Portrait of Old Man Holding a Handkerchief

In 1662 the young Louis XIV acquired this portrait from Everhard Jabach, a Cologne-born banker in Paris and one of the great picture collectors of his day, and it has stayed in the royal and then the national collection ever since. The sitter's name did not travel with it. Tintoretto painted a steady stream of Venetian officials and patricians, most of them in the same sober dark robes, their faces and hands lifted out of a shadowy ground with quick, sure strokes. This man follows the pattern, grey-bearded and heavy-lidded, looking out from under a high bald forehead. The one bright patch in the whole canvas is the white handkerchief bunched in his fingers at his waist. He hangs today in the Salle des États, the room of the Mona Lisa, among the Venetian pictures that share her walls.