Barbara and Giulio Strozzi and the Visual Arts

This essay looks at the artistic patronage of the Strozzi’s and Widmann’s, who were connected not only through commerce, culture, but also through the relationship between Giovanni Paolo Widmann and Barbara Strozzi. Both Giulio and Barbara, as well as various members of the Widmann family, were painted by the leading artists active in Venice at that time, such as Tiberio Tinelli, Bernardo Strozzi (well known as Il Prete Genovese) and Nicolas Régnier. Through the surviving documents and works of art, the dense intertwining of painting, music and poetry emerges, fostered by the Accademia degli Incogniti, the most famous literary circle flourished in Venice in the seventeenth century to which Barbara and Giulio Strozzi and the abovementioned artists were connected; furthermore, the essay sheds new light on the portrait genre and the role it plays in celebrating the individual's features and perpetuating personal memory.