Daniele Barbaro

In 1544 the historian Paolo Giovio was filling a villa on Lake Como with painted portraits of the famous men of his age, and he wrote to the young Venetian scholar Daniele Barbaro asking for a likeness to hang there. Barbaro, about 30 and not yet the churchman and Vitruvius scholar he would become, went to Titian. Titian painted him twice. This canvas in Ottawa is the only Titian in Canada, and its authorship has swung back and forth. It was bought as a Titian in 1928, doubted in 1991 after comparison with the version now in Madrid, then defended again once a cleaning revealed how carefully the collar and that strong nose had been reworked. X-rays show the painter changing his mind as he went.