Queering the family portrait: Jacopo Amigoni’s portrait of Farinelli and friends

When Charles Burney, the English music historian, visited the famous singer Carlo Broschi, called Farinelli, at his villa in Bologna in 1770, he observed:

‘He seems very much to regret the being obliged to seek a new habitation, after having lived twenty-four years in Spain, where he had formed many friendships and connections that were dear to him’.¹Charles Burney, The Present State of Music in France and Italy: Or the Journal of a Tour, T. Becket and Co. Strand, London, 1773, p. 219.

These connections are effectively showcased in a large group portrait that Farinelli commissioned from one of those friends, Jacopo Amigoni, while both men were at the court in Spain (below). In 1737 Farinelli was named private councillor and musical director at the royal chapel to the King of Spain, Philip V, but it was during the reign of his son, Ferdinand VI, after 1746, that Farinelli became a musical impresario, staging a series of important operatic productions. The most important of these was a series of spectacular musical productions and operas that Farinelli staged for the wedding of the Infanta Maria Antonia in 1750, for which he was inducted into the Order of Calatrava by King Ferdinand VI in the same year. Amigoni was summoned to the Royal Court in 1747, possibly through the intervention of Farinelli and died there in 1752, and the portrait itself was painted between 1750, when Farinelli received his knighthood, and the death of Amigoni in 1752.

When Charles III ascended the throne in 1759, Farinelli was asked to leave the court and he chose to retire to Bologna. The Amigoni group portrait hung in pride of place in his villa in the via delle Lame in Bologna in the first antechamber, together with two other large portraits of him, by Amigoni and Corrado Giaquinto respectively.²It is described in the inventory in the following terms: ‘Un quadro grande bislungo nella sua cornice intagliata e indorata di mano dell’Amiconi, rappresenta Ritratti del Sig.r Testatore, Abbate Pietro Metastasio, Teresa Castellini, Giacomo Amiconi stesso, Ussaretto e Cane del Sig.r Testatore. Figure intiere al naturale per il traverso. Alto P. 4: O. 4 largo P.6 O.8’. (A big oblong painting in its gilded and carved frame by the hand of Amiconi, representing portraits of the Testator, Abbate Pietro Metastasio, Teresa Castellini, Giacomo Amiconi himself, a small Hussar and dog of the said Testator. Whole figures life-size in wide format crosswise (figures extending from one size to the other). 4 palms high, 6.8 palms wide.) See Francesca Boris & Giampiero Cammarota, ‘La collezione di Carlo Broschi detto Farinelli’, Accademia Clementina. Atti e Memorie, XXVII, vol. 223, 1990, no. 25. In the course of showing Burney around the villa, he carefully drew his attention to the NGV portrait, demonstrating his pride in it. As he put it: ‘When he showed me his house, he pointed out an original picture, painted about that time, by Amiconi, in which are the portraits of [Italian poet and librettist Pietro] Metastasio, of Farinelli himself, of Faustina [Bordoni], the famous singer, and of Amiconi’.³Burney, p. 212.

The painting is exceptional in Amigoni’s oeuvre, and highly unusual in its focus on a group of musicians. It consists of full-length portraits of Amigoni himself, Farinelli, the soprano Teresa Castellini (misidentified by Burney as Faustina Bordoni), a half-length likeness of Pietro Metastasio and a pageboy dressed in a hussar’s uniform. It has primarily been studied by musicologists, who have been fascinated by the musical relationships it documents.⁴Martha Feldman, The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds, University of California Press, Oakland, California, 2015; Daniel Heartz, ‘Farinelli and Metastasio: rival twins of public favor’, Early Music, vol. 12, no.3, 1984, pp. 358–68; Daniel Heartz, ‘Farinelli revisited’, Early Music, vol. 18, no. 3, 1990, pp. 430– 43; Daniel Heartz, in John A. Rice (ed.), From Garrick to Gluck: Essays on Opera in the Age of Enlightenment, Hillsdale, New York, 2004. All acknowledge that it is a portrait of friendships forged in the context of operatic productions staged in Madrid at the royal court. In this essay I want to argue instead that this is a portrait of kinship rather than friendship, appropriating the compositional structure of the traditional family portrait in order to directly challenge it. For this is a representation of Farinelli’s chosen family, and as such it immortalises those he loved in ways that directly contest the heteronormative family structure that prevailed in eighteenth-century European society. Farinelli, whose own status as a castrato meant he lived his life against dominant social norms, in this painting queers the family portrait, presenting the viewer with a group bound by an alternative intimate form of belonging. The sitters qualify for inclusion by means of his feelings for them.

