Portrait d’un homme au bonnet rouge

This is young Titian, working in Venice around 1516, when Giovanni Bellini was old and Giorgione had recently died, leaving the city's painting to a new generation. No one knows who the sitter is, a young man in a soft red cap, one gloved hand resting on the hilt of his sword, his eyes turned to some private distance. What made the picture admired was the handling, the fur and the gold satin and the deep red felt all conjured with a looseness that felt new. It was well enough known by the 1600s that the Florentine painter Carlo Dolci copied this very figure into the background of one of his own religious scenes. Henry Clay Frick bought it in 1915.