Portrait of Cardinal Pietro Bembo

Titian painted this around 1539, the year Pietro Bembo, at 69, was finally made a cardinal by Pope Paul III. Bembo had spent his life on words rather than the Church. He edited Dante and Petrarch for the famous Aldine press in Venice and argued, successfully, that their Tuscan should become the standard literary language of all Italy, which is roughly why educated Italians write the way they do. Titian shows him newly robed in cardinal's red, thin and sharp-eyed, one hand lifted as if in the middle of a sentence. Bembo liked the result enough to sit for Titian a second time, and in a surviving letter he frets, politely, about how he ought to pay the painter for it.