Portrait of Pope Paul III

In 1540, the man in this portrait, Alessandro Farnese, had been Pope Paul III for six years, and it was the year he formally approved a small new order founded by Ignatius of Loyola, the Jesuits, who would become the sharp edge of the Catholic response to the Reformation. He was already in his seventies. Titian shows him without any of the softening a papal portrait might invite: a bent, watchful old man in the red cape of his office, his beard long and white, his eyes turned as if he has just caught a sound behind him. This was a shrewd political survivor who set Michelangelo to work on the Last Judgment and, a few years later, opened the Council of Trent. The hand resting on the chair is thin and ringed.