Portrait of Benedetto Varchi

Titian painted this around 1540, most likely during a stay in Venice by the sitter, the Florentine scholar Benedetto Varchi. Varchi was a historian and man of letters who wrote on the Tuscan language and on the theory of art. Titian gives him only a few props: a dark curtain, a stone pedestal and column he rests his hand on, a small gilt-bound book held loosely at his side. The rest is his black fur-trimmed gown and his bearing. That restraint was itself the point. This kind of grave, pared-down portrait of a thinker became a model that aristocratic sitters across Europe would ask for over the next two centuries. Titian signed it on the column, Titianus f.