A Venetian Magistrate

The Prado dates this small head to around 1590, the years when the stone Rialto bridge was going up over the Grand Canal after decades of argument about whether to build it in stone at all. It was finished in 1591. The sitter is called a Venetian magistrate, and nothing more precise about him survives. When the royal collection was catalogued as a public museum in 1857, the entry for this canvas ran to a single line, a portrait of a man with grey beard and hair, bust length. Handwritten labels are still stuck to the frame and the stretcher, one of them numbered 36 and torn away exactly where it named him, the surviving words mentioning only a collar. The picture is 54 by 43 centimetres, and it has left Madrid once in recent memory, for a show of 16th-century Venetian painting from the Prado's own holdings that ran in Barcelona from December 1997 to February 1998.