Giacomo Antonio Boni

Above the doors of the library in the Upper Belvedere, the palace built for Prince Eugene of Savoy, the Habsburg field marshal, hang portraits of ancient authors. Eugene commissioned them from several painters around 1720, and this Virgil, the Roman poet, is one of the set. For a long time it was credited to Donato Creti or his circle. Today it is given to Creti's fellow Bolognese, Giacomo Antonio Boni.

Boni was born in Bologna in 1688 and trained with Marcantonio Franceschini, a leading painter in the city, as well as with Creti and with Carlo Cignani in Forlì. From 1712 he spent more than a decade as Franceschini's assistant, working with him in Rome on a chapel dome in St Peter's, and in Genoa, Parma and Piacenza. In 1726 he moved to Genoa for good and filled its palaces with frescoes, among them the Palazzo Durazzo-Pallavicini. He died in Genoa in 1766, and the Bolognese writer Luigi Crespi claimed there was hardly a palace, church or house in the city without his work.