Portrait of Pier Luigi Farnese

Titian painted this in 1546, just back in Venice after a stay in Rome working for the Farnese, the family of the reigning pope, Paul III. The sitter is the pope's eldest son, Pier Luigi Farnese, whom his father had made Duke of Parma and Piacenza and commander of the papal army. Titian shows him in gleaming armor, catching the light shifting across the steel, every inch the soldier-prince. Within a year he was dead. In 1547 nobles in Piacenza, backed by the emperor's man in Milan, stabbed him and threw his body from a window. The picture is badly damaged now, worn by its own long history, but the hard, wary face still holds.