Portrait of a man

Around 1490 Giovanni Bellini was the leading painter in Venice, the man whose workshop trained both Giorgione and Titian. This small panel shows an unnamed man in three-quarter view against a plain dark ground, a format Bellini helped make standard in the city after seeing how Netherlandish painters turned the sitter toward the viewer. Some scholars suspect the face may be Bellini's own. He built it up in oil, then a fairly new medium in Italy, which let him hold the soft light on the skin and the steady, appraising eyes. The picture belongs to the Capitoline collection in Rome, in the gallery on the Capitoline Hill.