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The Conversation Piece

Scenes of Fashionable Life

BERNARDINO LICINIO (C. 1489-1565)

A Family Group

Inscribed 1524

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

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 in the 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
  • 123.2 x 177.3 cm (support, canvas/panel/str external)

    144.2 x 195.9 x 9.0 cm (frame, external)


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