Portrait of Roberto Castiglione (early 1600s): Art, History and Details

Portrait of Roberto Castiglione (early 1600s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The inscription on the bottom of this painting identifies the sitter of this commemorative portrait as Roberto Castiglione, a magistrate and imperial vicar for the Spanish empire in the 1200s. His identity is further supported by the coat of arms in the upper left. A red shield ornamented by a lion holding a castle with three towers in his right paw, the crest belongs to the Castiglione family, which was primarily based in Milan, but had branches in Cremona as well. His gloved left hand holds a prayer book and the glove for his bare right hand, which holds back the fur trim of his mantle.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait of Roberto Castiglione
• Date: early 1600s
• Culture: Italy, Cremona
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 147.3 x 120.6 x 10.2 cm (58 x 47 1/2 x 4 in.); Unframed: 121.2 x 98.7 cm (47 11/16 x 38 7/8 in.)
• Collection: P - Italian 16th & 17th Century
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1916.804

Collection credit

Holden Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Catalogue of Paintings, Part 3: European Paintings of the 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1982.
• Rubinstein-Bloch, Stella. Catalogue of a Collection of Paintings, Etc. Presented by Mrs. Liberty E. Holden to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1917.
• G. U. "The Holden Collection." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 4, no. 2 (1917): 19-34.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.