Bildnis des Alvise Cornaro

The man in this portrait is Alvise Cornaro, a gentleman of Padua whom Tintoretto painted around 1560, when the sitter was already very old. Cornaro was known across Italy less for anything he built than for a short book he wrote in his eighties on the sober life, arguing that eating and drinking in strict moderation had carried him into a healthy old age. He kept a small circle of scholars and scientists around him in Padua and put money into theatre and land reclamation. Tintoretto shows him plainly, a heavy-lidded old face above dark robes. For more than a century afterward the picture hung under the wrong name, catalogued as a Titian until the 1800s.