Knight with a Clock

Nobody knows who this man is. He wears the white eight-pointed cross of the Order of Malta, cut from cloth and sewn onto his coat as the order's founding bull of 1153 required, and every name proposed for him has come apart: a clockmaker at the Spanish court, a Venetian merchant family, a writer named Horologgi whose surname means clock. The clock is easier to follow. One very like it stands in Titian's portraits of the cardinals Granvelle and Madruzzo and of Eleonora Gonzaga, duchess of Urbino, close enough that it was probably the painter's own, kept in the studio. X-rays show the sitter first held something else, low near his waist, with both arms running almost parallel, and that the table came later so the hand would have somewhere to go. The portrait reached Madrid in 1637, sent by Niccolo Ludovisi to Philip IV in thanks for the coastal state of Piombino.