Portrait of an Actor

It was described in a 1755 inventory as a portrait of a "Comédien la tête découverte, tenant un masque d'Arlequin; par le Feti [Actor, head uncovered, holding a Harlequin mask; by Fetti]".

[8] After the death of Louis-Antoine Crozat, it was sold by his heir in 1772 to Catherine II of Russia and is mentioned as being in the collection of the Hermitage Museum beginning in 1774.

[12] The three-way correlation of Fetti's Actor and Annibale's Lute Player with Agostino Carracci's engraved Giovanni Gabrielli (c. 1599) was traced by Denis Mahon, who questioned it in 1947.

These misidentifications lingered, despite Posner's outright rejection of them in 1971, when he named the subject of the Lute Player as a member of the Mascheroni family of Bologna, based on Carlo Cesare Malvasia's description of the sitter in his 1678 book Felsina Pittrice.

[14] For example, the popular book, Five Centuries of Music In Venice by H. C. Robbins Landon and John Julius Norwich, published in English, Italian, French, and Japanese, as a companion to the five-part television series Maestro, included a full-page color plate of the Lute Player as a portrait of Gabrieli the composer in 1991.

[26] The Hermitage painting was shown with the title Portrait of Fancesco Andreini at a 1996 exhibit (organized by Safarik) at the Palazzo Te in Mantua.

[27] In 2015 the curators of the Hermitage Museum identified the subject of Fetti's painting as either Tristano Martinelli or Francesco Andreini,[2] but these attributions were subsequently removed.