The Chamber of the Magistrato alle Leggi

This chamber housed the Magistratura dei Conservatori ed esecutori delle leggi e ordini degli uffici di San Marco e di Rialto, to give them their full title. Created in 1553, this authority was headed by three of the city’s patricians and was responsible for making sure the regulations concerning the practice of law were observed.
In a mercantile city such as Venice, the courts were of enormous importance (think, for example, of the amount of litigation, the number of court-cases, which must have arisen within such a huge market as the Rialto). And the administration of justice in the city was made all the more special by the fact that it was not based on Imperial, Common or Roman law but on a legal system that was peculiar to Venice.

WORKS ON DISPLAY:

Titian (1488-1576)
Portrait of a Lady and her Daughter, ca. 1550
Oil on canvas
Venice, Fondazione Musei Civici, Palazzo Ducale on a long-term loan from a private collection
© Photo: Dominique Provost

Titian’s Portrait of a Lady and her Daughter was among several works left unfinished in the artist’s studio at the time of his death in 1576. The painting was inherited by Titian’s son Pomponio and must have seemed of little value. For this reason, it was probably altered soon thereafter by someone in the studio into a depiction of Tobias and the Archangel Raphael. Above the woman’s left shoulder, the contours of the archangel’s wing are still vaguely visible. In 1581, Cristoforo Barbarigo, a wealthy patrician of Venice, purchased the artist’s house and the contents of his studio, including the Portrait of a Lady and her Daughter disguised as “Tobias and the Archangel Raphael”. He placed the works on view in the Palazzo Barbarigo della Terrazza on the Canal Grande at S.Polo. “Tobias” was part of the group of works sold by the Barbarigo family to Tsar Nicholas I of Russia in 1850; many of these works later left the imperial collection. The painting was in Count Tyszkiewicz’s collection in Saint Petersburg in 1913, after which it came onto the art market. The original, underlying composition was rediscovered in 1948: after the picture had been X-rayed at the Courtauld Institute in London, the decision was taken to remove the overpaint. Restoration work carried out in recent decades has revealed Titian’s tender depiction of a mother and child. The identity of this mother and her daughter remains a mystery, but the most likely hypothesis is that this double portrait represents “Milia”, Titian’s mistress, and their daughter Emilia.

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Educated in Rome under the aegis of her father Orazio, Artemisia matured an aesthetic awareness that was close to the contrasts of light and shade typical of Caravaggio’s manner. This characteristic is evident in this painting – marked by a rapid shaft of light – whose subject matter seems to give form to the subtle discussions taking place in the Venetian literary academies of the time. A new way of understanding and representing women was taking shape, promoted not only by poets and men of letters, but also by the painters involved in those academic associations. It was against this backdrop that the ambiguous portrayal of Mary Magdalene appeared in the Galeria by Giambattista Marino, published in 1619; Marino was the prince of seventeenth-century Italian poets, and was in contact with Loredan and other exponents of Venetian culture. The “holy sinner” was no longer regarded merely as a penitent woman who had abandoned the worldly life following her felicitous conversion: ample space was also given to her beauty, whose splendor, expressed by means of a voluptuous appearance, was referred above all to a spiritual magnificence. In line with this approach, Mary Magdalene is not depicted here as penitent and therefore suffering, but caught in the moment of ecstatic rapture, which is expressed by her recumbent head and barely suggested smile. Painted shortly before her Venetian stay, the work to some extent anticipates that renewed interest in descriptions of “exemplary” women that evolved in the city during the seventeenth century. Moreover, the fact that such a subject was painted by a woman, with such sensuality and expressive intensity, increased its worth in the eyes of the collectors of the time, and continues to fascinate and captivate today’s viewers as well. The presence of Artemisia Gentileschi in Venice has only recently been more clearly defined. From the current state of research we know that the painter lived in the city for about three years, from 1626 to 1629. The evidence of this stay comes mostly from literary circles, in which her painting was highly praised: distinguished poets wrote eloquent verses about her work, admired her artistic temperament and involved her in their literary evenings. Among the numerous letters and poems dedicated to her are a few verses included in a pamphlet printed in 1627 by the Venetian publisher Andrea Muschio. These verses mention three paintings by an artist described as a “Roman woman painter in Venetia”. The lines were published anonymously, but some clues lead back to Giovan Francesco Loredan, founder of the famous Accademia degli Incogniti a few years later. Loredan was a pupil and friend of Antonino Collurafi, a knight of St. Mark’s to whom the Senate had entrusted the teaching of rhetoric in the public school. In several letters, Collurafi was not shy about singing the painter’s praises, and even asked her to create the emblem of the Accademia degli Informi that he had founded. As evidence of a more than occasional appreciation, Collurafi also dedicated two madrigals to her, in which the following verses mention the “celebrated painter”: Artemisia Gentil ne la Pittura / Inganna l’Arte e vince la Natura. (“Artemisia Gentil in Painting / deceives Art and overcomes Nature”).

