Giovanni Boldini is one of the finest examples of artistic innovation on the threshold of the twentieth century.
He did not stop at portraiture: he seemed to want to capture the true essence of his subjects, their movement, their personality. He was one of the most sought-after painters of the Belle Époque aristocracy, and his female portraits are still today among the most fascinating ever painted.
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Who was Giovanni Boldini
Giovanni Boldini was an Italian painter who lived between 1842 and 1931. He was born in Ferrara on 31 December 1842, the son of a painter, and it was his father who started him on his art studies.
In 1862 he moved to Florence, where he studied for several years and came into contact with the Macchiaioli at the famous Caffè Michelangiolo, the meeting place of the most innovative Tuscan painters. But the real turning point was Paris: he settled there around 1871 and within a few years became the most fashionable portraitist in the capital, in demand among nobles, bankers, actresses and ladies of high society.
He lived between Italy, England and France, but Paris was his city: there he had his studio, and there he died, in 1931.
Boldini and his boundless love for women
Women were always his weakness. Small in stature, immaculately elegant, he loved the luxury of the aristocratic class and the beautiful young women he charmed with his overwhelming personality. Women were his favourite subjects.
Many of his paintings depict female portraits in elegant, fashionable dress, a symbol of an emancipation that dared more and more. His female figures are self-assured, strong and determined to assert themselves in life and in society.
His love life was full of affairs, storms and twists. He married only at the very end, in 1929, to the young writer Emilia Cardona: he was 86, she just over thirty, and it was she who, after his death, would tell his life in a biography.
An incredible career
He was a friend of the greatest painters and intellectuals of his time. He met the Macchiaioli in Florence and the Impressionists in Paris, and moved in the cultural jet set of the Belle Époque.
He portrayed the most famous figures of his day: the dandy Robert de Montesquiou (who inspired Proust’s Charlus), the audacious Marchesa Luisa Casati with her greyhound, the American Rita de Acosta Lydig and many others. He also painted Giuseppe Verdi: the 1886 pastel, with the composer wrapped in a scarf and top hat, has become the most famous image of the musician.
Boldini travelled widely across Europe to portray the women of the most influential figures of his time. He was, in all likelihood, the most coveted portraitist of the European aristocracy at the turn of the twentieth century.
Giovanni Boldini’s style
In his paintings you admire the freshness of the colours, the vibrant figures and the idea of continuous movement. Fittingly, critics nicknamed him the “Master of Swish”: his long, swirling brushstrokes make dresses and bodies look as if caught in an instant, almost like photographs taken mid-action.
His portraits reveal the very personalities of his subjects: determination, sweetness, coquetry or strength of mind. Each canvas is a study of the human being, never a cold, static pose.
Where to see Boldini’s works
Boldini’s works are found between Italy and France:
- in Rome, the National Gallery of Modern Art (GNAM) holds the famous pastel portrait of Giuseppe Verdi (a short walk, if you are in the area, from the Vittoriano);
- in Ferrara, his home town, the Museo Giovanni Boldini keeps the richest collection of his works: it is housed in Palazzo Massari and, after the damage of the 2012 earthquake, is due to reopen in 2026 (in the meantime a selection tours the city in temporary exhibitions);
- in Paris, where he spent much of his life, some of his portraits are at the Musée d’Orsay and at the Petit Palais, the museum of Belle Époque Paris;
- other works are at Palazzo Pitti in Florence and in Pistoia.
And you, faced with one of those portraits that still seem to quiver with life, who would you have wanted Boldini to paint? Let yourself be swept up by his whirl of brushstrokes: it is the best way to understand why, a century ago, half of Europe queued to be portrayed by him.
