Portrait of a painter

Look at how many names this portrait has worn. It came into the gallery in 1896 as a self-portrait by Giambattista Piazzetta, one of the leading Venetian painters of the day. In 1924 it was reassigned to Luigi Crespi, then in 1943 to Federico Bencovich, a Dalmatian painter who worked in the Venetian orbit. Even that is not settled, and the museum still prints his name with a question mark. The sitter is himself a painter, dressed well above a working artist's station in silk shot with gold, catching the warm light that falls from the left. Who he is nobody can say for certain either. The picture belongs to the 1730s in its cool, iridescent colour and its watchful, faintly melancholy face. It was exactly that cold, pearly handling of the silk that first led scholars to Bencovich, and exactly what later made others doubt him.