Портрет мужчины

When this was painted, around 1490, the modern portrait was still fairly new in Venice. Just 15 years earlier a Sicilian painter, Antonello da Messina, had come to the city carrying a way of painting faces learned from Netherlandish art: the sitter turned slightly, seen close as a bust, set against a dark ground behind a stone ledge. Giovanni Bellini took that format and made it his own. Here a man is shown in exactly that pose, lit softly so the modelling of the face does the work, with no story or setting to distract from him. Bellini ran the busiest painting workshop in the city, and both Giorgione and the young Titian came up in its orbit.