Portrait d'un musicien

Around 1510, Venice lost Giorgione to the plague, and the young Titian, barely into his twenties, was left to carry the soft, shadowed manner the two of them had been building side by side. This portrait of an unnamed violinist belongs to those uncertain years. He turns toward you out of a warm brown darkness, a scroll of music in his gloved hand, his gaze sharp against the dim light. Scholars still argue over when it was painted. Some hear Giorgione's hush and place it early. Others catch the looser, smokier handling of Titian's later decades and push it forward by 30 years. The violinist himself stays nameless, caught mid-turn as though he had just been called.