Un ritrovato dipinto di Ottavio Leoni a Montecitorio: il Ritratto di Paolo Giordano II Orsini in abito nero
Adriano Amendola
The author restores to Ottavio Leoni a portrait kept in Palazzo Montecitorio, on deposit since 1925 from the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, formerly assigned to a 17th-century Dutch school. Moreover, the sitter is identified for the first time with Paolo Giordano II Orsini, Duke of Bracciano, one of the most famous Roman patrons of the Baroque period. This important acquisition for the State’s historical and artistic heritage shed new light on a canvas whose history, even the most remote, has been reconstructed thanks to detailed documentary research, identifying its passage from the ancient baronial Orsini family to Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Braschi, later Pope Pius VI, until its acquisition in Rome by Cavalier Domenico Venuti for the Bourbon collections under the pompous and disguised name of Van Dyck. The addition of the portrait to Ottavio Leoni’s catalogue has also made it possible to rethink the sequence of the known effigies of the Duke of Bracciano, proposing to assign to Ippolito Leoni the drawing in Lille, Palais des Beaux-Arts, and the painting in Ajaccio, Musée Fesch, already assigned to the hand of his father, Ottavio.