The catalyst for my argument for the construction of an alternative kinship network in the painting is the nature of the relationship between Metastasio and Farinelli. Although only Metastasio’s correspondence has survived, it is evident the pair settled on the epithet of ‘twin’ to describe their relationship, referring to their metaphorical ‘birth together in the light of the public’ in 1720.⁵‘Per dir così, nati insieme alla luce del pubblico’, in Roger Savage, ‘Getting by with a little help from my twin: Farinelli with Metastasio at his right hand, 1747–1759’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 28, no. 3, 2005, p. 387. As Farinelli expressed it to Burnley, they entered the world at the same time, ‘he having performed in that poet’s first opera’.⁶Burney, 1773, p. 212. This was Farinelli’s operatic debut in Naples, performing Angelice e Medoro with a libretto written by Metastasio in 1720. Both were ‘re-born’ in that moment with new identities (Carlo Broschi became Farinelli and Antonio Trapassi became Metastasio). From that point on they became musical celebrities, with brilliant careers at the courts of Europe. As scholars have noted, their status as twins was taken very seriously by both men and speaks to something deeper than friendship.⁷See in particular Heartz, 1984, pp. 358–66; Feldman, pp. 40–76; Savage, pp. 387–409. Metastasio’s letters are full of affection and professions of love, and he variously addresses Farinelli as ‘adorable brother’ or ‘incomparable twin’ or ‘most loveable twin’.⁸Letter CXLVI: ‘Gemello adorabile’, p. 234, and again in the farewell of the same letter, ‘Addio, adorabile gemello’, p. 239, in Giosuè Carducci (ed.), Lettere disperse e inedite di Pietro Metastasio a cura di Giosuè Carducci, vol. 1, 1716–1750, Nicola Zanichelli, Bologna, 1883. In return Farinelli dispatches expensive gifts to Metastasio, including vanilla and snuff.⁹Metastasio thanks Farinelli for these gifts in a letter written from Vienna on 26 August 1747. On receiving one of these gifts Metastasio wrote, ’You who are in my heart, or rather who have it with you, ask it how it feels’.¹⁰Carducci, letter CLXXV, written in 1750, p. 315: ‘Voi che mi state nel cuore, o per dir meglio che lo avete appresso di voi, dimandategli come si trova’. In effect, by claiming each other as twins, Metastasio and Farinelli were already redefining their relationship as a familial one, a family based not on biological procreation but on choice and shared celebrity.

To understand how the painting functions to bring together those that Farinelli considered family, a brief description of it is warranted. Amigoni’s conceit is to paint the group as if they have been interrupted while rehearsing outdoors in a garden, with Farinelli, Castellini and Metastasio seated. Behind them is a woodland, and in the far distance a city, presumably Madrid. Unusually it includes the artist himself who is standing and strikes an exotic note in his silk turban and dark green silk banyan, a loose gown fashionable in the eighteenth century, which was worn in informal domestic settings (below).¹¹Brandon Brame Fortune, ‘Studious men are always painted in gowns’: Charles Willson Peale’s Benjamin Rush and the question of banyans in eighteenth-century anglo-American portraiture’, Dress, vol. 29, no. 1, 2002, pp. 27–40. In spite of the luxurious material, it is apparently his work attire as in his left hand he holds paint brushes, clearly identifying his profession. His palette is held out to him by a pageboy dressed in a hussar’s uniform on the extreme right of the painting, who is accompanied by a dog with Farinelli’s initials on its collar (below). Amigoni leans forward towards the viewer with a slight smile, while placing his arm around Farinelli to rest his hand on his shoulder. With no canvas in sight, except the one the spectator observes, it is as though with a nod to Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas, he has reversed his normal position in front of the canvas, to appear where the group is posed, in order to be included.

