Portrait of the Artist's Parents

Placido Fabris painted his own mother and father in 1832 and set the table in front of them with clues. There is a letter addressed to his father, Francesco. There is a book fresh from the press by Leopoldo Cicognara, the art historian who then presided over the Venice Academy. And in his father’s hands is a tiny painted portrait of Placido himself, the son who had left the family’s mountain village in the Alpago for the city. Read together, the objects tell a quiet story of a boy who had made good and sent his likeness home. Giacomina, his mother, sits beside her husband in her best clothes. Fabris kept the picture and later gave it, with a group of his other works, to the Academy where it still hangs. The first drawing he made for it survives too, over at the Correr museum on the other side of Venice.