Portrait of Bishop Ludovico Beccadelli

The date is written right into the picture. In the bishop's hands is a folded letter, and its inscription tells us the sitter is Ludovico Beccadelli, Bishop of Ravello and the pope's apostolic delegate in Venice, painted in 1552. That year matters. Beccadelli belonged to the circle of reform-minded churchmen who hoped to renew the Church from within during the tense decades of the Counter-Reformation, when the Council of Trent was working out how the Catholic Church would answer the Protestant reformers. Titian gives him no grand setting, just a calm, watchful man in his red robes. The poet Pietro Aretino, a friend of the painter, praised the likeness in a sonnet as soon as it was done. The portrait later passed through the Bolognese art market and was bought for the Medici by Cardinal Leopoldo in 1653.