The lifelong friendship between Amigoni and Farinelli begun in London was continued in Madrid where Amigoni was commissioned to design set scenery for Farinelli’s operatic productions, and to work as a decorative painter in the palaces belonging to the royal family.¹²For more on their friendship, see Leslie Griffin Hennessey, ‘Friends serving itinerant muses: Jacopo Amigoni and Farinelli in Europe’, in Shearer West (ed.) Italian Culture in Northern Europe in the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, pp. 20–45. Amigoni was married to the mezzo-soprano Maria Antonia Marchesini who had sung with Farinelli at the King’s Theatre at Haymarket.¹³Stefano Mazzoni, ‘ “Qualche presa di Farinello”. Carlo Broschi in Spagna’, Dramaturgia, vol. 15, no. 5, 2018, p. 118. He testified on Farinelli’s behalf before the tribunal deciding whether he should be admitted into the prestigious Order of Calatrava, the cross of which is prominently displayed around his friend’s neck in the painting. He died in 1752 but in 1773 his two daughters were still residing in Madrid. Author Richard Twiss met them at the house of the Countess of Benevento and reported that one of them, Caterina Amigoni Castellini ’paints portraits in crayons extremely well’.¹⁴Richard Twiss, Travels Through Portugal and Spain in 1772 and 1773, G. Robinson, T. Becket and J. Robson, London, 1775, p. 167. The coincidence of Amigoni’s daughter sharing the same surname as Teresa Castellini raises the intriguing possibility that she married a relative of the soprano, further indicating the interconnected nature of this group.

The artist’s tender gesture suggests the painting may have been partly a labour of love for him. It also serves to present Farinelli to the viewer and communicate that he and the woman seated beside him are the most important figures in the composition. Farinelli and Teresa Castellini sit side-by-side in a format strongly reminiscent of formal marriage portraits (below).

They jointly hold a small sheet of music, which identifies them as singers. The score is a setting of the canzonet ‘La Partenza’, by Metastasio, in which he bids farewell to Nice. Metastasio sent text and music to Farinelli in January 1750, but what we see in the painting is a version set to alternative music by Farinelli as it is inscribed with the initials ‘C. B. F’.¹⁵Carducci, letter CLXXVII, pp. 325–6: ‘Per sollevarvi dalla noia della lunga lettera eccovi una canzonetta all’occasione della partenza di Nice. … La musica è ordinaria, et è mia: ma chi voglia cantarla con un poco d’espressione ci troverà quello che bisogna per persuadere una Nice’. (To relieve you from the tiresomeness of this letter I send you a canzonetta on the departure of Nisa … The music is common, and my own; but whoever sings it with a little expression, will find it sufficient to vanquish a Nisa.) Burney’s translation, in Charles Burney, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Abate Metastasio, 1, G. G. and J. Robinson, London, 1796, p. 344.

In a letter of 13 June 1750 Metastasio acknowledges receiving the canzonet with Farinelli’s music. He writes:

Your music to my canzonet is expressive, graceful, and the legitimate offspring of one arrived at supremacy in the art. I thank you for communicating it to me, particularly as a testimony of your love; but if it was maliciously sent, as a critique on mine, I shall take care to revenge myself on the first poetry that you shall send to the press.¹⁶ Carducci, letter CCI, Vienna, 13 June 1750, p. 380: ‘Espressiva, graziosa, e figlia legittima d’un arciconsolo dell’arte, è la vostra musica sopra la mia canzonetta. Vi ringrazio d’avermene fatto parte; e specialmente se questo è un segno d’amore. Se poi è stata malizia per criticar la mia, mi vendicherò anch’io su le prime poesie che voi metterete alle stampe’. Burney’s translation. Burney, 1796, p. 265.

