Marco Grimani

Venice had just come through a plague when this portrait was painted. Between 1575 and 1577 the city buried something close to 50,000 people, near a third of everyone living there, and the Senate vowed a church in thanks for its ending, the Redentore, which Palladio began in 1577. Marco Grimani sat in that Senate. The Prado dates his portrait to between 1576 and 1583, the last seven years of his life, and shows him in the red velvet trimmed with ermine that went with his rank. Nothing about his age is softened. He turns a little, holds the viewer's eye, and sets his left arm forward so the black behind him opens into depth. The light falls on the hands and the face and leaves the rest in the dark.