Ritratto di Girolamo Fracastoro

The man in this portrait is Girolamo Fracastoro, a Verona physician and poet, painted by Titian around 1528. Two years later Fracastoro published a long poem about a shepherd struck down by a new and terrible disease then sweeping through Italy. The shepherd's name was Syphilus, and that is how the disease got the name we still use. Fracastoro also argued, well ahead of his time, that infections spread by tiny seeds passing from person to person. Titian wraps him in a heavy coat lined with lynx fur, turning to meet your eye. For years scholars doubted the picture was truly a Titian, until a cleaning in recent times at London's National Gallery, where it hangs, restored both the paint and the attribution.