A Man with a Pink

In Venice in the 1490s, clothes told you exactly who a man was. The black cap and the stole folded across this man's chest marked the togati, citizens and patricians over the age of 25, and a red gown was allowed only to members of the city's councils, so he may have been a magistrate. The flower seems out of place on such a figure. He holds a pink, a kind of carnation, and at weddings of the time a bride hid a pink in her clothing for the groom to find. With the blue and gold ring on his thumb, it suggests the portrait marks his marriage. Solario turned him three quarters towards us, a pose Venetian painters had lately taken from Netherlandish portraits, and that turn lets both hands into the picture.