BERNARDO GIOVANNI CARBONE
(Genoa, 1614-1683)

Bernardo Giovanni Carbone was one of the best Genoese painters of the seventeenth century. He started working in Giovanni Andrea de Ferrari's workshop from a young age. Important were his stays in Venice, of which the most important was made between 1650 and 1659.

He is known above all as a portraitist of nobles and aristocrats taken with all their opulence, with characteristics close to Anthony van Dyck, who had lived in Genoa around the 1660s, becoming the most sought-after portraitist of large families. The portraits of the period between 1670 and XNUMX are perhaps the most interesting in his activity because they go beyond the imitation of Wandyckian ways by finding a complete compositional structure with a full figurative and psychological descriptive capacity.

The painting "Portrait of a Religious" was rightly joined to the group of portraits ascribed to charcoal by Franco Boggero and Camillo Manzitti (1997, p. 1266).

In the work, despite the undeniable recognizability of the language of our painter in the icastic rendering of the protagonist's somatic features - on whose face infinite drafts and glazes flow to achieve a very realistic effect of exquisite skill - a rather quick use of the brush is to outline the background and to draw the prospectively incorrect library. The hands, kneaded and expressionistically highlighted, refer to a very near time, not so much to Mourning di Voltaggio - as claimed by the two scholars who made it known -, as for the last point of reference useful for Carbonian portraiture, namely the Portrait of Maria Maddalena Durazzo, for which you have a payment note dated 1671

Biobliography:

-Boggero, Manzitti 1997, p. 126 (Coal)

-D. bleed, John Bernard Carbone, Soncino 2007