Ex Egiata

Giuseppe Grisoni · n.d.

Medium

Gouache, heightened with touches of gold paint, over traces of black chalk, on ivory laid paper

Original size

10.8 × 9 cm (4 5/16 × 3 9/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Baroque

*Ex Egiata* is a luminous example of eighteenth-century draughtsmanship, its delicate gouache surfaces lifted by touches of gold that give the work an almost devotional glow. Giuseppe Grisoni was a Florentine-born painter who built his reputation working across England and Rome during the first half of the 1700s, moving between portraiture and more intimate decorative works. His comfort with mixed media is clear here: the combination of gouache, gold highlighting, and underlying black chalk on ivory laid paper shows a practitioner who understood how layered materials could create depth without the weight of oil on canvas. The ivory paper itself acts as a warm ground, allowing the gouache to sit with a soft, matte richness rather than the harder opacity it achieves on white supports. Grisoni spent several years in England in the 1710s and 1720s, where he was admitted to the circle around Sir Godfrey Kneller, gaining exposure to the fashionable portrait conventions of the day before returning to the continent. The hand-painted oil reproduction translates the intimacy and tonal warmth of the original into a format built to last, preserving the interplay of light and shadow that makes Grisoni's technique so quietly compelling across centuries.