Titiaan - Female Portrait after Titian (Correggio)

Roman school from the seventeenth century. "Female portrait". Oil on copper.

Presents vintage frame. Dimensions: 24 x 18.5 cm; 45 x 41 cm (frame).

In this work, the author introduces us to a young woman with a long bust inscribed in an interior dominated by a large window on which he directs his gaze. In a reflective pose, he holds with one of his hands a bowl in which red elements can be seen, which can be identified as embers. This iconographic element allowed the image to depict Portia, wife of Marco Junius Grosso, who worked under the command of Julius Caesar. However, this marriage was considered an insult to Caesar, as Brutus left his first wife without explanation to marry Portia. In 44 BC, Brutus took part and died in the conspiracy against Caesar led by Cassius, in which his brother-in-law Cato took part. So Portia, in despair, committed suicide by swallowing the embers of the stove, the only element she could focus on due to the strict supervision. On a formal level, it should be noted that it is a work in which one can appreciate a pictorial influence typical of Northern Italy. What is deduced from the light sources used and also from the chromaticism, warm and round a palette and the perfection of the drawing, as well as the regularity and balance of the ideal face of the figure, refer to a close sensitivity. to a language with a classical character. These commented aspects bring the work closer to the Roman school which took its references from classical styles from both Greco-Roman antiquity and the Renaissance of the first Cinquecento, especially Raphael. They were also inspired by artists such as Correggio and 16th-century Venetian painting. For example, Gian Lorenzo Bernini went so far as to affirm in 1665 that Annibale Carracci had "brought together all the good things: the graceful lines of Raphael, the basic anatomy of Michelangelo, the delicate technique of Correggio, the pupil of Titian and the imaginative of Giulio Romano and Mantegna “His style was based on the study of natural reality (de vero naturale).” For Italian artists the end of painting is the truth, but as for Caravaggio this truth must be described directly and crudely, for classicists it must be filtered through the veil of reason, through the filter of history, which is the filter that the foundations of artistic correction. On the other hand, the study of reality even leads them to the description of vulgar genres, of the ugly (brutto), the modest, the popular, the grotesque, the comic, as observed in their ritratti carichi ("charged portraits") . , in which the physiognomy of the characters is distorted or exaggerated - one of the origins of caricature as an artistic genre. Classicism was a great success in papal Rome.