Porträt des Daniele Barbaro

The man in the portrait holds the book that mattered most to him. Daniele Barbaro was a Venetian nobleman and churchman, but his passion was architecture, and in 1556 he published a scholarly translation of Vitruvius, the ancient Roman writer on building. The illustrations were drawn by his friend Andrea Palladio, the architect. The same three men came together in stone and paint at Maser, on the mainland, where Palladio built Barbaro a villa and Veronese covered its walls with frescoes. Veronese painted this portrait in those same years, showing his patron in bishop's dress with the treatise in hand. Barbaro had been named Patriarch-elect of Aquileia, a senior church post, though he gave as much thought to columns and proportion as to doctrine.