Portrait of Paolo Tiepolo

Between 1575 and 1577 plague killed something like 50,000 people in Venice, close to a third of the city. Titian was one of them. Paolo Tiepolo, the man in the senator's robes here, sat among the officials who ran the health magistracy through those two years, the office that sealed infected houses, shipped the sick out to the lagoon islands and kept the count of the dead. He had already served as Venice's ambassador in Madrid and in Rome, and he was a procurator of Saint Mark's. Tintoretto painted him around 1578, not long after the city declared the epidemic finished. The Senate had promised a church if the sickness lifted, and while this portrait was being made the Redentore was rising on the Giudecca. Venetians still walk out to it over a pontoon bridge every July.