身着盔甲的男子肖像

In February 1530 Charles V was crowned emperor in Bologna by Pope Clement VII, the last time a pope crowned an emperor, and the two had been at war three years before that, when imperial troops sacked Rome. Titian travelled from Venice for the occasion and painted Charles in armour. That portrait is lost. Around the same date he painted this one, a young man in a scarlet coat under a full suit of polished armour, and nobody has established who he is. Armour was in demand in Italian portraiture then. The peninsula had been fought over by French and Spanish armies for a generation, and a suit of it said wealth and rank as much as soldiering. Armand Hammer, the American oil executive, bought the picture in the last century and it belongs to the museum he founded in Los Angeles.