Further on in the same letter he asks: ‘And so my canzonet has received the approbation of the Deity of the Manzanare?’, a reference that scholar Daniel Heartz argued, I think correctly, is to Castellini.¹⁷Carducci, letter CCI, Vienna, 13 June 1750, p. 380: ‘Dunque la mia canzonetta à ottenuta l’approvazione della dietà del Manzanare?’; ‘For it is surely she who is referred to in this query’, in Heartz, 2004, p. 109. The two men are engaged in a friendly rivalry over setting the poem to music and possibly vying to impress Castellini with it, and it is telling that Farinelli and Castellini hold between them, the score that Farinelli set to music, not the one Metastasio sent him. Castellini’s position in the painting, then, between the two men, echoes the central position she occupies in their correspondence. Unlike other portraits of Farinelli that feature musical scores, this is a private song, not something that Farinelli performed in public.¹⁸I am indebted to Mark Shepheard for this suggestion. It was ideally suited to be sung in a small informal group like this one. Metastasio’s anecdote that it was written for a young nobleman deeply in love with a ballet dancer in Vienna, is a story that strangely echoes Castellini’s own trajectory according to Cappelletto. He claims that she was forced to flee from the Imperial court of Vienna after a tempestuous relationship with an aristocrat.¹⁹Sandro Cappelletto, La voce perduta: vita di Farinelli, evirato cantore, Edizioni di Torino, Turin, 1995. Capelletto gives no source for this statement, simply stating ‘it is said’: ‘si diceva fosse fuggita da Vienna dopo una tempestosa relazione con un nobile delle Corte imperiale’, p. 112.

The intimacy of their gesture in sharing the score is enhanced by the colour accents of their clothing. Both are expensively dressed, and the painter was at considerable pains to portray the raised silver embroidery on Farinelli’s frock coat. The luxurious texture of the garment contrasts with his loose white shirt open at the collar, which bestows on him an air of informality. His right hand is raised as if in greeting and appears to graze her shoulder. Both display elaborate lace cuffs, and the blue collar and lining of Farinelli’s coat as it folds back at the cuffs are echoed by the blue bows all over her dress: on the shoulders, the bodice, and at her elbows. Unusually Teresa Castellini wears no jewellery at all, despite receiving generous gifts of jewels from the Spanish royal family during her tenure in Madrid. The very pale rose pink of her bodice contrasts with the deeper, duskier hue of Farinelli’s coat. Castellini pulls back her overdress, so it bunches in her lap, revealing a silky white undergarment. She wears a large corsage on her chest with a much smaller floral arrangement in her hair. At her feet are more musical scores nestled with another loosened blue ribbon, and a basket of flowers (below).

Farinelli had been appointed artistic director of the theatres of the Buen Retiro and Aranjuez in 1747. He engaged Teresa Castellini as seconda donna to the Spanish court theatre in 1748 where she became his pupil. Within two seasons she became prima donna. They worked very closely together for a decade, with her singing in many of the operas Farinelli staged before she returned to Italy in 1 758, with a pension obtained from the Spanish royal family. Her presence here, and the large salary she commanded, suggests he loved her.²⁰Eleanor Selfridge-Field, in A New Chronology of Venetian Opera and Related Genres 1660–1760, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 2007, noted that in 1748, the year she came to Madrid, Castellini was engaged. Teresa Castellini appeared as Sabina in the opera L’Adriano in 1748 in Venice, and was apparently engaged to marry Giovanni Antonio Donini who played Adriano (p. 511). In the same year during carnival she sang in ‘La Clemenza di Tito’ as Servilia while again Giovanni Antonio Domini sang in the title role (p. 620). Cappelletto reports that Castellini was the most highly renumerated singer at the royal court in Spain. See Cappelletto, p. 111. Early biographers noted her status as favourite with Farinelli. Sacchi, writing in 1784, wrote that he ‘singularly favoured Signora Teresa Castelli’ while Cantù in 1856 stated he ‘personally protected the Milanese Teresa Castellini’.²¹Giovenale Sacchi, Vita del Cavaliere Don Carlo Broschi, Venice, Nella Stamperia Coleti, Venice, 1784, p. 28; ‘Fu anche da lui singolarmente favorita la Signora Teresa Castellini’.Cesare Cantù, Storia degli Italiani, vol. 6, L’Unione Tipografico – Editrice, Turin, 1856, note 17, p. 223: ‘singolarmente protesse la Milanese Teresa Castellini’; Giovanni La Cecilia, in Storie Segrete delle Famiglie Reali, A Spese degli Editori, Genoa, 1859, III, p. 463, described Farinelli as ‘singolarmente protesse la milanese Teresa Castellini’ which could be translated as ‘he particularly protected Teresa Castellini’.

