Portrait of a Member of the House of Minerbetti

Vasari records that in 1541 Titian painted the emperor Charles V's ambassador in Venice, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, standing and shown full length, and that the fashion for full-length portraits started there. Until then a portrait usually stopped at the waist. This canvas is one of those early standing figures, close to 180 centimetres of it, a man at nearly life size with floor under his feet and air around him, and for a long time it was taken to be the Mendoza portrait itself. The Palatine Gallery now lists the sitter as a member of the Minerbetti, an old Florentine family. Which of them he is, and whether the Spanish name ever belonged to this canvas, is unresolved.