The Artist and his Family

Four people, one room, and a statue of Diana in a niche at the back. The man at the easel is Carlo Francesco Nuvolone, painting around 1650. The woman at the harp is usually identified as his wife, Beatrice Castoldi. The elderly man standing behind the group, half in shadow, is his father Panfilo, who died in 1651, and that has led part of the literature to read the picture as a tribute to him rather than a family at leisure. There is a second version of the same concert, in Como, close but not identical. Who actually held the brush is an open question. Some scholars give the side figures, including his own, to his brother Giuseppe; the national catalogue and the museum name Carlo Francesco alone. The canvas was listed in a Milanese private inventory in 1759 and came to the Brera in 1806.