In the Cinquecento and Early Seicento, Venetian portraiture developed a sub-genre depicting portraits of art collectors. These, have been generally investigated taking into account the connections between the artist and the patron, since many of them have been executed by the foremost painters and sculptors of the period, including Lorenzo Lotto, Paolo Veronese, Jacopo Tintoretto, Palma il Giovane, Bernardo Strozzi and Tiberio Tinelli. In this paper, I would like to shift the attention from these relationships to focus instead on the way in which portraits shed light on the biographies of the art collectors as we know them from wills, inventories, printed biographies and poetic compositions. This paper explores this topic by examining a series of case studies, including those of Andrea Odoni, Giovanni Paolo Cornaro, Alessandro Vittoria, Bartolomeo dalla Nave, Alvise Molin and Giovan Donato Correggio.
Linda Borean has been Professor of History of Art at the University of Udine since 2001. She is member of the Committee of the Ph.D in Art History. She has been Getty Scholar (2003/2004) and Andrew Mellon Senior Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum in New York (2012/2013). Linda Borean’s research, supported by some grants (Francis Haskell Memorial Fund, Royal Society of Edimburgh Grants in Humanities), concerns history of art and art collecting in Venice in early modern age. She has been member of the project Il collezionismo d’arte a Venezia supported by the Fondazione di Venezia and by the Getty Research Institute. In this context, she is the co-editor of the volumes Il collezionismo d’arte a Venezia. Il Seicento (2007) and Il collezionismo d’arte a Venezia. Il Settecento (2009). She has published essays in international journals (Arte Veneta; The Burlington Magazine) and given papers in international symposiums, universities (University of St. Andrews; Pune, India, Technology Institute; Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence; INHA, Paris) and museums (London, National Gallery; Madrid, Prado; Boston, Museum of Fine Arts).