Saturday, December 28, 2013 - 
art collecting,Art history,Fabio Isman,Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza,venice
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art collecting,Art history,Fabio Isman,Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza,venice
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Fabio Isman reports on scholar Augusto Gentili's identification of sitter of portrait "Young Knight in Landscape" at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
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| Carpaccio's 1515 "Young Knight in a Landscape", Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza |
Investigative journalist Fabio Isman's article "Scoperto chi è il “Cavaliere Thyssen” di Carpaccio" discusses the work of scholar Augusto Gentili who has identified the mystery man in Vittorio Carpaccio's painting "Young Knight in a Landscape" (1515) at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. Gentili, a lecturer at Ca'Foscari di Venezia until his retirement, has identified the painting as a portrait of the Venetian captain Marco Gabriel decapitated by the Turks in 1501 during wartime.
Here Mar Borobia for the museum describes the difficulty in identifying painting as either a fictional knight or a portrait which would be "the first known example in which the sitter is depicted full-length":
It has been suggested that this new format can be explained if this image were a posthumous portrait of a soldier, in which case the figure would be similar to funerary images of a comparable type and date. The landscape around this enigmatic young man is as mysterious and troubling as he is, combining as it does flowers and animals that refer both to good and evil, purity and corruption.
Isman reports that Professor Gentili linked the portrait to Marco Gabriel and to Venice's Hotel Gabrielli. The English translation of Gentili's analysis will be published in The Burlington Magazine.