Venetian school of the late 16th century, Portrait of a gentleman

Venetian school of the late 16th century

Portrait of a gentleman

Oil on copper, 18 x 14,5 cm

With frame 22 x 18 cm

The Dal Pontes, nicknamed Bassano, were a family of painters from Bassano del Grappa, active in the Veneto region between the late 15th and early 17th centuries. They descended from Jacopo di Berto, a tanner originally from Gallio who moved to Bassano del Grappa in 1464, in the Contrada del Ponte (hence the surname). His son Francesco the Elder—born between 1470 and 1473 and died in 1539—was the first to practice painting, albeit modestly. He was responsible for opening the industrious family workshop, where numerous artists worked, creating canvases, banners, and frescoes for churches and palaces, as well as everyday objects (so-called "applied art") commissioned by the emerging Venetian bourgeoisie. It was in this environment that his three sons were educated, Giambattista (documented up to 1549)[2], Gianfrancesco and Iacopo (c. 1510-1592), who can be considered, without a shadow of a doubt, the most authoritative representative of the family. Among Iacopo's sons, we remember Francesco the Younger (1549-1592), Giambattista (1553-1613) and Leandro (1557-1622): it was the latter who specialized in the portrait genre, becoming particularly popular among noble and bourgeois patrons of the second half of the sixteenth century and the first two decades of the seventeenth century: although his style is strongly based on his father's late manner, especially as a portraitist he showed a certain influence with respect to the production of Jacopo Robusti, known as Il Tintoretto, with a predilection for the marked contour line, distancing himself from the taste for the bright colouring of his father's workshop. Among his most famous works in this genre are the Self-Portrait from the Uffizi Gallery and the Portrait of a Man from the Accademia Gallery. It is precisely to this latter work that the artist of this beautiful copperplate appears to be directly inspired: the man, one Giovanni Paolo Ventura—the sitter's identity is revealed through an inscription on the upper right margin of the painting—wearing elegant yet extremely severe clothing, directs an intense and penetrating gaze at the viewer, conveying a sense of authority. The back of the plate depicts a sailing ship and a figure swimming, presumably saving himself from a shipwreck. The image is accompanied by a Latin motto that could be translated as: "Salvation comes from God, evil comes from the Evil One." Probably, the work could therefore constitute an ex-voto made by a beneficiary, a certain Paolo Ventura, who appears in the portrait, following a shipwreck from which he was saved thanks to divine grace.

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