Il medico Gian Giacomo Bartolotti da Parma

Titian was still a young man building his name when he painted this in Venice, around 1516, just as the death of Giorgione and the old age of Giovanni Bellini were leaving him the leading painter in the city. The sitter is thought to be Gian Giacomo Bartolotti, a doctor from Parma, and by tradition Titian's own physician. He turns toward us out of a plain dark ground, one hand resting quietly, the face alert and near. There is little here but the man himself. The portrait later belonged to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, the great Habsburg collector, and travelled with his pictures to Vienna, where it stays.