“Luse da sto gran lume Varotar”. Strategie comunicative della famiglia Varotari fra inediti, testi e contesti

Three generations of the Varotari family occupied the Venetian artistic scene from the end of the sixteenth century to the second half of the seventeenth century, from the founder Dario to Alessandro – known as Padovanino – and his sister Chiara, up to Alessandro’s children, Ascanio and Dario il Giovane. Each generation, each in its own way, has tried to make its own contribution to the construction of a myth linked to family continuity, a myth more declaimed than effective. Through the analysis of contemporary literature, unpublished or little-known pictorial and literary works, this essay analyzes the strategies that the different members of the family adopt for this purpose, some putting their hands to the pen and some to the brush. In this way, it reveals an absolutely conscious plan, which exploits the contacts of the family with the nascent Venetian art criticism and with the Venetian and Paduan cultural elites. Dario Varotari il giovane, in particular, is part of a network that links the world of academies, artistic literature, art dealers and patrons, all put at the service of family exaltation, of a fictional but tenaciously pursued myth, that of the artistic gens of the Varotari.