Porträt des Jacopo Sannazaro

For a long time this was simply called Portrait of a Man. A gentleman in a dark fur-lined robe turns toward us, one finger slipped into a closed book to hold his place, as if we had interrupted his reading. Titian painted it in Venice in his late twenties, around 1516, just as he was taking over as the city's leading painter. The sitter was later identified as Jacopo Sannazaro, a famous Neapolitan poet of the day, and the clue was an old copy of the picture inscribed with a Latin form of his name. How an English king came to own it is its own story. It reached London in 1660 as part of a diplomatic gift from the Dutch to the newly restored Charles II, and it has stayed in the royal collection ever since.