Portrait of Leopoldo Cicognara

The man in this portrait created much of the museum it now hangs in. Leopoldo Cicognara was president of the Venice Academy of Fine Arts, and it was he who, in 1817, first opened its gallery to the public. He was a historian of sculpture and a close friend of the sculptor Antonio Canova, then the most famous artist in Europe. Ludovico Lipparini, a young painter from Bologna working in Venice, made this likeness in 1825, near the end of Cicognara's years in charge. He was close to sixty by then, his great history of Italian sculpture already finished. The portrait entered the Accademia's own collection much later, in 1903.