Tintoretto’s Portraits of Giovanni Grimani

An up-to-date reading of the ways in which the public image of a Venetian prelate came to be defined through his portraiture

This exquisite, richly illustrated catalog documents a dossier exhibition held at Venice's Museo di Palazzo Grimani, presenting three portraits of the Venetian prelate Giovanni Grimani, a collector of antiquities and patron of important 16th-century artists. The first, already in the collection at Palazzo Grimani, is the work of Domenico Tintoretto (1560-1635) and depicts the patriarch in old age in an iconography that can be found in earlier portraits, including the Portrait of the Patriarch Giovanni Grimani in the Schorr Collection (London), and a small oil on panel representing the same subject, now in a private collection, both painted by his father, Jacopo Tintoretto (1518-94). This unprecedented comparison, in addition to bearing witness to the iconographic evolution of effigies of the Venetian prelate over the course of several decades, helps to outline a history of Venetian portraits during that period.