Scholar Touba Ghadessi has argued that Farinelli has chosen to emphasise his romantic ties to Castellini in the portrait to reinforce his masculinity and to counter speculation concerning his sexuality that resulted from his mutilation.²²Touba Ghadessi, Portraits of Human Monsters in the Renaissance: Dwarves, Hirsutes and Castrati as Idealized Anatomical Anomalies, Medieval Institute Publications, Kalamazoo, 2018, p. 144. As a celebrity Farinelli was beset by the enduring public fascination with the erotic life of a castrato. It is evident that an important secondary function of the painting is to emphasise his respectability, using decorum to counter the gossip about his private life and emphasising instead his high social status and his success at the Spanish court. The pageboy, the dog with his initials on its collar and, above all, the cross of Calatrava all perform this function. The cross nestles in the folds of his white shirt, with the insignia also embroidered on his coat. The admittedly slim evidence we have for the relationship between Farinelli and Castellini contradicts Ghadessi’s hypothesis however, suggesting that rather than being an attempt by Farinelli to assert his masculinity to a skeptical public, the portrait is but a pale reflection of the genuine feelings he had for Castellini.

What evidence that does exist for their relationship involves Metastasio. Unlike the other protagonists, he was not physically in Madrid at the time, but in Vienna, and his position in the painting, behind the main couple, with his face slightly shadowed may refer to his geographical distance. The reasons why Farinelli included him in the portrait are both personal and professional – as Farinelli’s twin he was close to his heart, while as a librettist he was responsible to a great extent for the success of Farinelli’s operatic ventures in Madrid. Of their intimate friendship author Roger Savage has stated: ‘love was certainly the essence of it’.²³Savage, p. 388. The full quote reads: ‘Just what sort of electricity was it that passed between them in the 1720s? It is impossible to say on the evidence we have, beyond that love was certainly the essence of it’. In order to include Metastasio, Farinelli had to request a portrait from him for Amigoni to use as a model. In his reply on 26 August 1747 to what was evidently Farinelli’s request for a portrait, Metastasio complained at some length about sitting for portraits and explained the result would be unsatisfactory, but eventually agreed to commission one, adding that he could not resist the ‘entreaties of a loved twin’.²⁴‘Ma chi può resistere alle istanze dell’amato gemello?’, Carducci, letter CXXXII, p. 209. The resulting picture he dispatched to Madrid in the care of a friend. It remained in Farinelli’s possession and was listed among his things when he died.²⁵‘Un quadretto nella sua cornice indorata rappresenta a mezzo busto il Ritratto dell’insigne Abbate Pietro Metastasio’’ (A small painting in its gilded frame representing in half bust [length] the portrait of the distinguished Abbate Pietro Metastasio), Boris & Cammarota, p. 217, no. 249. While separated from the main group he remains connected to them through his attribute, the quill, which created the words in the musical score they hold.

Metastasio’s playful correspondence with Farinelli reveals the extent to which he was intrigued by Farinelli’s relationship with Castellini, a curiosity provoked presumably by Farinelli’s half of the correspondence. On 6 September 1749 he wrote:

How is the beautiful Castellini? Is it true that she is so pleased with my greetings? That she wants to honour me with her desirable ? Ah, if you love me, do not allow my friendship to be put to such a great test. After the graphic descriptions that you have made of such a loveable person, the violent temptation of one of her letters could precipitate me to make you some mental infidelity, and I would then be inconsolable. Tell her, however, that as a twin, I cannot help but feel at least [some of] the upheavals of all the movements of your heart: that, when I hear her name, I get a certain tingling, which discomforts me, and yet I don’t wish it to end: that if the Manzanares²⁶The Manzanares is a river in the Iberian Peninsula that flows through the capital, Madrid. were not so far from the Danube, I would have come to see if she would receive me with open arms as she does my greetings: and tell her …. Signore no. Tell her nothing. The road is too slippery, and it is easier not to enter it than to walk there without falling.²⁷My translation: ‘Che fa la bella Castellini? È poi vero che le sieno sí cari i miei saluti? che voglia onorarmi de’suoi desiderabili caratteri? Ah, se mi amate, non permettete che sia messa a cosí gran cimento la mia amicizia. Dopo le lubriche descrizioni che voi mi avete fatte di cosí amabile persona, la violenta tentazione d’una sua lettera potrebbe precipitarmi sino a farvi qualche infedeltà mentale, e ne sarei poi inconsolabile. Ditele per altro che, come gemello, io non posso non risentire almeno di ribalzo tutti i moti del vostro cuore: che, quando ascolto il suo nome, mi si mette addosso un certo formicolio, che non lascia d’incomodarmi, e pure non desidero che finisca: che, se il Manzanare non fosse cosé distante dal Danubio, io sarei venuto a vedere s’ella riceverebbe me a braccia aperte come fa i miei saluti: e ditele. … Signor no. Non le dite nulla. La strada è troppo sdrucciolevole, è piú facile non entrarvi che caminarvi senza cadere. Io pe mme lo ssaccio ca chiavarria’nnitto, ‘nfatto de facce’nterra me romparria la noce del lo cuollo; sia ditto ‘nfunno a lo maro. E accossi vota foglio, e passa’nnanze’. Carducci, letter CLXVII, pp. 290–1 [note that the italics of this last section are in Carducci’s edition to highlight the fact that this is Neopolitan dialect]. It is important to note that Burney translates this section differently, such that the tingling sensation he attributes to the mention of Farinelli’s name, not Castellini’s. See Burney, 1796, p. 289. His translation is used in Martha Feldman’s ‘The castrato’s tale’, in Paula Findlen et al. (eds), Italy’s Eighteenth Century: Gender and Culture in the Age of the Grand Tour, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 2009, p. 187, where it drives a different interpretation of Metastasio’s longing.

