Portrait of Pope Paul III

Alessandro Farnese was already an old man when he became Paul III in 1534, and he spent his years as pope facing a Church tearing apart. It was he who finally summoned the Council of Trent in 1545, the long meeting that would shape the Catholic answer to the Protestant reformers, and he who excommunicated Henry VIII of England. Titian painted him more than once, hunched and sharp-eyed, and those portraits are the faces most people still picture when they think of him. He died in 1549 with the council he had called still unfinished; it would sit, on and off, for another 18 years.