Resumen de Marco Mantova Benavides, Tiziano e un ritratto a Konopiste
The article presents the only painted portrait we know of the jurist Marco Mantova Benavides, who together with Pietro Bembo played a leading role in the world of collecting in sixteenth-century Padua. The painting in the Bohemian castle of Konopist, forming part of a series of portraits of the Obizzi family, whose residence near Battaglia Terme, not far from Padua, housed part of Benavides' collections; its style points to the authorship of the principal local portraitist of the last quarter of the 1500s, Francesco Apollodoro, called il Porcia. The artist lived in the area that included the palazzo of the jurist, with whom he is recorded to have been in contact in 1573. The prize item in Benavides' quadreria was Titian's portrait of him, which was placed in the entrance of his private "museo". It has been supposed that the picture could be identified as Titian's portrait in the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, but the present rediscovery proves that the sitters cannot be the same. It is suggested here that the canvas in Konopiste, which depicts the jurist aged between 55 and 60 (i.e., in the period 1545-1550), might thus depend on the lost prototype.
