When Luca Ferretti speaks about the portraits of Jan van Eyck, he does not speak about technique - though he could, and at length. He speaks about the experience of being looked at. "Van Eyck's sitters know they are being observed," he says. "They have accepted the scrutiny. They have composed themselves for it. And then something has remained - something that the composition could not quite contain. That remainder is what the painting is about."
Formation
Ferretti studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze, where the curriculum still includes traditional drawing from the model and extended study of the Italian masters. But it was his subsequent three years in the Low Countries - visiting collections in Bruges, Ghent, and Brussels, spending long hours before Van Eyck, Memling, and Rogier van der Weyden - that determined the direction his practice would take.
"Florence teaches you to draw," he has said. "The Low Countries teach you to see. I needed both, but I didn't understand the second until I experienced it directly." He returned to Florence with a practice that was, in his own description, deeply un-Italian: slow, methodical, psychologically weighted, and painted on panel rather than canvas.
The Panel Tradition
Ferretti's use of oak panel rather than canvas is not an affectation. It is a technical choice with specific consequences. Panel does not flex. It does not breathe. It creates a surface that is harder, smoother, and more demanding than linen or cotton, and it rewards the application of multiple thin transparent layers in a way that canvas cannot.
He prepares his own panels with gesso, applying six to eight layers sanded between each application, until the surface achieves what he describes as "the quality of marble warmed by the hand." On this surface, the subsequent oil layers appear to have depth rather than merely surface - light seems to enter the paint and return from within it, in the manner of the Flemish originals he has spent his career studying.
The Sitter's Knowledge
His portraits require long sittings. A finished work of forty-four by fifty-eight centimetres - the scale of a Memling - will typically require twelve to fifteen sessions of two hours each. The sitter has, by the end of this process, spent between twenty-four and thirty hours being observed by Ferretti at close range. The psychological effect of this extended mutual observation is, he believes, visible in the resulting work.
"A photograph is taken in a fraction of a second," he says. "The person in front of the camera has not had time to become accustomed to the scrutiny. They are caught. My sitters have had time to accept it, to settle into it, to become themselves more fully because they have been observed long enough to stop performing." The result is portraits that carry what Ferretti calls a quality of earned transparency - not exposure, but a voluntary disclosure that comes from extended mutual attention.
Two Works on Artemble
Both works currently available through Artemble - Portrait of a Young Scholar and The Florentine - were painted in the past eighteen months and represent the most fully realised work Ferretti has produced. Each is available with a Certificate of Authenticity signed by the artist and countersigned by Artemble's curatorial team.