Author: Melanie Viering

An older man with long grey hair and a mustache. He wears a black jacket and two rings.

David Teniers the Younger “Parma the Physician”

David Teniers II (after Titian), Parma the Physician, n.d., oil on panel, 6 3/4 x 4 3/4 in.
David Teniers II (after Titian), Parma the Physician, n.d., oil on panel, 6 3/4 x 4 3/4 in.

 

To document an image of something in the seventeenth century, the only way to do it was by hand. David Teniers the Younger created “Parma the Physician” as a recreation of Titian’s Portrait of the Physician Gian Giacomo Bartolotti da Parma. In addition to this painting Teniers’ also painted two-hundred-and-forty-three other recreations of some of the most valuable paintings from the collection of Hapsburg Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, cousin of King Philip IV of Spain. Teniers published these paintings together as the first illustrated printed catalogue of a major paintings collection entitled Theatrum Pictorium or the Theatre of Painting.

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