Double portrait
This painting may derive from a work by Paolo Veronese. It was first documented in connection with the Borghese Collection in 1693. It depicts two elegantly dressed men around a table on which a book rests. A green curtain in the background serves to close the scene.
Object details
Inventory
Location
Date
Classification
Period
Medium
Dimensions
Frame
19th-century frame – part of a polyptych, 28 x 181.5 x 4 cm
Provenance
Rome, Borghese Collection, 1693 (Inv. 1693, room II, no. 42; Inventario Fidecommissario Borghese 1833, p. 28. Purchased by Italian state, 1902.
Inscriptions
On the back: "PAOLO VERONESE/MDXXX/QUATRI O..SI F../.."
Conservation and Diagnostic
Commentary
The provenance of this painting is unknown. The first information regarding it dates to 1693, when the Borghese inventory of that year listed it with an improbable attribution to Paolo Caliari, called Veronese. This name was repeated in the 1833 Inventario Fidecommissario but rejected by Adolfo Venturi (1893), who wrote of an anonymous painter of the ‘Flemish school’. Yet his opinion was in turn rebuffed by Paola della Pergola (1955), who deemed the work a copy of a painting by Veronese executed by an unknown artist of the Veneto school. This painter was certainly familiar with Double Portrait with the Musicians Verdeletto and Ubretto in Berlin (Gemäldegalerie, inv. no. 152), which Roberto Longhi (1927) had attributed to Titian. Given the compositional scheme, however, it is more likely that the present work is a derivation from the circle of Veronese rather than a direct copy of a work of his.
Antonio Iommelli
Bibliography
- G. Piancastelli, Catalogo dei quadri della Galleria Borghese, in Archivio Galleria Borghese, 1891, p. 455;
- A. Venturi, Il Museo e la Galleria Borghese, Roma 1893, p. 199;
- R. Longhi, Cartella tizianesca, in “Vita Artistica”, II, 1927, n. 224;
- P. della Pergola, La Galleria Borghese. I Dipinti, I, Roma 1955, p. 147, n. 269;
- P. della Pergola, L’Inventario Borghese del 1693 (I), in “Arte Antica e Moderna”, XXVI, 1964, p. 224;
- K. Herrmann Fiore, Galleria Borghese Roma scopre un tesoro. Dalla pinacoteca ai depositi un museo che non ha più segreti, San Giuliano Milanese 2006, p. 137.
