Venetian school of the late 16th century, Portrait of a gentleman

Venetian school of the late 16th century Portrait of a gentleman Oil on copper, 18 x 14.5 cm With frame, 22 x 18 cm   The Dal Ponte, nicknamed Bassano, were a family of painters from Bassano del Grappa, active in the Veneto region between the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the 17th century. They descended from Jacopo di Berto, a tanner originally from Gallio who moved to Bassano in 1464 in the contrada del Ponte (hence the surname). His son Francesco the Elder – born between 1470 and 1473 and died in 1539 – was the first to practice the art of painting, albeit modestly. He is credited with opening the industrious family workshop where numerous artists were engaged in the creation of canvases, gonfalons, and frescoes for churches and palaces, as well as everyday objects (the so-called "applied art") commissioned by the emerging Venetian bourgeoisie. It was in this environment that his three sons, Giambattista (documented until 1549)[2], Gianfrancesco, and Iacopo (c. 1510-1592), were trained. Iacopo can undoubtedly be considered the most authoritative representative of the family. Among Iacopo's sons, Francesco the Younger (1549-1592), Giambattista (1553-1613), and Leandro (1557-1622) are remembered. It was Leandro who specialized in portraiture, becoming particularly popular among noble and bourgeois patrons in the second half of the 16th century and the first two decades of the 17th century. Although his style is strongly based on his father's later manner, especially as a portraitist, he showed a certain influence from the production of Jacopo Robusti, known as Il Tintoretto, with a predilection for a marked outline, moving away from the taste for the bright coloring of his father's workshop. Among his most famous works in this genre, we remember the Self-Portrait of the Uffizi Galleries and the Male Portrait of the Accademia Galleries. It is precisely to this latter work that the author of this beautiful copper seems to look directly: the man, a certain Giovanni Paolo Ventura – the identity of the effigy is made known to us through an inscription affixed to the upper right margin of the painting – who wears elegant but extremely rigorous clothes, directs an intense and penetrating gaze at the viewer, transmitting a sense of authority. On the back of the plate are depicted a sailing ship and a figure who, swimming, probably saves himself from a shipwreck: the image is accompanied by a motto in Latin that could be translated in these terms: "Salvation comes from God, evils come, instead, from the Evil One." Probably, the work could therefore constitute an ex-voto made by a beneficiary, a certain Paolo Ventura, who appears in the portrait, following a shipwreck from which he was saved following a divine grace.