Portrait of Giacomo di Andrea Dolfin

Titian painted this Venetian gentleman around 1531, when he was the most sought-after portraitist in the city and on his way to working for emperors and popes. Titian dresses the man in the heavy burgundy robes of high office and gives him a steady, faintly wary look. Up close the paint is loose and fast, the fur and the beard laid in with obvious speed. For centuries nobody knew who he was. Then in 1982 a scholar managed to read the half-legible address on the letter in the sitter's hand and gave him back a name, Giacomo Dolfin, a magistrate sent that year to govern a town on the Venetian mainland.