MAASTRICHT.- It is well known that each year Maastricht becomes a gathering point for the international art world. Yet the city’s association with exchange and movement long predates the modern fair. Situated on the river Meuse at a crossroads between the Low Countries, the German lands and France, Maastricht developed from the Middle Ages onward as an important centre of trade and circulation. Merchants, travellers and objects passed through its markets and along its river routes, linking the city to a wider European network of commerce and cultural contact.

In a different form, the annual meeting of collectors, scholars and dealers at TEFAF continues this long history. For Colnaghi, the fair offers an opportunity to present works shaped by distinct artistic traditions and historical circumstances, bringing together objects whose origins span several centuries and geographies. The presentation ranges from a nineteenth-century Fang reliquary head from Gabon, created within the ritual context of the byeri ancestor cult and later entering European collections through the dealer Paul Guillaume, to a rare mid-seventeenth-century portrait by Alonso Cano painted during his Valencian period, and a recently rediscovered signed portrait by Lavinia Fontana depicting the Bolognese noblewoman Isabella Ruini Angelelli, a sitter who appears repeatedly within the artist’s circle of aristocratic patrons.

A highlight among the paintings is a Portrait of a Man by Jacopo Robusti, called Tintoretto (1518–1594), dating to around 1549–1550, a decisive phase in the artist’s career when he was actively measuring his work against that of Titian. Recently rediscovered and identified by Enrico Maria Dal Pozzolo, the painting belongs to a small group of portraits executed in the late 1540s that reveal Tintoretto’s increasingly ambitious engagement with Venetian portrait conventions. Technical examination has shown that the canvas was reused from an earlier composition, beneath which appears the head of a female figure, a practice consistent with the artist’s known working methods. Shown half-length against a dark ground, the sitter, probably in his forties, is presented with a psychological intensity characteristic of Tintoretto’s most accomplished portraits of this period. The work belongs to a moment when the young painter was translating Titian’s gravity and illumination into a more urgent and condensed language. Together with comparable examples in Oxford and New York, the painting marks a moment of particular concentration in Tintoretto’s activity around the end of the 1540s, just before the freer handling that would characterise his production in the following decade.

Another highlight is Bartolomeo Cavarozzi’s Sorrows of Aminta, painted during the second decade of the seventeenth century and representing one of the most refined treatments of a composition central to the artist’s Roman Caravaggesque phase. The subject derives from Torquato Tasso’s pastoral drama Aminta, first published in 1573, and is identified through the musical score placed on the table, which scholars have recognised as the madrigal Dolor che sì mi crucii, based on the Ovidian story of Pyramus and Thisbe and set to music by Erasmo Marotta in 1600. In the painting two youths are absorbed in grief and recollection: one plays a flute while the other rests pensively beside a violin and tambourine, surrounded by grapes and vine leaves arranged as an elaborate still life. The composition exemplifies the Caravaggesque interest in emotionally charged half-length figures and the naturalistic depiction of objects, while also demonstrating Cavarozzi’s particular refinement in the rendering of surfaces and textiles. Born in Viterbo in 1587, Cavarozzi moved to Rome at a young age, where he trained with Cristoforo Roncalli and entered the circle of the Crescenzi family, becoming one of the earliest Roman painters to adopt Caravaggio’s naturalistic manner while developing a softer and more lyrical interpretation of it. The present painting belongs to a group of versions of the subject known today and is considered one of the most accomplished examples of the composition.

Equally among the works presented this year is a portrait by Diego Velázquez dating to around 1628–1629, executed shortly before the artist’s first journey to Italy and belonging to his formative Madrid period at the court of Philip IV. The painting depicts Sebastián García de Huerta (1576–1644), an ecclesiastical jurist from La Guardia near Toledo who rose through the patronage networks of Cardinal Bernardo de Sandoval y Rojas before entering the Supreme Tribunal of the Holy Office in 1616 and, in December 1629, being appointed Secretary to Philip IV. Commissioned at the height of his career, the portrait was closely connected to García de Huerta’s programme of self-commemoration in his native town, where he endowed a funerary chapel in the parish church of La Guardia. The work thus records a figure whose career moved between ecclesiastical administration and royal government, reflecting the institutional structures of early seventeenth-century Castile. Technical examination has also revealed that the canvas was reused from an earlier devotional composition, probably a representation of the Virgin, a practice documented elsewhere in Velázquez’s early production. Preserved for centuries within the García de Huerta family, the painting represents a rare and historically significant example of Velázquez’s portraiture from the years immediately preceding his Italian sojourn.