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Giambattista Tiepolo (1696-1770)
Neptune Offering the Riches of the Sea to Venice, 1756-1758
Oil on canvas

Venice is depicted lying like a beautiful queen; she wears the doge’s cloak and leans on the lion, symbol of the Serenissima. With her hand she indicates the god of the sea Neptune who pours a cornucopia full of gifts onto her feet: corals and pearls represent the dominions of the Republic; gold coins and jewels instead refer to the wealth generated by trade. The image perfectly restores the myth of Venice that its ruling class intended to perpetuate, despite the objective political and military weakness that the State was
experiencing in the decades preceding its fall in 1797.
The painting was created by Giambattista Tiepolo to replace the one of a similar subject previously painted by Jacopo Tintoretto for a section of the ceiling of the Sala delle Quattro Porte of the Doge’s Palace. In those years, when Titian was already strongly interested in the revival of sixteenth-century Venetian painting, this commission gave him the opportunity to immerse himself even more in this tradition, looking in particular at the works created by Paolo Veronese for the rooms of the Palazzo Ducale.

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Giovanni Cariani (1485 o 1490-post 1547)
Portrait of a Man, 1510-1515
Oil on canvas
Venice, Fondazione Musei Civici, Palazzo Ducale on a long-term loan from a private collection
© Photo: Dominique Provost

Initially attributed to Giorgione for the setting of the composition and the sfumato technique, the work was assigned to the Bergamo painter Giovanni Cariani by Bernard Berenson. The painting has been dated to the beginning of his career, when the artist resided in Venice and his painting was very close to that of Giorgione. It can also be hypothesized that this special type of double portrait is intended to represent the depicted figure and his wife, who died prematurely, here represented through the reproduction of one of her portraits painted by another artist.

Jacopo Tintoretto (1519-1594)
Angel Foretelling Saint Catherine of Alexandria of her Martyrdom, 1560-1570
Oil on canvas
Venice, Fondazione Musei Civici, Palazzo Ducale on a long-term loan from a private collection
© Photo: Dominique Provost

Giovanni Cariani (1485 o 1490-post 1547)
Christ Carrying the Cross, ca. 1517
Oil on canvas
Venice, Fondazione Musei Civici, Palazzo Ducale on a long-term loan from a private collection
© Photo: KIK-IRPA

Born near Bergamo, Giovanni Cariani moved to Venice in 1509. Here he was impressed by the paintings of Bellini, Giorgione, Titian and Sebastiano del Piombo. The study of Giorgione’s ways is evident in his works and in particular in this Christ Carrying the Cross: a painting that is a synthesis of his Venetian stay and is inspired by the model of the Christ Carrying the Cross at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, whose attribution sways between Giorgione and Titian. The refinement of the sfumato technique used by Cariani, clearly of Giorgionesque style, hinted at a cultured and aristocratic client. The hypothesis has been put forward that the work could be the one seen in 1525 by the Venetian Marcantonio Michiel in the collection of the Bergamo nobleman Leonino Brembati. Other scholars instead maintain that the painting mentioned by Michiel can be recognized in Cariani’s Christ Carrying the Cross, now preserved at the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo.

Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641)
Head Study for the Portrait of an Alderman of Brussels, ca. 1634
Oil on canvas
Venice, Fondazione Musei Civici, Palazzo Ducale on a long-term loan from a private collection
© Photo: KIK-IRPA

In 1634–1635, Van Dyck was commissioned to paint a large-scale group portrait of the seven members of the Vierschaar, the High Court of Justice in Brussels. The portrait hung in the town hall until its destruction during the French bombardment of the city in August 1695. In preparation for this group portrait, Van Dyck made preliminary studies of each of the aldermen. Two of these, wonderfully vivid, sketch-like portrait studies, are in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. This recently discovered portrait belongs to that group. Its feeling of immediacy is remarkable: Van Dyck captured the likeness brilliantly in what must have been a short sitting.