Portrait of Doge Alvise Mocenigo

Alvise Mocenigo was doge of Venice for seven years, from 1570 until his death in 1577, and little of it was quiet. In October 1571 the fleet of the Holy League, Venice included, destroyed the Ottoman navy at Lepanto off the Greek coast, and the city celebrated for weeks. Then in 1575 plague arrived, and across two years it killed roughly a third of everyone in Venice, the aged Titian among the dead. Tintoretto painted this portrait near the end of that reign, showing the doge in his gold brocade and the horned cap of his office, the corno, his head turned a little, the look of a man who had ruled through both the victory and the disaster. Mocenigo laid the foundation stone of the Redentore, the church built as Venice's thanks for the plague's end, and died before it was finished.