Portrait of two gentlemen in a landscape

Two young men pose in a garden, one standing, one seated, with an antique marble bust set among the trees beside them. That was the language of status around 1790: a gentleman who had made the Grand Tour, or wished to look as if he had, was shown out of doors with a piece of classical sculpture close at hand, a sign of learning and taste. The full-length figures in open landscape follow a formula Matteini had picked up in Rome, in the studio of the fashionable portraitist Pompeo Batoni. The picture is given to Matteini, though the attribution is not certain. It reached the Accademia in 1939, passed on from the Venetian export office.