Portrait of a Man

Veronese painted this around 1576 to 1578, the years when plague killed tens of thousands of Venetians, and Titian died in the middle of it. None of that reaches the picture. A man in formal black, painted at about life size, leans on the base of a fluted column. Above him, in a niche, stands a marble statue of a draped woman, of which only the lower half is visible. Far off at the lower left, the basilica of San Marco sits in an invented pastoral landscape. The Getty reads these as clues. The statue and the architecture may point to a sculptor or an architect, the sword and black clothes to military rank or a knightly order, and the basilica to service of the Venetian state. His name is lost. Scholars once wondered whether this was Veronese himself, but the face differs from his earlier self-portrait in St Petersburg. J. Paul Getty wrote about the picture in his 1965 book on collecting, and later gave it to his museum.