The story
Antonio Riccobono, a classical scholar born in Rovigo, had been dead for more than 140 years when Giambattista Tiepolo painted his portrait in the 1740s. The picture belongs to the Accademia dei Concordi, a society of learned men founded in 1580 by Count Gaspare Campo, who liked to gather the town's writers and scholars in his palace to talk about literature, music and art. Over the following centuries the academy built up a gallery of portraits of Rovigo's notable figures, and Tiepolo's Riccobono is the best known of them.
In the 19th century noble families of the town left their own collections to the academy. The bequest of Count Giovanni Francesco Casilini alone brought close to 200 Venetian paintings, and the Silvestri family's pictures followed. The academy still keeps its library in its own palazzo on the main square, completed in 1814, while the finest paintings are shown in Palazzo Roverella together with the collection of the town's seminary. Among them is a Madonna and Child by Giovanni Bellini from the 1470s, and the collection also has a Christ Carrying the Cross based on one of his designs.
