Il Ritratto is an organization of young artists dedicated to traditional techniques of portraiture. The name il Ritratto means "the portrait" in Italian and the gallery was created to present the work of these very talented young portraitists.

The eight artists of il Ritratto are united by their common home in Florence, Italy which as a city has produced many of the greatest portaitists in the history of art. The aritists have recieved thorough training in the techniques of their craft and the painters in particular are directly linked to both the Boston school of the turn of the century as well as the the great nineteenth-century Parisian ateliers of Jean-Léon Gerôme, Paul Delaroche, Antoine Jean Gros, and Jacques Louis David. The painting materials are still prepared by hand from the canvas to the varnish and all the colors are hand-ground from the best pigments available on the international market. Sorry, the painters at il Ritratto do not work from photographs.

To commission a portrait is simple. The artists at Il Ritratto are all willing to travel (and most of them already spend half the year or more away from home while working on their commissions) or the client is invited to vacation in Tuscany, enjoying the art, food, and culture of one of the most special regions on earth while the portrait is being completed. The travel expences of either option will, however, be the responsibility of the client.

Obviously the most important pages on this site are the artist's pages, which show their work as best is possible in jpeg-compressed photos. However, to help you with deciding on a portrait, further information can be found through the following links: Pricing and approximates times for sittings are described on the 'prices' page; all the possible ways to contact il Ritratto are listed on our 'contact' page; and finally, external links to everything we've found on the internet pertaining to portraiture, as well as our competitor's pages, can be found on the 'links' page.


Thank you for visiting the Il Ritratto website,

Nelson Cammarata
Curator
curator@ritratto.com