Portrait of the paint dealer Alvise dalla Scala

In 16th-century Venice a painter could buy his colours from a shop that sold nothing else. These dealers, the vendecolori, appeared in Venice decades before anywhere else in Europe, where pigments were still a sideline for apothecaries, and more than 90 of their shops are known from the city's records. For a long time the man in this portrait went without a firm name. Titian painted him in 1561, when the painter himself was past 70, as a sober figure in black holding a palm branch. The clue is on the window ledge at the left, a small open box once taken for a medicine chest and now read as a case of paint samples. In 2010 a study published by the Dresden gallery proposed that the sitter is Alvise dalla Scala, the colour dealer who supplied Titian's own studio. The palm branch may be a nod to his name or to his patron saint.