O Batismo de Cristo

This is early Titian, painted around 1512, when he was still a young man in Venice and had just absorbed the lessons of Giovanni Bellini and of Giorgione, the latter dead of plague at barely thirty in 1510. Christ stands in the Jordan while John pours the water, and off to the lower right kneels a man in contemporary dress who has nothing to do with the Bible story. That is Giovanni Ram, a Spanish merchant living in Venice who paid for the panel and expected to appear in it. Titian works him in at the edge, tied to the sacred scene only by a glance. The picture stayed with Ram's family until the end of the century, then travelled to Rome, reaching the Capitoline collection in 1750.