Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione

The man in dark clothes was one of the most read authors in Europe. Baldassare Castiglione wrote The Book of the Courtier, published in Venice in 1528, a set of polished conversations laying out how the ideal court gentleman should speak, move, and hold himself. He died the next year, in 1529, worn out on a diplomatic mission in Spain. Titian, the leading portraitist of Venice, gives him exactly the restraint the book preaches: no grand gesture, a quiet turn of the head, the gaze steady and a little guarded. The most famous likeness of Castiglione is Raphael's, now in the Louvre, and Titian would have known it. What he offers instead is the plain, dark-suited sobriety that his own century came to read as good taste.