Girolamo Forabosco

1605 – 1679

Italian painter. He was active in Padua and Venice, where he was enrolled in the Fraglia dei Pittori between 1634 and 1639 and paid taxes from 1640 to 1644. His early work, such as the portrait of the so-called Menichina (1624; Rome, Palazzo Barberini), was influenced by that of Padovanino (Alessandro Varotari), who had revived the style of Titian. He also adopted compositional and formal schemes from Tiberio Tinelli, as in the Portrait of a Woman (private collection). The large canvas of the Miraculous Rescue (1646; Malamocco, S Maria Assunta), commissioned by Giovanni Ventura as an ex-voto for his escape from a shipwreck, shows Forabosco, unconstrained by the narrative and devotional character premises of the undertaking, creating a tender portrait group, distinguished by its spontaneity. The most striking quality of his work is its combination of physiognomic exactitude with free, fluid brushwork. Forabosco lived exclusively in Venice. His only documented move was to Padua, where he opened a studio for a year in 1653, and where he died in 1679.

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