Artwork story
About Portrait of Alvise Contarini(?); (verso) A Tethered Roebuck
The artist and artwork
Jacometto (Jacometto Veneziano) painted Portrait of Alvise Contarini(?); (verso) A Tethered Roebuck around 1485–95. Active in Venice by 1472 and dead before 1498, the painter and illuminator specialized in small, exacting portraits. This oil-on-wood panel measures only 4 5/8 by 3 3/8 inches overall. On its face, a black-clad man turns in crisp profile against blue sky, lagoon, and minute shoreline. His identity as Alvise Contarini remains uncertain.
The world around it
Late-fifteenth-century Venice was a powerful trading republic and center of artistic exchange. Jacometto's meticulous surface and atmospheric distance reveal Netherlandish influence on Venetian portraiture. The city also developed a strong multisided-portrait tradition: likenesses sat inside boxes, behind covers, or opposite emblematic reverses that staged identity, virtue, intimacy, and secrecy. In 1543, the connoisseur Marcantonio Michiel recorded this panel and its female pendant in a Venetian patrician's collection and praised them as a most perfect work.
A detail to notice
The sitter's hardest message sits behind him. The oil-and-gold reverse shows a roebuck chained beneath the Greek word AIEI, meaning forever, an emblem of fidelity. Normally this would suggest that the male portrait and its female companion represented a married pair. Michiel, however, identified the woman as a nun of San Secondo, and their relationship remains unknown. Her headdress may be secular; she might have entered a convent as a widow, lived there secularly, shared a platonic bond, or joined the man in a concealed relationship. The panels probably fitted into a boxlike frame, so viewing meant opening, turning, and withholding. Jacometto gives the portrait a public face and private argument, but never the key.
Look closer: materials, scale, and subjects
The recorded object is painting made in Oil on wood; verso: oil and gold on wood and held in the Robert Lehman Collection department.
Recorded dimensions include Overall 4 5/8 x 3 3/8 in. ; recto, painted surface 4 1/8 x 3 1/8 in.; verso, painted surface 4 3/8 x 3 1/8 in.
Subject terms include Men, Portraits, and Profiles. Treat them as guideposts, not a complete interpretation.
Collection history and public-domain source
The collection credit line is Robert Lehman Collection, 1975.
The individual artwork page and official image were verified as Public Domain on 2026-08-24.
No Context Gallery independently uses the public-domain image. The source museum has not endorsed, sponsored, or affiliated itself with these products.
Research sources
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