Scipio Clusone With a Dwarf Valet

Tintoretto signed and dated this at the upper right in 1561, when he was 43 and one of the busiest portrait painters in Venice. The sitter was Scipione Clusone, a colonel in the service of the Venetian Republic, and he is shown in the middle of arming rather than finished and posed. The parade corselet is polished, the gauntlets are still lying on a shelf, and behind him a dwarf page holds up the crested helmet. The canvas left Italy during the Second World War and turned up in Germany among the works assembled for the museum Hitler planned at Linz. It was brought back by the Italian recovery mission under Rodolfo Siviero, and in 1988 it was assigned to Genoa. A restoration in 1990 looked at the support itself, a dense and very regular Flemish weave, and confirmed the attribution.