The Emperor Domitian

Between 1536 and 1540 Titian painted eleven Roman emperors for Federico Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, half-length figures for a room in the ducal palace. The ancient biographer Suetonius had written the lives of twelve Caesars, so the set was one short, and in 1562 the Cremonese painter Bernardino Campi supplied the last of them, Domitian. When Domenico Fetti became court painter in Mantua half a century later, the whole series was still hanging there.

The Louvre thinks this canvas, like its pair, an Emperor Titus now in the Schönborn collection at Pommersfelden in Germany, is most likely a copy after that set. If so, the model for this emperor was Campi's work rather than Titian's. The originals no longer exist. They left Mantua when the Gonzaga sold their pictures and ended up in the royal palace in Madrid, where they burned in 1734, so copies like this one are part of how the series is known today. At some point the canvas was enlarged by a few centimetres on every side. Louis XVI bought it in 1777, at the Paris sale of the Prince of Conti's collection.