Portrait of Cardinal Pietro Bembo

Pietro Bembo spent much of his life deciding how Italians ought to write. In a hugely influential book he argued that the Tuscan of Petrarch and Boccaccio, already two centuries old, should be the model for literary Italian, and his view largely won out. Only near the end did the Church reward the scholar with a cardinal's hat, in 1539, when he was already in his late sixties. Titian painted him a few years after that, an old man of about 75 in the red biretta and cape, the beard long, the glance turned aside. Bembo died in 1547, only a couple of years after sitting. It is one of two Titian portraits of him; the other, made around his elevation, shows him younger and now hangs in Washington.