Retrato de un hombre

For a long time nobody was sure this portrait was really by Titian. It hung in Besançon underrated, its surface worn and overpainted, until close study and laboratory analysis put it back under his name, dated to about 1515, when he was young in Venice and building his reputation on portraits much like this one. The sitter looks out calmly in dark clothes against a plain ground, alive and particular. Who he was, though, is lost. Guesses have ranged from a duke of Ferrara to the poet Pietro Bembo, then a secretary at the papal court, the Bembo idea resting on an early written mention of a Titian portrait of him. None of it can be proved.