A Venetian Patrician

The record is mostly blanks. The canvas came into the Spanish royal collection without the sitter's name, and the Prado will not date it any closer than the second half of the 16th century. What survives is the word in the title. In Venice, patrician was a legal category. It meant a man from one of the families enrolled in the Great Council, a group closed to newcomers since 1297, and it was from that pool alone that the Republic drew its senators, its magistrates and its doges. So the label records the one thing about him that the state kept written down. Tintoretto painted a great many of these men, and several of the portraits in the Prado have lost their names in the same way.