Giovanni Bernardo Carbone (1616-1683), Entourage Of - Portrait Of A Lady With Virginal

- Oil on canvas. Original canvas lined.- Montbaron reveals to his clients this authentic pictorial apparition, an effusion frozen in time, from the intimate circle of Giovanni Bernardo Carbone, the high priest of portraiture who knew how to sculpt the psyche of the most beautiful families of the Genoese Baroque. It is not a simple canvas, but a revelation. The silhouette of the young courtesan, a diva of icy beauty, stands out in the shadows against the theater curtain draped in a tragic and sumptuous purple. Her face, a sculpted enigma, emerges from the shadows through exquisite sfumati that dissolve the flesh in a mist of desire, crowned by a magnificent turban that rises like an oriental whim, in full and delicious communion with the most feverish fashion of Northern Italy around 1650. An orgy of merciless jewels, rendered with obsessive and spectacular precision, punctuates the darkness of the nocturnal velvet square. But the supreme voluptuousness lies in the gesture: the attribute par excellence of a lady versed in the sweet poisons of the intellect, her slender hands, with lily-like fingers, hold the roll of a score, while the other rests on the keyboard of a virginal, an altar of ebony and ivory adorned with a heraldic coat of arms. After consulting heraldists, it is presumed that this emblem, a symbol of destiny, belongs to the illustrious line of the Zoppi, a Piedmontese house whose dynastic influences resonate within the Ligurian nobility and western Veneto. The work is not contemplated, but inhaled like an ancient and disturbing perfume. - Giovanni Bernardo Carbone (Albaro, 1614 – Genoa, 1683), alias Carboni, was a central figure of the Genoese Baroque, whose mastery made him the portraitist par excellence of the high society of his time. Initially trained under Giovanni Andrea de Ferrari, Carbone enriched his style during trips to Venice around 1643 and 1650, absorbing crucial influences that refined his technique. Specializing in portraiture, he generally executed full-length or three-quarter-length figures, depicting the Genoese aristocracy in their finest attire or surrounded by their most sumptuous possessions. This approach made him the principal local emulator of the courtly style imposed by Anthony van Dyck, capturing the dignity and social status of his subjects with inimitable elegance. - Unframed image dimensions: 95 x 119 cm / 113 x 138 cm, with a refined frame inspired by early 20th-century Dutch art.