Portrait of a Gentleman

Venice in the 1550s was one of Europe's great crossroads, a trading republic where merchants, envoys and soldiers from half the continent came and went. You can read a little of that in this man. Nobody knows who he is, but his clothes are not the kind a Venetian of the day would wear, and the museum takes him for a foreigner, some aristocrat passing through the city on the water. Tintoretto was in his 30s and painting the portraits many count among his finest, working fast, with a narrow range of colour that he pushed into sharp contrasts of light and shade. What he gives the stranger is a cool, haughty expression, the look of a man used to being obeyed. The face lifts out of a dark ground with almost nothing around it to tell you where he stands.