Attributed to Vittore Carpaccio
Republic of Venice · Renaissance, Venetian school
The story
Attributed to Vittore Carpaccio is the label a museum uses when its specialists think a picture is probably his, while no signature, document or settled agreement proves it. It claims more than workshop of Carpaccio, which would hand the picture to his assistants, and less than a plain attribution to him.
Portraits are a particular problem. Carpaccio made his name with large story paintings for the confraternities of Venice, and portraits that are certainly his are rare. The firmest point of reference is the Young Knight in a Landscape in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, signed and dated 1510. Other Venetian portraits of his time have moved onto his name and off it again as scholars compared their faces with the crowds in his narrative canvases.
His own family adds to the difficulty. His son Benedetto worked beside him from about 1515, inherited his drawings, and around 1540 settled in Capodistria, today Koper in Slovenia, where he went on supplying the churches of Istria with pictures in his father's manner.
