Portrait of Marcantonio Barbaro

The date on this portrait, 1593, tells you a lot. Tintoretto was in his mid-seventies and had one year left to live. His sitter, the Venetian statesman Marcantonio Barbaro, was nearly as old and would die two years later. Barbaro had spent his life in the service of the Republic. As ambassador in Constantinople he was held under guard when war broke out, yet he was the man who negotiated Venice back into peace with the Ottomans in 1573, after the great sea battle at Lepanto. With his brother Daniele he had commissioned the architect Palladio to build the family villa at Maser, and late in life he oversaw the rebuilding of the Rialto bridge in stone. Tintoretto shows him robed in red trimmed with ermine, an old servant of the state, painted by an old master near the end of both their lives.