Portrait of Antonio Anselmi

Antonio Anselmi was a Venetian man of letters, secretary to the great scholar and cardinal Pietro Bembo, and this is how Titian showed him around 1550, at the start of his own last long phase. Look closely and you notice the picture is unfinished. The face is fully worked, alert and turned toward you, but the left arm rests on nothing in particular and the lower corner trails off into bare, undecided paint. Titian poured everything into the head and let the dark coat, hair and beard sink almost invisibly into the background. He left a number of his late paintings this way, carried a long distance but never formally closed.