Portrait of Count Franz Anton Berka of Dubá

Count Franz Anton Berka of Dubá was a Bohemian nobleman whose portrait Maratta painted around 1670, during a period when the Roman artist's fame had spread far enough to attract commissions from Central European aristocracy traveling through or resident in Italy. The Berka family were among the old Bohemian nobility, and by the mid-seventeenth century many such families were rebuilding cultural prestige after the disruptions of the Thirty Years' War, often turning to Italian artists to signal sophistication and refinement. Maratta's portraiture had by this date achieved a settled authority — he was in his mid-forties, his style fully formed — and he could render an aristocratic sitter with the combination of social flattery and psychological acuity that distinguished his best work. The portrait eventually entered the National Gallery in Prague, where it functions as testimony to the cultural exchange between Rome and the Bohemian lands during the late Baroque period. It is one of the relatively few Maratta portraits with a precisely identified northern European sitter.

Canvas portrait in which the conventions of European aristocratic portraiture — three-quarter pose, dignified bearing, rich costume — are filtered through Maratta's Roman Baroque training. The paint surface balances careful facial modeling with more broadly handled costume areas. Armor or rich fabric, typical of Bohemian aristocratic portraits of this period, would provide Maratta opportunity to demonstrate technical range.