Portrait de Giacomo Doria

By the 1530s Titian was the portraitist everyone in Venice wanted, and his sitters were not only doges and cardinals but the foreign merchants who made the city rich. Giacomo Doria was one of them, a Genoese trader living in Venice, a diplomat with ties to the Habsburg court and two sons who would go on to rule Genoa. Titian paints him almost entirely in blacks and grays, a bearded man turning to meet your eye, dignified and reserved. What is new here is the great polished marble column rising behind him. Titian seems to have used the device in a portrait for one of the first times, a quiet marker of wealth and standing that also opens up the space around the figure. It became one of the standard props of grand portraiture after him.