Antonio Moro - Retrato de sir Thomas Gresham

Antonio Moro, Antonis Mor van Dashorst, portrait of Sir Thomas Gresham. The Renaissance art of the Low Countries of the North achieved international fame with Moro. Antonis Mor van Dashorst was born and raised in Utrecht. He was a student of Jan van Schorel there, before traveling the world. First, he began to make himself known in Amberes, soon becoming the leading portraitist of the court and the high nobility. He left for Italy and Portugal, and was later sent to England to make the portrait of the young Prince Philip's fiancée, Queen Maria Tudor. Later he went to Spain with his teacher, forgetting Utrecht, where he had left his family, and there he achieved fame under the Spanish name of Antonio Moro. His solid Utrecht training did not give up, but these trips expanded his horizon beyond all that his compatriots could know before him. With it, he acquired a more loose style, a confidence in himself that confirms his safety. But above all, Moro has more than any other the sense of distinction. His models look at the viewer with a calm and distant gaze. It would be more accurate to say that this distance is always observed by the portraitist himself, the same as Holbein, as a courtesan consumed with respect to his models. Would it be out of place for him to dare to make a psychological analysis of the faces that pose before him? There has never been any intimacy between him and them, and yet there is no doubt that their portraits are very similar. He may have made them a little more beautiful, nobler and more worthy of what they were in reality, and he may also be one of the secrets of his success. The portrait of Sir Thomas Gresham was probably painted shortly before 1566. Gresham lived from 1519 to 1579. He was a highly regarded and well-placed English merchant in the world of business, founder of the London Stock Exchange and the Gresham College. He was in charge of representing the commercial interests of the crown of England in the Netherlands, and it was probably there that Moreau made his portrait.