Portrait of Martino Martini (1614-1661), Jesuit missionary in China

Michaelina Wautier painted Portrait of Martino Martini in 1654, depicting the Jesuit missionary and cartographer who had spent years in China and produced the first detailed atlas of China to be published in Europe. The portrait was likely painted in Brussels, where Martini was seeking support for his China mission, and gives us an unusually cosmopolitan sitter for a Flemish woman painter of the period. Wautier renders the missionary with the directness and psychological specificity of the best Flemish portrait tradition, the face alert and intelligent, the composition formal but not rigid. The portrait documents both a fascinating historical figure and the breadth of Wautier's portrait practice.

The Jesuit's scholarly bearing and the dark robes are rendered with Wautier's precise Flemish technique, the warm lighting and the direct gaze creating a portrait of intellectual authority and missionary determination.