Portrait of Doge Francesco Venier

Francesco Venier was a sick man when Venice made him Doge in 1554. He held the office barely two years before he died, in 1556, and Titian painted him in that short window, catching a face that already looks tired under the heavy gold and crimson of the ducal robes. There is a second reason this picture matters. Titian's official portraits of the doges, made for a long commemorative frieze in the great council hall of the Doge's Palace, all burned in the fire that gutted those rooms in 1577. This canvas, a separate version that stayed in private hands, is part of what survives of Titian's doges. He was an old man by now, in his sixties, and the loose, smoky handling of the robes shows it.