Portrait group: The singer Farinelli and friends

Carlo Broschi, known as Farinelli, was the most celebrated castrato singer of the eighteenth century, whose voice reportedly could cure the melancholy of Philip V of Spain. Amigoni and Farinelli were close friends across decades — the painter had worked at the Spanish court from 1747, and both moved in the same aristocratic musical circles. This group portrait from around 1750 is a masterpiece of Rococo sociability, showing Farinelli surrounded by musical friends rather than in the conventional isolated state portrait pose. The work encodes the new cultural ideal of artistic friendship and intellectual companionship that the Enlightenment was promoting against the older model of individual genius. Amigoni places himself in the portrait as one of the friends, making it simultaneously a document of their relationship. The painting is now in Melbourne, having traveled through multiple European collections before reaching the National Gallery of Victoria.

The multi-figure composition is organized as a conversation piece in the British tradition, with figures gathered informally around a shared social moment rather than arranged in the hierarchical rows of formal group portraiture. Amigoni differentiates each face with greater specificity than he typically brings to mythological figures. The palette remains his characteristic warm golden cream, unifying diverse costumes.