Portrait of Diego Martelli

The 1879 portrait of the Florentine critic Diego Martelli, now in the Scottish National Gallery, is among the most boldly experimental of Degas's mature portrait compositions. Martelli, an art critic and champion of the Italian Macchiaioli movement, visited Paris in 1878-79 and entered the Impressionist circle's social network. Degas shows him seated low and to the right, with papers and books spread on the floor around him — the clutter of a working intellectual's domestic space painted with the same interest in modern interiors that defines his café and rehearsal room works. The unusual low viewpoint gives the composition a vertiginous, almost photographic quality.

The steep downward viewing angle — as if the artist stood above the seated sitter — compresses spatial relationships between the figure and the objects on the floor, creating a distinctive flattening effect. Degas handles the scattered papers and books with loosely descriptive strokes that give them as much pictorial weight as the sitter himself.