A later moment in Spanish court portraiture is represented by Miguel Jacinto Meléndez’s Portrait of Philip V, King of Spain, painted during the first decades of the eighteenth century as the Bourbon ruler consolidated his authority following the War of the Spanish Succession. Born in Oviedo in 1679, Meléndez established himself in Madrid as a painter of religious works before being appointed Painter to the King in 1712, becoming one of the principal artists responsible for shaping the official image of the new monarch. Philip V, grandson of Louis XIV, had ascended the Spanish throne in 1700 after the death of Charles II brought the Habsburg line to an end, a succession that triggered a prolonged European conflict before his rule was finally secured. In the present portrait the King appears wearing the insignia of both the French Order of the Saint-Esprit and the Spanish Order of the Golden Fleece, visual elements that deliberately linked Bourbon dynastic identity with the historic symbols of Spanish kingship. Meléndez produced numerous versions of Philip’s likeness for circulation across the Spanish territories and diplomatic networks of Europe, disseminating an image of the monarch that balanced martial authority with courtly refinement. The present composition, notable for the staff of command and the distant cavalry engagement indicated in the background, participates in this programme of dynastic representation and reflects the broader effort to stabilise Bourbon legitimacy through the language of state portraiture.

The presentation also includes a Roman marble Head of a Young Man, dating to the mid-second century A.D. and representing a fine example of portraiture from the Antonine period, when Roman representations of individuals increasingly adopted the aesthetic conventions established by imperial imagery. The young man is depicted with thick, tightly curled hair arranged in dense locks across the forehead and crown, carved with the running drill that became characteristic of Antonine sculptural practice. His features, lightly bearded chin and deep-set eyes correspond closely to portraits inspired by the youthful images of Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, whose official likenesses circulated widely across the Roman Empire and shaped the appearance of private portraiture. This stylistic shift marked a significant departure from the clean-shaven and closely cropped portraits associated with the Julio-Claudian and Flavian dynasties, reflecting instead the philhellenic ideals promoted by the emperor Hadrian and continued by his successors. The present head, carved in marble and remarkably well preserved despite minor losses to the nose and ears, retains the delicately rendered beard and much of the original detail of the curling hair, the stone itself acquiring a warm surface tone through burial. Comparable examples of this Antonine portrait type survive in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples, the Louvre in Paris, and the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, situating the present sculpture within the broader development of Roman imperial portraiture during the middle decades of the second century.

A different sculptural tradition is represented by this Fang reliquary head (Añgokh-Nlô-Byeri), produced in Gabon in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century and originally forming part of the byeri complex through which Fang communities maintained an active relationship with their ancestors. Carved in wood and placed above a container holding the relic bones of a lineage ancestor, often skull fragments or long bones, the sculpture functioned as a mediator between the living and the dead and played a central role in ritual consultation and protection. The present example is distinguished by its refined modelling and exaggeration of form: a broad domed forehead marked by incised scarification lines, arched brow ridges, and a face tapering into a delicately pointed chin above a long, elegant neck. Traces of wear around the mouth and nose likely result from ritual scraping, a practice through which small particles were removed for use in protective or propitiatory substances. Such heads were not simply guardians of relic containers but integral participants in ritual life, embodying the presence and authority of ancestral spirits within the community. The sculpture’s later history reflects its early recognition within Western collections: it passed through the collection of the Parisian dealer Paul Guillaume and was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s landmark 1935 exhibition African Negro Art, an event that played a decisive role in establishing Central African sculpture within the canon of modern art history.

At Colnaghi Elliott Master Drawings this year we present a work by Paul Gauguin that belongs to the formative period of the artist’s first stay in Tahiti following his arrival on the island in 1891. Gauguin travelled to the South Pacific in deliberate opposition to European artistic conventions, seeking what he believed to be a more elemental and spiritually authentic culture. During this early phase, before embarking on the major painted compositions that would define his Tahitian oeuvre, he devoted himself intensively to drawing, producing numerous portrait heads and figure studies as a means of visual research and experimentation. The present sheet, Head of a Tahitian, executed in coloured chalks and pastel and heightened with touches of gold, stands apart within this group for the refinement of its surface and the clarity of its conception, suggesting that it was intended as an autonomous work rather than a preparatory study. The simplified profile, with its closed eyes and monumental calm, reflects Gauguin’s attempt to capture what he described as the essential character of Tahitian physiognomy, departing consciously from European ideals of beauty. A small bird- or lizard-like form hovering above the head links the drawing conceptually to Gauguin’s painting Te Nave Nave Fenua (1892), where a related creature appears beside a standing female figure, an image often interpreted as an allusion to temptation within the artist’s personal mythology. Closely related to imagery found in the Cahier pour Aline, the illustrated notebook Gauguin assembled for his daughter between 1892 and 1893, the drawing occupies an important place within the artist’s early Tahitian production and stands among the most accomplished portrait head studies of this pivotal moment in his career.