Ritratto di Andrea Odoni

In 1527, the year imperial troops sacked Rome and carried off or smashed much of what they found, a Venetian merchant named Andrea Odoni sat for this portrait surrounded by broken pieces of the ancient world. Odoni wasn't a nobleman. He came from a family of immigrants and made his money in trade, then poured it into collecting classical marbles, coins, and fragments. Lotto turned him sideways in a wide format he'd used before only for married couples, and set him among his own antiquities like a man at home in the past. In one hand he holds a small statue of Diana of Ephesus, the many-breasted goddess. On the table beside him lie a few old coins and a book.