Uomo sconosciuto con cappello dalla piuma nera

Venice in 1517 had just lost Giovanni Bellini, the old master who had run its painting for half a century, and the man stepping into that gap was Titian, still in his twenties. This portrait comes from those early years. We don't know who the sitter is. He turns toward us in a copper-brown cloak and a broad black hat with a white plume and a gold brooch, and he holds a small stone in one hand, a detail no one has convincingly explained. The picture later passed through the collection of the painter Anthony van Dyck, who admired Titian above almost everyone, and by 1671 it was recorded at Petworth in Sussex, where it still hangs.