Portrait of the Venetian Painter Giovanni Bellini (?)

Titian painted this around 1511, in his early twenties, just stepping out of the shadow of the older masters who then ran Venetian painting. Tradition holds that the sitter is one of those masters, Giovanni Bellini, by then the grand old man of the city's art and near the end of a very long life. No one can prove it, which is why the museum keeps a question mark in the title. The clue people point to is the background. Titian divided it in two, a plane of shadow on one side and, on the other, a strip of open country with tiny shepherds, the kind of landscape Bellini's own generation had first set behind their sitters. The old man turns his lined face slowly into the light.