Portrait of a gentleman in a fur

In the 1550s Paolo Veronese was a young painter making his name in Venice, a city where a portrait was as much about cloth and standing as about a face. This unnamed gentleman turns toward us wrapped in a heavy fur-lined coat, the kind of costly garment that told everyone exactly where its wearer stood. Veronese renders the fur, the folds and the quiet hand with the ease that would soon win him the grandest commissions in the city, from the halls of the Doge's Palace to a country villa he frescoed for the Barbaro family. The sitter's identity has been argued over for centuries and is still uncertain.