A Venetian General

He is in Venetian armour, a commander's baton in his right hand and weapons in his left, and he is turned so that the arm pushes out toward the viewer. That one gesture opens up the space around him, and the stare holds it. Tintoretto painted him in Venice between 1570 and 1575. The picture reached Spain through another soldier. Diego Mexía, first Marquis of Leganés, who commanded Spanish armies in Flanders and Italy and built one of the great private picture collections in Spain, gave it to Philip IV, and it stayed in the royal palaces for the next two centuries, moved from room to room by successive inventories. Nobody has established who the sitter was. The Prado catalogues him simply as a Venetian admiral, and the pose is close to Tintoretto's portrait of Sebastiano Venier, who led the Venetian fleet at Lepanto, now in Vienna.