Portrait of a White-Bearded Man

This portrait was painted around 1570, in the years when Venice, a republic run by councils of patrician men, went to war with the Ottoman Empire over Cyprus. The sitter was one of those men. Tintoretto hides nearly everything else about him. His robe sinks into the dark background, and only a thin band of crimson at the collar and the fur trim mark him out as a member of one of the Venetian councils. The light picks out just two things, his head and his hand. His name has not come down to us. The painting reached Vienna from the collection of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, and was long given to Tintoretto's son Domenico before scholars returned it to the father. In 1985 the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard built his novel Old Masters around it. Its hero, an old music critic, has sat on the same bench in front of the White-Bearded Man every other morning for over 30 years.