Lorenzo Soranzo

The balustrade beside this Venetian nobleman records the plainest of facts, the year 1553, his age of 35, and his initials. X-rays tell a stranger story. Underneath, Tintoretto had first painted someone else entirely, an older man whose inscription read 1552 and the age of 75. Rather than begin again, he kept the body and the fur-trimmed coat, repainted the face into the younger Lorenzo Soranzo, and altered the numbers to match. Soranzo came from a patrician family and worked in the Venetian treasury. Tintoretto skips the usual signs of rank and lets the light do the work, gathering on the hands and, above all, on the face he had reason to paint twice.