Monsignor Giuliano della Rovere

Giuliano della Rovere shares his name with Pope Julius the Second, who was born Giuliano della Rovere more than a century earlier, but this is a later and much quieter member of the family. He was the son of a cardinal, legitimised only afterwards, abbot of the monastery of San Lorenzo in Campo, and a cousin of Francesco Maria the Second, the duke of Urbino. Barocci painted him around 1595 almost entirely in greys and blacks, on a diagonal that runs through the edge of the table, the sitter's arm and a small still life of books and an hourglass. The Kunsthistorisches Museum compares the searching, uneasy likeness to the portraits of Lorenzo Lotto. The portrait reached Vienna through a family arrangement. In 1792 the grand duke of Tuscany and the new emperor, two Habsburg brothers, exchanged paintings between their galleries, and this one was among those sent north from Florence.