Portrait of Charles V

This seated portrait was made in 1548 at Augsburg, where Charles V had summoned Titian to his court after a hard-won victory over the Protestant princes of Germany. Charles ruled an empire so vast it was said the sun never set on it, yet here he sits without armour, sunk quietly into a chair, in black, an ageing man more tired than triumphant. The museum lists the picture as Titian's, and the design is his, worked up from a sketch in his own hand. It adds that Titian left much of the painting itself to an assistant from his workshop, probably the Netherlandish painter Lambert Sustris, who travelled to Augsburg with him. How far Sustris went, from the loosely brushed landscape on the right to the whole canvas, is still debated. Within a few years Charles would do the almost unheard-of thing for a monarch and abdicate, handing his crowns to his son and brother and retiring to a monastery.