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Bernardino Licinio (c. 1489-1565)

A Family Group Inscribed 1524

Oil on canvas | 123.2 x 177.3 cm (support, canvas/panel/stretcher external) | RCIN 402586

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  • Licinio was born in Venice to a Lombard family. Although he trained in the workshop of Giovanni Bellini, Licinio seems to have preserved the realism typical of Lombard painting. This unidentified family is grouped around a magnificent Turkish table-carpet. The father is attempting to resolve a dispute between the younger children.

    Knowledge of Licinio’s work was obscured for four centuries because Giorgio Vasari and Carlo Ridolfi confused him with a very different artist, Pordenone (c.1483/4 - 1539), Titian’s chief rival in Venice in the 1530s. It was only at the beginning of the twentieth century that Licinio’s oeuvre began to be clarified. This portrait was attributed to ‘Bordenon’ in the 1627 Mantua inventory of the Gonzaga collection, although Nys, who was negotiating to buy the collection on behalf of Charles I, recognised it as a Licinio and valued it at 300 scudi. It is now universally accepted as by Licinio, particularly because of its similarity to the signed portrait of Licinio’s elder brother Arrigo and his family (Galleria Borghese, Rome).

    In the nineteenth century it was thought that the portrait was of the artist and his own family, but there is no record even that Licinio married. The bringing together of so many portraits in one painting links this work (dated 1524) with the two other later examples by Licinio: Arrigo Licinio and his Family of c.1535 (Galleria Borghese) and Portrait of a Sculptor with Five Apprentices of the early 1530s (Duke of Northumberland, Alnwick Castle). These three paintings are justly regarded as Licinio’s most famous works.

    The family is grouped around a magnificent Turkish table carpet, called a ‘small-patterned Holbein’ after its distinctive geometric pattern. Family groups by Lorenzo Lotto, his Married Couple of c.1524-5 (Hermitage) and Giovanni della Volta and Family of 1547 (National Gallery, London), are also grouped around table carpets. The two eldest children on the right of Licinio’s family group gaze back at the viewer, but the rest are involved in a dispute over the fruit on the table. The boy on the left, in elaborate striped hose, has selected an apple from the bowl against the wishes of his younger siblings; his father is adjudicating, watched by his wife. The aggrieved self-importance of the young daughter, who stands with arms akimbo nearest to the viewer, anxious to establish herself against all her older siblings, rings true for any large family.

    Apart from the drama of the fruit, it has been noted that the figures do not relate to each other psychologically, in contrast to the work of Licinio’s great rival, Lotto, whose portraits have a focused intensity. It has been suggested that there was a commemorative purpose to Licinio’s portraits and that their elegant inscriptions, in timeless classical lettering, play with ideas of the immortality of the painted likeness. In contrast, the grouping of an ordinary family here suggested to Mary Logan ‘the taste of a country photographer’. Licinio’s group portraits were preceded by Giovanni Cariani’s similarly realistic and detailed group portrait, the Seven Members of the Albani Family (private collection) painted in Bergamo in 1519. His innovations in this area of portraiture in Venice may also have been part of the interchange of ideas with visiting Netherlandish and German artists: there is a close relationship between such Italian family portraits as this one and the Portrait of a Family of c.1530 (Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Kassel), now attributed to Maerten van Heemskerck.

    Catalogue entry adapted from The Art of Italy in the Royal Collection: Renaissance and Baroque, London, 2007
    Provenance

    Mantua, 1627 inventory; acquired by Charles I; recorded in the Gallery at St James's Palace in 1639 (no 39); sold from there for £100 to Ralph Grynder and others on 23 October 1651 (no 278); recovered at the Restoration and listed in the Store at Whitehall in 1666 as Pordenone (no 480)

  • Medium and techniques

    Oil on canvas

    Measurements

    123.2 x 177.3 cm (support, canvas/panel/stretcher external)

    144.2 x 195.9 x 9.0 cm (frame, external)

  • Alternative title(s)

    The artist's family, previously identified as


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