Portrait of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese

Alessandro Farnese was made a cardinal at 14, lifted into the office by his grandfather, Pope Paul III, who had a habit of advancing his own family. By the time Titian painted him around 1545 he was 25 and one of the richest, most powerful patrons in Rome. Titian shows him against a green curtain in a cardinal's robes, but with a telling touch: he holds a pair of gloves, an accessory that belonged to portraits of noblemen rather than churchmen. It reads less as a man of the Church than a Farnese prince who happened to wear red. Titian worked on it in the same stretch of months as the great group portrait of Paul III with his grandsons.