Portrait of Onofrio Panvinio

By the middle of the 16th century, scholars in Italy were trying to rebuild ancient Rome on paper, street by street and monument by monument, from coins, inscriptions and ruins. The young man Tintoretto painted here was one of the best of them. Onofrio Panvinio was an Augustinian friar from Verona, still in his twenties when this was made, already so deep in the ancient world that a colleague called him a glutton for antiquity. In Rome he became librarian to a cardinal of the powerful Farnese family and turned out maps and histories of the early Church and the ancient city at a furious pace. It did not last. He died at 38, in Palermo, worn out by the work. The portrait that caught him as a young scholar now hangs in the Palazzo Colonna in Rome.