Title: Portrait of a Man
Artist: Attributed to Lorenzo Lotto
Date: ca. 1540
Medium: Oil on canvas
Venetian artist Lorenzo Lotto (ca. 1480-1556) painted some of the most startlingly beautiful as well as the most puzzling and moving works of the later Renaissance. . While he was active during the High Renaissance, he already constitutes, through his nervous and eccentric posing and distortion, a transitional stage to the first Florentine and Roman Mannerists of the 16th century. Portrait of a Man is also named as Bust of a Bearded Man.
Title: Portrait of a Friend of Titian
Artist: Tiziano Vecellio
Date: ca. 1550
Medium: Oil on canvas
Titian, name in Italian is Tiziano Vecellio (ca. 1488-1576), the greatest 16th century Venetian painter and the shaper of the Venetian coloristic and painterly tradition. He is one of the key figures in the history of Western art. Titian’s most important innovations in the years from 1530 to 1550 were made in portraiture, the time when Portrait of a Friend of Titian was made. In all Publications the inscription that the sitter is holding has been read: Di Tiziano singolare amico. This reading embodies, however, an interpretation, and it is, indeed, somewhat misleading. It is always believed that the inscription conveys that he is a special friend of Titian. Naturally the words singolare amico can carry the meaning amico speciale, or amico stretto, testifying to a close relationship. But, in sixteen-century Italy, the words amico singolare and similar expressions, for instance amicissimo, could equally be conventional epithets, used with abandon to label relationship that were neither all too deep nor all too binding.
Title: Young Man from the Renialme Family
Artist: Jacopo Robusti Tintoretto
Date: ca. 1547-1548
Medium: Oil on canvas
Tintoretto (ca. 1518-1594) was an artist of immense output and dramatic style who emerged from the Venetian School of painting. He was one of the best-known Venetian painters next to...