Portraits of Giorgio Cornaro and his Heirs: Resolving issues of Identity, Authorship and Patronage in Renaissance Venice and Beyond

This thesis seeks to resolve long-standing scholarly confusion over the identity, patronage, and authorship of prominent painted and sculpted portraits of the Cornaro ‘della Regina’ family, specifically Giorgio Cornaro (1452-1527) and his immediate heirs. The individuals concerned were members of one of Venice’s most important and influential aristocratic families during the later renaissance. This research will synthesize and build upon a range of secondary early and modern sources - biographies, monographs, and general histories relevant to the Cornaro family. The thesis presents a connoisseurial analysis and comparison of Cornaro portraits in relation to the under-utilised seventeenth-century painted Cornaro Family Tree. The research will demonstrate how the artist of the Family Tree, Antonio Zanchi, sought out reliable portraits of the Cornaro to accurately represent the family members in the painting. The thesis aims to highlight errors in the literature and recommend alternative titles for relevant portraits. Archival evidence will also be presented to suggest new provenances for Cornaro likenesses. New evidence aims to prove that paintings did in fact survive the 1530s fires at the Cornaro palaces at San Maurizio and San Polo in Venice. This thesis is innovative in seeking to review this material within an art-historical context and in a manner that gauges the significance of the Cornaro family as art patrons. The research will be subject to a case study structure, and aims to present the Cornaro era as an important episode in the art patronage of renaissance Venice. It will help to reveal the dynastic ambitions of the Cornaro family and trace how individual members were continually responsible for projecting their power and wealth through images. It is also intended that the significance of Cornaro-sponsored projects will cast new light on the professional and stylistic development of key Venetian artists, such as Titian. Individual Cornaro careers and their associations with artists will be addressed in what aims to lay the groundwork for the first extensive survey of potential portraits of major members of the Cornaro family from the first half of the sixteenth century.