발다사레 카스틸리오네의 초상

The man in dark clothes was one of the most read authors in Europe. Baldassare Castiglione wrote The Book of the Courtier, published in Venice in 1528, a set of polished conversations laying out how the ideal court gentleman should speak, move, and hold himself. He died the next year, in 1529, worn out on a diplomatic mission in Spain. Titian, the leading portraitist of Venice, gives him exactly the restraint the book preaches: no grand gesture, a quiet turn of the head, the gaze steady and a little guarded. The most famous likeness of Castiglione is Raphael's, now in the Louvre, and Titian would have known it. What he offers instead is the plain, dark-suited sobriety that his own century came to read as good taste.