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4. Hieronymus II Francken, Cabinet d’un Amateur, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Belgique.<br />
David may have been even more similar to this Hunter<br />
in that he is also depicted with his shoulder bare and<br />
the red sleeve descending down his arm.<br />
While no other works on copper by Manfredi are<br />
known and the small scale has required a more<br />
minute brushwork than is usual for the artist, it can<br />
be recalled that Manfredi worked most frequently<br />
for collectors and independent patrons, whose tastes<br />
could easily have followed the current vogue for<br />
small works on copper. The practice of painting on<br />
copper had become increasingly popular during<br />
the latter half of the sixteenth century. In Prague, for<br />
the erotic cabinet pictures so favoured by Rudolf<br />
II, and throughout Italy for small scale devotional<br />
paintings intended for personal use; in Florence,<br />
Bronzino’s Pietà is an example, while the Bolognese<br />
painters who came to Rome, Annibale and Ludovico<br />
Carracci, Domenichino, Reni and Albani were all<br />
practitioners. Copper was also the preferred support<br />
for the landscapes of the Northern artists working in<br />
Rome, such as Bril and Breughel, as well for Elsheimer<br />
and his jewel like figurative scenes (examples of these<br />
artist’s works on copper all appear in Gallery pictures)<br />
and for small portraits, such as those by Alessandro<br />
Allori in Florence and Ottavio Leoni in Rome. The<br />
meticulous effects achievable on its smooth surface<br />
were of course the prime attraction but also the<br />
portability of the light metal. Artists such as Arpino<br />
and Gentileschi made reduced versions for collectors<br />
of their favoured compositions, Arpino’s St. Michael<br />
and the Rebel Angels in the Glasgow Art Museum<br />
and Gentileschi’s David with the Head of Goliath<br />
in Berlin are examples 4 , while Saraceni, who like<br />
Manfredi was a close follower of Caravaggio, made a<br />
speciality of painting on copper and he and Elsheimer<br />
may have vied with each other in this field 5 . Keith<br />
Christiansen now believes that more artists painted on<br />
copper in the early 17 th century than was previously<br />
thought. In this context, there is no reason at all to<br />
doubt that the small scale copper support, so popular<br />
at the time, would have been appealing to Manfredi<br />
5. Attributed to Cornelis de Bailleur, the Harrach collection at Schloss Rohrau, Austria.<br />
13
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