Portrait of a Man

We do not know who this man is, and there has long been debate about who painted him. The work is traditionally given to Titian and dated to around 1517, early in his long career, but the attribution is not settled, and the picture is often catalogued more cautiously as attributed to him. Portraits like this were common in the Venice of these years: a sober half-length of a well-dressed gentleman, turned slightly, meeting the viewer with a level gaze, the identity left to the family who commissioned it and now lost to us. It hangs in the Galleria Palatina in the Pitti Palace, part of the Uffizi Galleries in Florence. The picture carries no letter, no coat of arms and no inscription, so his name is lost along with him.