A Venetian Senator or Secretary

In 1857 a cataloguer at the royal museum in Madrid, the Prado under its older name, reached this canvas and entered it as number 767: a man at half length, greying beard, black cap, black clothes, dressed much like the secretaries of the Senate of Venice. His guess is still in the title the museum uses. 40 years earlier the picture hung in the dining room of the Royal Palace, where the inventory called the sitter a priest. In Venice the difference was one of caste. A senator was a patrician. A secretary of the Senate came from the cittadini originari, the non-noble citizens who ran the ducal chancery and kept the Republic's confidential papers, the highest career open to them. The museum still gives the man no name and dates the canvas no more closely than the 16th century. The number 767 is on the front of it, lower left, written by hand in orange.