Man with Ermine Coat

For a long time this man had a name. He was taken to be Filippo Strozzi, a Florentine exile who grew up in France, served the French crown as a soldier and was killed in 1582 after a sea battle off the Azores. The museum now calls that identification a mistake, and the sitter is simply a man in a fur-lined cloak, painted by Titian around 1560. By then Titian was past 70 and the most sought-after portraitist in Europe, and much of what a client paid for was exactly this, the weight and sheen of an expensive coat and a face that seemed to be thinking. The canvas belonged to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, the Habsburg collector whose pictures came to Vienna. Unusually, it hangs today not in the picture gallery but in the Kunstkammer, among the Habsburgs' precious objects.