Portrait of Gian Giorgio Trissino

The man with the dark beard and black cap, one hand resting on a blue book with gilt clasps, is Gian Giorgio Trissino, a scholar and poet from Vicenza on the Venetian mainland. In 1515 he wrote Sofonisba, a tragedy built on the rules of the ancient Greek stage, and in 1524 he proposed adding Greek letters to the Italian alphabet to fix its spelling. At his villa outside Vicenza he later took up a young stonemason, Andrea di Pietro, taught him the architecture of the ancients and gave him a new name, Palladio.

The Louvre dates the portrait only to the first quarter of the 16th century. It came to Paris by way of the Venetian painter and collector Italico Brass, and when the collector Baron Basile de Schlichting owned it in 1908 it passed as a work of Giovanni Bellini. He left it to the Louvre in 1914.