Art History Talk Series
- Titian’s Portraiture and the Cornaro Family’s Artistic Patronage

Guest Speaker Dr Rachel Healy

This talk presents the findings of Dr Rachel Healy's PhD research into Titian’s portraiture and the Cornaro family’s artistic patronage. Building on Healy’s recent identification of Giorgio Cornaro and his son Cardinal Francesco in a painting in the National Gallery of Ireland, the paper addresses long-standing uncertainties about the identities of sitters in related works—specifically the Cornaro Triple Portrait in Washington, D.C., and Man with a Falcon in Nebraska. In clarifying these attributions, it casts new light on Titian’s development as a portraitist and considers the survival of key Cornaro commissions following fires at two family palaces in the 1530s. A seventeenth-century painted Cornaro Family Tree is also examined as a valuable but overlooked tool for resolving other disputed identifications within one of Renaissance Venice’s most powerful patrician dynasties.

About the Speaker

Dr Rachel Healy holds a BA, MA, and PhD in Art History from University College Dublin, where she focused on sixteenth-century Venetian portraiture. She has lectured in Art History at University College Dublin, University College Cork, and the Red Door Gallery in Newcastle West.

Kindly supported with funding from Night Time Economy grant under the Six after 6 programme.

Image Credit: Giorgio Cornaro (1452-1527) and his Son Francesco Cornaro (1478-1543), Vincenzo di Biagio Catena, c.1470-1531, Oil on wood panel, 63 x 98 cm, NGI.100, National Gallery of Ireland, Licensed under CC BY 4.0

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