Portrait of Admiral Tommaso Contarini

Venice in 1580 was a city patching itself up. Fire had wrecked rooms of the Doge's Palace in 1574 and again in 1577, and the plague of 1575 to 1577 had killed close to 50,000 people, something like a quarter of the population. One of the dead was Titian, in 1576, which left Tintoretto the busiest painter in the city, running a workshop that handled both the state commissions and the portraits of the men who commanded the fleets. This is one of those portraits. The museum in Narbonne carried it for a long time under a different name altogether, as a likeness of the admiral Vincenzo Cappello, and for a period under Titian's name rather than Tintoretto's; it is catalogued now as a Tintoretto and as Tommaso Contarini. It hangs in the old palace of the archbishops of Narbonne, which the city turned into its museum in the 19th century.