Portrait of a Young Man

Titian painted this young man around 1518, just as he was taking command of art in Venice. Giovanni Bellini, the old master who had led the city's painters for decades, had died in 1516, and Titian, around 30, stepped into his place. You can feel him testing a new kind of portrait, the sitter turning softly out of a dark ground, alive rather than posed. The picture later belonged to Louis XIV of France and hung for centuries with the royal, then national, collections in Paris. Since 1956 the Louvre has lent it to the Musee Fesch in Ajaccio, on Corsica, the museum built around the art that Napoleon's uncle, Cardinal Fesch, gathered in his lifetime.