Giuseppe Ghislandi is considered the most gifted Italian portrait painter of the late Baroque. Famed for his lively portraits and fanciful character studies, he was himself one of the most interesting and popular artistic personalities of his generation. Despite lifelong ties to his native Bergamo, he was widely traveled, and his long career was to be informed by artistic developments in Venice, Milan and Bologna, as well as by Northern European stylistic currents.

Born into a family of artists, he studied painting in his early years but soon felt a gravitation toward the church, and it was during his Venetian period (1675-1688) that he was first tonsured as a monk in the Order of the Minims, taking the monastic name Vittore and joi...