Portrait of Antonio Riccobono

By 1745 Giambattista Tiepolo was the most sought-after decorator in Europe, covering Venetian ceilings with tumbling gods and light. So it is a little strange to find him here painting a single sober scholar for a small academy in Rovigo, on the mainland. Stranger still, the sitter was long dead. Antonio Riccobono was a humanist from the town who taught eloquence at the University of Padua and died in 1599, almost 150 years before Tiepolo lifted a brush. There was no living face to study, only older likenesses. Yet the result is counted among his most intense portraits, with none of the flattery the age usually asked for. The commission was unusual too: the academy itself paid for it, wanting a face for the scholar their town still claimed as its own.