Giorgio Cornaro with a Falcon

The young man rests a gloved hand near a hooded falcon, and that bird is the clue to who he probably is. The sitter is thought to be Giorgio Cornaro, of one of Venice's grandest families, who together with his father helped bring hunting falcons from Crete to the nobles of Italy. So the falcon here reads almost like a family calling card. Titian painted the portrait in the 1530s, though scholars still argue over the exact year and even over how much of the canvas came from his own hand. Recently cleaned, it gives back his patient attention to a face and the soft sheen of the sitter's dark sleeve.