Portrait of Marchese Giovan Francesco Serra di Cassano (1609–1656) in armour

oil on canvas, in a Baroque gilt metal frame, possibly original

unframed: 117.3 x 93 cm.; 46¼ by 36⅝ in.

Drawing inspiration from Van Dyck and playing on contrasts of light and dark, this arresting portrait of the distinguished military commander Marchese Giovan Francesco Serra di Cassano (1609-1656), is one of four recorded versions, of which only two can be said with any certainty to be autograph. All depict him dressed in armour holding the baton of command. The present work is closest to the version still in the Serra di Cassano collection, Rome, first recorded in the inventory of 1740 drawn up in Naples. The family moved there from Milan in the years following the death of the Marchese. A second portrait of Serra is recorded in the artist’s inventory of 1665: ‘Ritratto del Eccl.mo Marchese Serra originale del Cauagl.e largo Br. 1. on. 8. alto Br. 2. on. 1.’2This autograph version, like the canvas that remained in the Serra collection, is likely to have been commissioned in Milan. A letter dated 20 August 1648 from the artist to Madama Reale Maria Cristina, Duchess and Regent of Savoy, refers to a visit he paid Serra, who was suffering from an injury probably sustained in battle at Cremona, where he had led Spanish troops against the French.3 It has been suggested that the portrait commission is datable to around this time. By December 1652 Serra had left Milan for Spain; a date prior to this accords stylistically with Cairo’s work in the late 1640s. A third portrait, presumed lost, is known through a copy in the Galleria Nazionale di Palazzo Spinola, Genoa;4 quite close to the design of the Serra version, it shows the sitter full-length, wearing the medal of the Ordine di San Giacomo. A fourth portrait of the Marchese is recorded without an attribution in the seventeenth-century inventory of the collection of the Marqués de Leganés, Spanish Governor in Milan, who in 1635 had appointed Serra as Fieldmaster; the latter portrait may be the same as the one listed in the nineteenth-century collection of Madrazo.