National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia
While Amigoni spent much of his life painting mythologies and European royalty, this specific canvas captures an elite, intimate circle of historical figures. The central figure is Carlo Broschi, famously known as Farinelli (the most celebrated operatic castrato superstar in human history). Surrounding him are Teresa Castellini (the prima donna of the Madrid opera), the legendary poet and librettist Pietro Metastasio, and a proud self-portrait of Amigoni himself holding his brushes. "Portrait Group: The Singer Farinelli and Friends" is a groundbreaking subversion of Enlightenment-era social norms because instead of surrounding the singer with conventional blood relatives, Amigoni uses an aristocratic layout to honour a chosen family. Farinelli's status as a castrato meant he could never legally marry or produce an heir, and this painting cleverly transforms the elite "dynastic portrait" into a celebration of queer, creative companionship, and as scholars argue, "queers the family portrait." Amigoni’s fluid brushwork and rich, velvet tones immortalize a powerful network of expatriate Italian masters who quite literally dictated the musical and visual tastes of European royal courts. Intriguingly, Amigoni's dominance among British elites severely threatened local artists. Most notably, the fiercely patriotic British painter William Hogarth launched a bitter cultural war against Amigoni, using visual satire and media campaigns to bash foreign artists and aggressively push them out of high-profile commissions like the St. Bartholomew’s Hospital staircase.
The real subject of this painting is not the individual figures, but the connections between them. It is a portrait of an intimate circle, what one contemporary scholar calls an “alternative kinship network”. Farinelli and Metastasio considered themselves “twins,” reborn together in the public eye when they first collaborated on Metastasio’s opera Angelica e Medoro in Naples in 1720. The painting commemorates specific collaborations. Farinelli reportedly set Metastasio’s canzonetta La Partenza (The Departure) to music, and the soprano Castellini, seated beside him, holds the sheet music for this very work.
