie, Memorials of Galileo Galilei, 1564–1642 (Leamington & London: Courier Press, 1929); Baldinucci, Notizie dei professori del disegno, Vol. IV (Florence, 1846 ed.), p. 49; Goldenberg Stoppato, Sustermans: sessant'anni alla corte dei Medici, exhibition catalogue, Galleria Palatina (Florence: Centro Di, 1983); Bisceglia, catalogue entry for inv. 1890 no. 745, Uffizi Gallery; Favaro (ed.), Le Opere di Galileo Galilei: Edizione Nazionale, 20 vols. (Florence: Barbéra, 1890–1909). For Regnoli: Balzani, 'Regnoli, Oreste', Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Vol. 86 (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2016). For Pompignoli: Bénézit, Dictionary of Artists (Oxford Art Online, entry B00144195); Istituto Matteucci, Dizionario degli artisti dell'Ottocento. For the Florentine copy system: Giometti, 'Il mondo in un registro: Artisti, committenti e viaggiatori nei permessi di copia degli Uffizi 1763–1820' (presented at the Uffizi conference La fabbrica della copia a Firenze e a Napoli tra Sette e Ottocento, 2021).
Oil on canvas (55 × 45 cm, excl. frame), in a black-painted wood frame with gilt inner moulding. The painting was conservation-treated in December 2025 – January 2026 by Nada Clare Miedema (paintings conservator, ACR). Three older discoloured patches on the reverse were removed, revealing two wider tears in the support (one in the forehead area, another to the left of the sitter), which were mended with linen fibres and methylcellulose. Paint adhesion in the forehead and upper left corner was stabilised with sturgeon glue consolidant. The discoloured varnish was cleaned with gelled ethanol; older restorations were removed, revealing numerous small dark marks across the face and collar, of which those in the lighter areas were successfully cleaned with an oil-in-water emulsion. Losses were filled and inpainted with Golden conservation colours. An intermediate and final varnish of Laropal A81 was applied. The stretcher was keyed out to improve tension, and a conservation-grade corrugated cardboard backing board with polyester wadding was fitted to the reverse. The painting is now in stable and attractive condition, the image reading clearly and with good tonal range across the face, beard, collar, and dark ground.
Item #6654
Price: $65,000.00
