A bearded man

The present work, a bust-length portrait of a bearded man, is representative of the type of portraiture for which Giuseppe Nogari was best known throughout the first half of the eighteenth century in Venice. In application of paint and technique, Nogari's portraits owe a great deal of stylistic influence to works by Rembrandt. Over the course of the seventeenth century, Rembrandt's popularity and influence had spread from the Netherlands throughout Europe, and examples of the prodigious artist's work became available to new generations of painters through the more portable media of drawings and prints. In Venice, Nogari would have been exposed to drawings by Rembrandt in the collection of Zaccaria Sagredo and prints from the collection of Anton Maria Zanetti. These works would have served as a seminal influence on Nogari's style and choice of subject matter.