Emperor Nero

Portrait of Emperor Nero, attributed to the workshop of Bernardino Campi (Cremona 1522 -1591). From the sixteenth-century historian Alessandro Lamo ("Historical news of the painters, sculptors, and architects of Cremona") we know that Berardino Campi produced and replicated several times the series of the 11 Roman Emperors that he had created for the first time at the request of Ferdinando d'Avalos, Marquis of Pescara and Governor of Milan. The latter, while in Mantua in 1561 to attend the Duke's wedding, had asked Berardino Campi - court painter - to make him a copy of the famous series of portraits of the Roman Emperors created by Titian Vecellio in 1538 for the Gonzaga. Titian's originals, originally set between the stuccos of the "Cabinet of the Caesars" in the Ducal Palace of Mantua, followed the sale of the collection in 1628 and since then suffered various vicissitudes that led them first London and then to Madrid, where they were destroyed in the Alcazar fire of 1738; today we know them only through the paintings of Berardino Campi, as well as by virtue of some drawings by Ippolito Andreasi (Kunstmuseum of Dusseldorf) and engravings by Egidio Sadeler. The first series that Bernardino drew directly from Titian's paintings is now largely in the collections of the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples, and was exhibited in 2006 in the exhibition "The Treasures of Capodimonte", held at the Pinacoteca Civica Ala Ponzone in Cremona; this series was such a success that the Cremonese painter was forced to replicate it several times to meet the continuous requests of the most important Lords of Italy. The painting illustrated here must have been part of one of the numerous series of the 11 Emperors, all of the same size, that the workshop of Bernardino Campi did not stop replicating in the following decades (*); the intervention of the master is recognizable in the parts that express the linear decorativism and the search for preciousness in the details typical of Bernardino Campi (he came from a family of goldsmiths), capable of giving the image, together with the impact of "power", also an original affectation. Oil on canvas of cm.130 x 105, in a gilded frame from the last century. (*). For example, the series replicated for Vespasiano Gonzaga dates back to the years between 1584 and 85, more than twenty years after the first (reconstruction by G.Sartori).