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for Giovanni Bernardo Carbone
Giovanni Bernardo Carbone
Italian, 1616 - 1683
Italian painter. One of the finest though one of the least known Genoese painters, he studied with Giovanni Andrea de’ Ferrari (i) in the late 1620s, a period when he could have known Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione and Giovanni Andrea Podesta, who were also in the studio. His trips to Venice of c. 1643–4 and 1650, his friendships with Valerio Castello in the 1650s and with Casone and Giovanni Battista Carlone in the 1670s indicate some further influences on his work. He is chiefly known as a portrait painter who followed the manner of Anthony van Dyck closely enough to confuse clients in the 17th and 18th centuries. His earliest dated painting, a portrait of the Imperial Family (1642; Terralba, Villa Imp.; see Martinoni, fig.), is highly ambitious, showing the family crowded into a room with a perspective view of their villa and gardens in the background. Many of his portraits are refined depictions of full-length figures, ranging from distinguished ecclesiastics to elaborately dressed children in the manner of van Dyck, standing on balconies with highly detailed baskets of fruit (e.g. Portrait of a Child, Madrid, Prado). His splendid portrait of Paolo Gerolamo Franzone (Nîmes, Mus. B.-A.) shows the sitter full-length on the terrace of a Genoese palace, turning to receive a letter from a black servant. In its modelling and inclusion of still-life, his work relates to the portraits by Luciano Borzone; he may have derived his interest in Flemish realism from the works of Anton Maria Vassallo.
Carbone’s skill in depicting still-life, facial features and fabrics is also apparent in his religious paintings. His altarpiece of St Michael with SS Jerome and Bernardo (c. 1640; Marassi, S Margherita) shows figures highly charged with light and colour and with sharply articulated contours, similar to those in works by de Ferrari and Domenico Fiasella. Three dated paintings, the Visitation (1647; Lerici, Parish Church), Virgin and Child with Six Saints (1663; Genoa, S Teodoro) and the Virgin and Child with St Anthony of Padua and St Stephen (1665; Celle Ligure, Parish Church), indicate that his sweet-faced figure types and softly flowing draperies continued throughout his career but gained a silkier sfumato, in keeping with the Venetianizing style and the open brushwork of his friend Castello, whose fresco, the Presentation of the Virgin (c. 1659; Genoa, S Maria del Zerbino), Carbone finished in a style that was very close to that of its initiator.
Carbone’s most panoramic religious painting is the large altarpiece St Louis Adoring the Cross (c. 1663; Genoa, SS Annunziata), which contains carefully described still-life and fabrics, strongly lit angels and numerous charming foreground and background figures depicted in velvety shadows. The multi-figured composition is in the same tradition as paintings by Casone and Carlone, but its strong sfumato offers an alternative to their colourful narratives of the 1660s and 1670s. To these paintings can be added the vividly realistic Adoration of the Magi (Genoa, Mus. Accad. Ligustica B.A.). The artist’s delicate modelling, refined figure style and skill for precisely describing still-life are seen also in chalk drawings (e.g. Virgin and Child Entrusting the Keys to a Saint, Florence, Uffizi) that approach the softness of Strozzi, who was also in Venice in the 1640s, and the lyrical Baroque figures of Castello.
M. Newcome. "Carbone, Giovanni Bernardo." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T013972 (accessed March 22, 2012).
Person TypeIndividual
Italian, c. 1610 - 1665
