“Titian’s Schoolmaster”

Long known as “Titian’s Schoolmaster,” this portrait of a cleric is one of the most sensitive works of Giovanni Battista Moroni, the Bergamasque painter celebrated for the psychological directness of his portraits. By tradition the sitter was once thought to be the tutor of the Venetian master Titian, a name that stuck even though the identification is now doubted; the real subject is simply an ordinary churchman seen without flattery. Painted about 1575, the picture shows the uncompromising honesty and the quiet sympathy with which Moroni captured middle-class and clerical sitters, qualities that make him a beloved figure among Renaissance portraitists.