Portrait of a Young Gentleman

Venice in the middle of the 16th century had a fixed formula for painting its patrician families, learned from Titian. A three-quarter-length figure turned towards the viewer, a window behind with a distant landscape, fur and gloves to say what the man was worth. Tintoretto and his studio produced a great many of these, and the museum in Besançon places this one between 1547 and 1555. Nobody knows who the sitter is. There is an inscription at the lower right that may once have been his name, but it has been cut short and now reads as nothing. The picture came to Besançon in 1894, left to the town, which had been running a public museum since 1694, a century before the Louvre opened its doors.