Venetian School Of The Late 16th Century, Portrait Of A Gentleman

2813 / 2000
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Venetian school of the late 16th century

Portrait of a gentleman

Oil on copper, cm 18 x 14.5

With frame, cm 22 x 18

The Dal Ponte family, nicknamed Bassano, was a family of painters from Bassano del Grappa, active in Veneto between the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the 17th century. They were descended from Jacopo di Berto, a tanner from Gallio who moved to Bassano in 1464 in the contrada del Ponte (hence the surname). His son Francesco il Vecchio - born between 1470 and 1473 and died in 1539 - was the first to practice, albeit modestly, the art of painting. He opened the industrious family workshop where worked numerous artists engaged in the creation of paintings, gonfalons and frescoes for churches and palaces, as well as objects of use (the so-called "applied art") ordered by the emerging Venetian bourgeoisie. It was in this environment that his three sons, Giambattista (news until 1549)[2], Gianfrancesco and Iacopo (1510 ca.-1592), who can be considered, without doubt, the most authoritative representative of the family. Among the children of Iacopo are remembered Francesco il Giovane (1549-1592), Giambattista (1553-1613) and Leandro (1557-1622): it was precisely the latter who specialized in the genre of the portrait, becoming particularly popular among the noble and bourgeois clients of the second half of the sixteenth century and the first two decades of the seventeenth century: although his style is strongly based on the last manner of the father, above all as a portrait painter he showed a certain influence on the production of Jacopo Robusti, known as Il Tintoretto, with a predilection for the marked outline line, moving away from the taste for the brilliant colour of his father’s workshop.Among his most famous works in this genre we mention the Self-portrait of the Uffizi Galleries and the Virile Portrait of the Accademia Galleries. It is precisely to this last work that the author of this beautiful copper seems to look directly: the man, a Giovanni Paolo Ventura - the identity of the effigy is made known to us through an inscription affixed on the upper right margin of the painting -  he wears elegant but extremely rigorous clothes, turns an intense and penetrating look at the viewer, Conveying a sense of authority. On the back of the plate are a sailboat and a figure that, probably, swims to save himself from a shipwreck: the image is accompanied by a motto in Latin language which could be translated into these words: "Salvation comes from God, but evil comes from the Evil One". Probably, the work could therefore constitute an ex-voto made by a beneficiary, such as Paolo Ventura, who appears in the portrait, following a shipwreck from which he was saved as a result of divine grace.