Metastasio’s letter clearly states that Farinelli has written to him at some length about Castellini, and Metastasio’s conceit here is that as his twin he cannot help but to share some of Farinelli’s feelings himself, including the pleasurable tingling when he hears her name. He builds on this notion of sharing Farinelli’s feelings for Castellini as a result of their status as twins in another letter to Farinelli:

I cannot help but attach a small coda in thanksgiving of the charming mademoiselle Castellini, whom I hope is enjoying the salubrious air of Aranjuez in the company of her doctor. I have always begged in my previous letters to tell her and do for her a thousand things in my name. But you do not give me the slightest sign of having executed my commissions. Would you ever be jealous? Oh what a nasty weakness. Dear twin, I deeply sympathise with you, particularly reflecting that this particular evil is not cured in Spain. We good German folk do not know the violence of that disease, except in a mild form, that serves as the sauce for love. You other southern peoples, devoid of love for your neighbor, you would want everything for yourself, without giving the slightest part of it to anyone.²⁸Carducci, letter CXCIV, Vienna 2 May 1750, p. 359–60: ‘P.S. La lettera già scritta à lunga abbastanza, ma con tutto ciò io non posso fare a meno di attaccarvi una picciola codetta in grazia della vezzosa mademoiselle Castellini, a cui auguro salubre l’aria d’Aranguez in compagnia del suo medico. Io vi ò sempre pregato nelle mie antecedenti di dirle e farle mille cose tenere a nome mio. Ma voi non mi date il minimo cenno d’avere eseguite le mie commissioni. Sareste mai geloso? Oh che brutta infermità! Caro gemello, vi compatisco assai, particolarmente riflettendo che di quel male non si guarisce in Ispagna. Noi altri buona gente tedesca non conosciamo le violenze di quella malattia, se non che in un grado moderatissimo, che serve di salsa all’amore. Voi altri popoli meridonali, privi d’amor del prossimo, tutto vorreste per voi, senza farne la minima parte ad alcuno’.

The playful tone of the letter, suggesting that Metastasio himself has taken on some of the solemn character traits of the Germans in contrast to Farinelli’s fiery southern Italian temperament, indicates he is not at all serious in taking Farinelli to task for his jealousy. In short, he is teasing him about his feelings for Castellini, and hoping to provoke him in reply.

