OTTAWA.- From June 13 to September 16, 2018, the National Gallery of Canada presents Masters of Venetian Portraiture: Veronese, Tiepolo, Vittoria as part of its Masterpiece in Focus series. Featuring 17 works – including three sculptures, 12 works on paper, one book and one painting – the exhibition looks at how portraiture played a key role in elevating and celebrating social status during the late Baroque and Renaissance periods.

At the centre of the exhibition is a terracotta bust sculpted in the 1570s by Alessandro Vittoria (1525-1608), one of the greatest portraitists working in three dimensions in sixteenth-century Italy. The bust marked the first Vittoria work acquired for a Canadian public collection when it was purchased by the National Gallery of Canada in 2002. This work, one of possibly only two autograph busts by the famed sculptor currently residing in the Western Hemisphere, was carefully restored by the Gallery’s Chief of Conservation and Technical Research Doris Couture-Rigert in 2005.

Sitting 74.3 cm tall, the terracotta bust depicts Vittoria’s close friend and patron, Giulio Contarini (1500-1580), who held the notable position of procurator at St. Mark’s Basilica for more than 40 years. Portraying a remarkable resemblance to Contarini – from the fine detail of his hair and beard to the soft lines on his face and delicate folds of his clothing – the terracotta bust served as an accurate model for a separate marble version that sits on Contarini’s funerary monument in the church of Santa Maria del Giglio in Venice. Even more remarkable is that the terracotta bust has survived some 450 years – a rarity for a sculpture of its kind.

“The terracotta bust of Giulio Contarini is a magnificent Renaissance sculpture with a fascinating story,” said National Gallery of Canada Director and CEO, Marc Mayer. “I was interested to learn that the great Tiepolo, for example, made a series of chalk studies after it more than a century and a half after it was created. This jewel of a show places Alessandro Vittoria’s bust in conversation with other remarkable works from the period.”

Complementing Vittoria’s bust are other works on view from the Gallery’s permanent collection, as well as exclusive pieces on loan from North American Institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Among the highlights are a painting of Vittoria by the greatest Venetian painter of the period, Paolo Veronese (1528-1588); and North America’s only collection of studies on Vittoria’s terracotta bust by Venetian Rococo artist Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696-1770). These studies were done almost 200 years after the completion of Vittoria’s terracotta bust, which Tiepolo used as a teaching prop in his family’s studio.

“Long before the era of selfies and social media, portraiture held an important social role in Renaissance Venice,” said Sonia Del Re, the Gallery’s Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings, who organized the exhibition. “The history of the bust gives us a unique opportunity to propose a focused display that sketches the social and material context in which the work was created, and in which it was then circulated.”

Together the works on view in Masters of Venetian Portraiture: Veronese, Tiepolo, Vittoria speak to the mastery of Vittoria as a portraitist, and the magnitude of his influence on Venetian artists and patrons across time.