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By the mid-1540s, when this was painted, Lorenzo Lotto was in trouble. Venetian taste had swung to the grand, glowing manner of Titian, and Lotto, older and out of step, kept moving from town to town after commissions, eventually noting his own mounting debts in a careful account book that still survives. None of that strain shows as swagger here. The man is turned slightly, watchful, caught in the plain, searching way Lotto looked at people rather than flattering them. We do not know who he was. One guess makes him an official from the Marches, the region on Italy's Adriatic coast where Lotto spent his last working years.