Portrait of Diego Martelli

Diego Martelli was not merely a sitter: he was the intellectual pivot around which Italian Impressionism turned. A Florentine art critic and champion of the Macchiaioli, Martelli had travelled to Paris and become a conduit between French and Italian avant-garde movements. Zandomeneghi, who had himself moved from Florence to Paris in 1874, shared Martelli's commitment to pictorial modernity, and the portrait, painted in 1879, is both an act of friendship and a statement of artistic alliance. The painting shows Martelli as an intellectual at ease — the informality of his pose and setting signalling his identity as a progressive thinker rather than a formal patron. A companion portrait by Degas, painted the same year, shows the same sitter from a different angle; together the two works document the intimate circle of artists and critics who inhabited the early Impressionist world. Now in the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Florence, Zandomeneghi's version is among his most personally significant works.

The portrait employs a deliberately casual compositional arrangement with Martelli turned slightly away from the viewer, papers and materials around him suggesting intellectual activity. Colour is warm and unified, the figure emerging from a background handled in broad, quickly applied passages.