Bernardino Licinio

Bernardino Licinio worked in Venice in the age of Titian, and he built his reputation on a subject the great Venetians mostly left aside, the family. He became one of the early masters of the group portrait, the informal scene of relatives gathered together that later ages would call the conversation piece.

His best-known canvas is exactly that. It shows his own older brother Arrigo, himself a painter, with his wife Agnese and their seven children ranged around him, and it now hangs in the Galleria Borghese in Rome. Licinio came from a family with roots near Bergamo, on the mainland, that had settled in Venice, where two of his brothers became parish priests.

He watched the leading Venetians of his time closely. His dated portraits show what he drew from Titian and from Lorenzo Lotto, another Venetian master of the searching, particular face. He went on painting into the 1560s, a steady recorder of Venetian sitters across more than four decades.