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Nicolo Priuli was elected a procurator of San Marco in 1545, an office held for life and, after the doge himself, about the highest a Venetian could reach. His name is cut into the base of the column behind him in the painting.

He wears none of the insignia of that office. The heavy black cloak trimmed with fur and the round black cap were what any Venetian patrician put on, which is why part of the scholarship places the sitting before the election rather than after it, and treats the picture as early work by a painter then in his twenties, building a practice in a city that already had Titian. Dates in the middle and later 1540s are the usual proposals. It hangs in the Ca' d'Oro on the Grand Canal, the Gothic palace that Baron Giorgio Franchetti restored and handed to the Italian state in 1916 together with the collection he had put in it.