Antonio Domenico Beverense (?, 1624/26 – Vicenza, 1694), Female Portrait Pair

Antonio Domenico Beverense (?, 1624/26 – Vicenza, 1694)

Female portrait pair

(2) Oil on oval canvas, 38 x 28 cm

With frame, cm 48 x 38

“It has a precise design, non-municipal shapes, beautiful composition. A diligent and worthy painter to be known; he has something by Guercino”: this is how Luigi Lanzi referred, in his rapid but flattering profile, to the qualities of the art of Antonio Domenico Beverense (?, 1624 or 1626 – Vicenza, 1694), noting, regarding a Marriage of the Virgin in the Scuola degli Zoppi, now lost, a subtle influence of the Bolognese school. The figure of the artist has been reevaluated in recent studies, particularly by Ugo Ruggeri, who has traced his secular production, previously obscured by erroneous attributions, often to the more famous Pietro and Marco Liberi. Although superficially linked to the Liberian lesson, Beverense's education was eclectic. His most important Venetian canvases, the Presentation of the Virgin at the Temple and the Assumption of the Virgin (San Moisè), dated 1665, place his documented activity at a time of change in Venetian painting, heralding the abandonment of the "dark" taste. His style was influenced by the "decorative current of Fumiani, Lefevre and Chéron" and shows a tendency towards luministic drama and Tintorettesque memories. A small portrait of the curate Giambattista Vinanti, parish priest of San Pantalon, also dates back to 1670, a work believed to be lost but still on site in the church sacristy. Beverense was particularly appreciated by Venetian private patrons for its profane and allegorical subjects, often characterized, even explicitly, in an erotic sense. Several mythological works are attributed to him, such as Venus and Adonis (Gemäldegalerie, Dresden), The Toilet of Venus (Banca Intesa Collection) or the Allegory of Time Fleeing (Magnani Rocca Foundation, Mamiano di Traversetolo): in these canvases, he manifests his propensity for academic compositions, often with figures from behind or forced into twists, but with a "pointed and accurate" attention in defining the contours and rendering the complexion. It is in this vein that the two oval female portraits presented here could be inserted, characterised by specific physiognomic traits, such as large, roughly dashed eyes, contained and reserved expressions, a pointed nose, well-groomed hairstyles and the typical dimple on the chin that characterises many female subjects in the Venetian painter's pictorial corpus. The last part of his career, before his death in Vicenza in 1694, is characterised by a slightly different production in the secular sphere, with figures of a smaller format, often scattered across vast and sometimes threatening landscapes. At this stage, his style approached the contemporary production of Giulio Carpioni. Examples of this contact are found in works such as The Death of Leander and Diana and Actaeon, preserved at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Caen. Beverense achieved a new formal refinement during this period with a lightening of the hues, espousing the "mineral politeness" of Carpionesque art. His taste in these 1680s and 1690s also showed a notable affinity with the Roman painter Girolamo Pellegrini, with a view to recovering Veronese's style. His particular epidermal classicism contributed to a style that, in some ways, is singularly ahead of a certain academic "barocchetto" of the end of the century, serving as a trait-d'union with respect to the established baroque of Pietro Liberi and preceding artists such as Gregorio Lazzarini and Antonio Bellucci.