Retrato de Giulio Romano

By the mid-1530s Titian was working regularly for the Gonzaga court at Mantua, and there he met Giulio Romano, the man who had trained under Raphael in Rome and then reinvented himself as Mantua's chief architect and designer. Around 1536 Titian painted him. Giulio turns toward us out of a plain dark ground, holding up a large sheet of paper on which the plan of a domed, centrally arranged building is carefully drawn. Titian keeps everything subdued, black clothes against a black background, so that all the light falls on the face, the hands and that white sheet. The building on the plan has never been firmly identified, and it may be a project that was only ever drawn and never built.