The first of the four new PTM Andata / Return appointments scheduled from mid-May to the end of the year, the Portrait of Carlo Emanuele Massa, owned by the Cavallini-Sgarbi Foundation, enriches the new eighteenth-century itinerary of the Tosio Martinengo Art Gallery, in particular the path dedicated to painting by Giacomo Ceruti.

The loan of Portrait of Carlo Emanuele Massa adds an important piece in the narration around Ceruti's work, of which the Tosio Martinengo Art Gallery preserves the most significant body of works in the world: the most modern of the " painters of reality " - according to the happy definition by Roberto Longhi - links him to Moretto, Moroni, Lotto, Savoldo and Caravaggio. Famous for his paintings with a pauperist subject , Ceruti was also a sought-after and refined portraitist, with a production that returns his prolific network of contacts woven over the course of his long career and his, still insufficiently recognized, ability to intercept the trends of European painting of the time.

Following some of the most significant exponents of the aristocracy of the time, Ceruti was in fact engaged in Venice, Milan, Padua, Piacenza, with a parenthesis in Tortona that the work of the Cavallini-Sgarbi Foundation allows us to investigate with a new look. In the Piedmontese city Ceruti decorated the hall on the noble floor of Palazzo Busseti and, around 1750 , he painted the portrait of Carlo Emanuele Massa, presented to the public for the first time on this occasion at the Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo in Brescia. Carlo Emanuele Massa was one of the most authoritative representatives of the Savoy government, trustee of King Carlo Emanuele III in the territory of the Piedmontese dominion: his portrait belongs to the mature phase of the painter, following the Venetian experience, in which Ceruti opens up to new requests for a client of international taste, with amazing results in the mimetic rendering of faces and surfaces.