Italian school; XVIII century. "Portrait of Giovanni by Gio Batti. Pompeo Tommasi." Oil on canvas. Relined. Measurements: 87 x 73 cm. Outstanding male portrait, of three quarters on neutral background, representing a man of advanced age and aristocratic bearing. Resolved in realistic language, the painter delves into the psychology of the character. His angular features underline the severity of his character. The starched collar enhances the haughtiness of his features, modeled with a clear light that also extracts the right textures of the coat. In the 18th century, the panorama of European portraiture was varied and broad, with numerous influences and largely determined by the taste of both the clientele and the painter himself. However, in this century a new concept of portraiture was born, which would evolve throughout the century and unify all the national schools: the desire to capture the personality of the human being and his character, beyond his external reality and his social rank, in his effigy. During the previous century, portraiture had become consolidated among the upper classes, and was no longer reserved only for the court. For this reason the formulas of the genre, as the eighteenth century progressed and even more so in the seventeenth century, would relax and move away from the ostentatious and symbolic official representations typical of the Baroque apparatus. On the other hand, the eighteenth century will react against the rigid etiquette of the previous century with a more human and individual conception of life, and this will be reflected in all areas, from the furniture that becomes smaller and more comfortable, replacing the large gilded and carved furniture, to the portrait itself, which will come to dispense, as we see here, of any symbolic or scenographic element to capture the individual instead of the character.