While brief, these excerpts of Metastasio’s correspondence suggest that Farinelli was deeply involved with Castellini. Another possible indication of his feelings for the soprano can perhaps be gleaned from Burney’s misidentification of Castellini as Faustina Bordoni, in his quote describing the painting at the beginning of this essay. Scholar Anne Desler wondered at the fact that several visitors misidentified her as Faustina in spite of being shown the portrait by Farinelli himself.²⁹Anne Desler, ‘ “The little that I have done is already gone and forgotten’: Farinelli and Burnley write music history’, Cambridge Opera Journal, vol. 27, no. 3, 2015, pp. 227–8. She notes that Count Lamberg also misidentified her as Faustina Bordoni. She suggested that he may have misled visitors intentionally about her identity possibly to avoid speculation about his private life. Faustina Bordoni was married to the German composer Johann Adolf Hasse, and her inclusion would be unremarkable, as a married woman whose presence could be explained as part of a professional relationship. An identification of Castellini, however, may have provoked a number of questions. Aware of the fascination with his private life, Farinelli was very careful not to create opportunities for gossip. Very shortly after he arrived in Spain he wrote in a letter to Count Sicinio , ‘I live in complete isolation in order not to give anyone reason to talk about me’.³⁰This quote is from Desler, p. 219, note 54. Perhaps in this context it is also significant that that while he had previously had rooms in the various royal palaces, in 1750 the architect Santiago Bonavía was engaged to build a house on the site of Aranjuez, solely for Farinelli’s use.³¹Margarita Torrione, ‘La Casa de Farinelli e nel Real Sito de Aranjuez: 1750–1760: nuevos datos par la biografía de Carlo Broschi’, Archivio Español de Arte, no. 275, 1996, pp. 323–33. That Farinelli may have been deliberately obscuring Castellini’s identify suggests that his relationship with her was not something he wanted to be widely known, even though he intended the painting to be in part a public celebration of his achievements and status. It therefore had a dual function: created by him as a private affective visual record of his most important relationships and designed to be received by the public as an impressive picture that emphasised his status, particularly his membership of the knighthood of Calatrava.

The young pageboy on the extreme right, Heartz has argued is dressed as an Austrian archduke and is possibly a portrait of the crown prince Joseph, who would have been about ten years of age at the time.³²Joseph II became emperor when his father Francis I died in 1765. Daniel Heartz, in Derek Beales, Joseph II, vol. 1: In the Shadow of Maria Teresa, 1741–1780, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987, p. 172. See also Heartz, 1990, pp. 430-443 and Heartz, 2004, p. 109. His identification is largely accepted by other scholars.

The high fur hat, he noted, is Hungarian, and the facial features resemble those of Joseph. However, the Spanish court enjoyed a close relationship with the court of the Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna, because both were ruled by two branches of the same family. It would not be unusual for Austrian pageboys to be at the court in Madrid. It would however be highly unusual for an Austrian crown prince to hold out a palette deferentially for a painter. Furthermore, for Heartz’s hypothesis to work, Farinelli would also needed to have obtained a portrait of the crown prince from Vienna, where he resided. The obvious person to entrust with such a mission would have been Metastasio, who was at the court in Vienna. He could, for example, have asked Metastasio to arrange this at the same time as he commissioned a portrait of himself, and Heartz in fact argues that this is what may have occurred.³³Heartz, 2004, p. 110. But there is no such mention in the correspondence, and Metastasio describes in laborious detail all the favours he undertakes for Farinelli. It also seems unlikely that Farinelli would have commissioned a portrait of the crown prince as he had no special relationship with him. It is more likely that the pageboy, like the dog with Farinelli’s initials on its collar, is present in order to accentuate the general impression of Farinelli’s high social status at the royal court and his affluence.

As a famous, wealthy and successful castrato, Farinelli attracted intense devotion and savage criticism in equal measure.³⁴In order to demonstrate his status as a celebrity, Desler notes that when he arrived in Venice in 1728 hundreds of people followed him around the Piazza di San Marco. See Desler, p. 219. The fascination and revulsion displayed towards him reflected his fetishisation as non-normative. Much of the criticism of the castratos focused on their appearance. For hormonal reasons many grew very tall with attenuated limbs or were prone to weight gain. Many scholars and historians, such as Pierre-Jean Grosley, noted their clumsiness and odd physical appearance.³⁵Grosley described castrati he saw in Naples in 1770 as follows: ‘Moreover, I was unable to share the pleasure derived by the Italians from these effeminate voices. They emerge from bodies which are so little in keeping with them: these bodies are made up of parts which fit so badly together; their movements in the theatre are so heavy and clumsy that I would have preferred an ordinary voice in an ordinary body to the most marvellous musico, in Katherine Crawford, Eunuchs and Castrati: Disability and Normativity in Early Modern Europe, Routledge, London and New York, 2019, p. 147. Translation is Crawford’s. Cartoonists had a field day with Farinelli depicting him as awkward, exceptionally tall and spindly, and in artist William Hogarth’s the Rake’s Progress, Plate 2, ‘Surrounded by artists and Professors’ a long scroll flung over a chair reads, ‘A list of the rich Presents Signor Farinelli the Italian Singer condescended to accept of the English Nobility and Gentry’.³⁶For an analysis of the satirical sketches and cartoons of Farinelli, see Heartz, 1990, pp. 430–43. The hostility towards castrati was also tied to the supposed female fascination with them, but as scholar Alanna Skuse has argued, it was also linked to their wealth and power. As she put it: ‘The castrato thus occupied a curious position, he was not chattel, but neither could he be admitted as a subject to a heteronormative patrilineal society’.³⁷Alanna Skuse, Surgery and Selfhood in Early Modern England: Altered Bodies and Contexts of Identity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2021, p. 22.

