Family of Don Filippo di Borbone
Artist: Joseph Baldrighi (Italian, 1722-1803)
Date: 1757-1758
Medium: Oil on canvas
Collection: National Gallery of Parma, Parma, Italy
Description
It is in the privacy of a room in the Royal Palace of Colorno that Baldrighi portrays the family of Don Filippo di Borbone, staging a performance that substantiates, in the small, great duchy, the enlightened march of court portraiture away from grandiloquent iconography, a demonstrative and absolute stage, towards an uncompromising and all-encompassing officialdom. And by signing at the bottom, on the marble floor, he thus forever connects, as if in a single inlay, his name to the ducal family, to its customs, and to the objects with which it is usually familiar: the music sheets and instruments, the tennis racket and the dog, the parrot, the clock, and the fabrics.














