Young man in a gold-decorated suit of armour

The museum can say only that the sitter was a 30-year-old admiral, and his name has been lost. What can be dated is his armour. It is a magnificent suit of the kind made around 1540, while the portrait was painted some 15 or 20 years later, around 1555 to 1560, so the steel he chose to be painted in was already a generation old. Tintoretto plays the gleaming metal against dull stone architecture, a formal pose against a close, personal face, the kind of contrast the museum singles out in his portraits of the 1550s. The picture was already in the collection of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm in Vienna when it was inventoried in 1659.