Portrait of a Man

By about 1520 the independent portrait had become something a private Venetian might simply want for himself, not a ruler or a saint but an ordinary well-off man, and painters like Titian were busy supplying them. Giovanni Cariani, who had come to Venice from the Bergamo hills, took on that work too. His sitter here is turned a little to one side, with one hand laid flat on his chest, a gesture of good faith that keeps turning up in portraits of these years. We do not know who he was. The picture has hung in the Accademia since about 1850, catalogued only as the portrait of a man, and nothing in it tells us his name, his trade, or why he wanted his likeness kept.