Caballero de Malta

Giorgione, the young star of Venetian painting, died in the plague of 1510, and into the space he left stepped an even younger Titian, still working in that soft, dreamy manner. This portrait comes from those early years. The sitter wears the eight-pointed cross of the Order of Malta, the crusading Knights of Saint John, and tells us his own age without a word: the last bead of the rosary in his hand is marked with the Roman numerals for 35. For a long time nobody was sure who painted it. The surface had darkened, and experts passed the picture between several names until a cleaning in 1998 uncovered the hand of the early Titian underneath. It now hangs in the Uffizi in Florence.