Xavier and Antonio Bueno, “Double Self Portrait”, 1944, Oil on Canvas, Museo Civico Pier Alessandro Garda

This double self portrait is an exemplary painting, sealing the extraordinary artistic and personal symbiosis between the two Bueno brothers. The unique iconography depicting the brothers intent on portraying each other on the same canvas is unheard of in the whole of art history. There was a close artistic symbiosis and a relationship of mutual influence between the two brothers.

The sons of an international journalist, the brothers Bueno stayed for ten years in Italy after spending their childhood in Berlin, Geneva and Paris. In 1940, they arrived in Florence to study its Renaissance heritage, intending to stay only a short while. Both artists, however, ended up living out the rest of their days in the Tuscan capital.

During their lives there, the biographies of the two brothers are practically indiscernible, and their creative processes proceed following an apparent common matrix. Both of these artists, along with artistic peers Pietro Annigoni and Gregory Sciltian, were part of the small group that signed the Manifesto of Modern Realist Painters, and part of the related movement that lasted from 1947 to 1949.