Ritratto del doge Pietro Loredan

Venice elected Pietro Loredan doge in 1567 because the electors could not agree on anybody else. He was 85. The three years that followed were very bad ones for the city. Grain ran short and people went hungry, plague came, and in 1569 the Arsenal, the state shipyard the Republic's power rested on, caught fire and blew up. In 1570 the Ottomans moved on Cyprus, which Venice held, and the war for it began. Loredan died that year.

Tintoretto painted him in full ducal dress, gold brocade lined with fur, an ermine cape, the stiff horned cap over a white linen coif. A second version of the portrait is in Melbourne and may be the one taken from the living man.

The official portrait of Loredan, the one that hung in the Doge's Palace, burned in the palace fire of 1577.