As non-normative subjects who were ‘othered’ by their society, and the focus of intense negative attention in relation to their sexuality, castrati correspond to the definition of ‘queer’, as defined by an identity that resists or transcends traditional categories of sexuality.

Queer theorists have traditionally had a difficult relationship with kinship studies as anthropologists understand the term, precisely because it has centred on family structures, as the regime of sexuality has been regarded as distinct from the study of the family. An important contribution to this debate was made by David Schneider who argued that kinship should be understood as a distinct domain of social networks, rather than as a biological fact.³⁸David M. Schneider, American Kinship: A Cultural Account, N. J., Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1968. By stressing culture rather than biological reproduction, he paved the way for more inclusive definitions of kinship.³⁹See also David M. Schneider, A Critique of the Study of Kinship, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1984, and Nancy E. Levine, ‘Alternative kinship, marriage and reproduction’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 2008, 37, pp. 375–89. In the light of this concept of cultural kinship, feminist and queer theorists revisited the concept. In her influential Families We Choose (1991), Kath Weston argued that kinship needs to be understood as fluid and contingent linkages of individuals in relationships, which are constructed as family by their participants.⁴⁰Kath Weston, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship, Columbia University Press, New York, 1991 In particular in relation to chosen families she argued that that kinship ties were grounded in love rather than sexuality. Freeman and others have expanded on Weston’s research to suggest that a performative model of kinship might be useful, one connected to practice and process.⁴¹Elizabeth Freeman, ‘Queer belongings: kinship theory and queer theory’, in George E. Haggerty & Molly McGarry (eds), A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Studies, pp. 295–314. Elizabeth Freeman cites Pierre and practice theory, and in particular his focus on the habitus as the set of learned behaviour patterns to investigate the ways in which chosen kinship is constructed and performed, rather than inherited. Freeman says:

Whereas the procreative model treats the production of culture as if it were the extension of biological reproduction or childrearing, the model of habitus invites us to think of biological reproduction as simply one possible mode of cultural production.⁴²Freeman, p. 306.

Applied to opera, the concept of adopted or chosen kin is highly relevant. As scholar Martha Feldman put it: ‘In these widened networks, adoptive kin tended to merge with natural ones. The ties were ones of mutual understanding, professional, musical, and personal.’ Singers toured Europe together, and met repeatedly in different European cites to perform together. They defended and supported each other in times of crisis. She cites the example of Carlo Scalzi, who leapt to the defence of his colleague, Margherita Gualandi, over a contractual dispute with the Neapolitan opera.⁴³Feldman, p. 64.

Family portraits in the eighteenth century were saturated with the dominant ideology of heteronormative behaviour. They were intimately tied to marriage and dynastic procreation and for this reason very often include children, to underline the smooth inheritance of property through generations. Farinelli’s family portrait could not and would not confirm to this prescriptive model. Instead, it immortalises a group whose ties were affective and cultural rather than biological, a group defined as family by Farinelli himself, rather than society.

The ‘doing’ part of the kinship represented here relies on the shared experience of the group: the musical practice and performance they were all involved in. Just as Farinelli staged these operas, and directed the sitters represented here to various tasks, so too does he stage his relationships in the painting, presenting to the viewer a radically different proposition of what constitutes a family, a form of relatedness defined by the cultural practice of belonging. In short, the portrait becomes Farinelli’s means, on his terms, to resist objectification and negotiate his relationship to the outside world.

Lisa Beaven is Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, at La Trobe University, Melbourne

Notes