Portrait of an Old Man with a Glove

In 16th-century Venice, Titian and Tintoretto had painted many of the city's elderly magistrates, men in dark robes with little to look at but a lined face and a pair of hands. The museum sees that tradition in this portrait and counts it a relatively early work by Bassetti, still marked by the sobriety and energy of Venetian portraiture of the 1500s.

His portraits, the museum observes, concentrate almost entirely on the face, and his sitters are usually old people, absorbed in silent thought, alone with themselves and with the approach of death. Who he was is not recorded.