Mandsportræt

The sitter is not certainly known — one old title proposes the architect Andrea Palladio — but the man was a thinker who also worked with his hands: a chalk holder lies on the armrest beside a book marked with white and red ribbons, an attribute that yokes the labour of the hand to the flight of the mind and calls up Horace’s maxim ut pictura poesis, “as is poetry, so is painting”. El Greco painted the portrait in Rome in the early 1570s, in the years just after his training with Titian, and its colour and light belong to the Venetian tradition in which he had learned to work. He would afterwards settle in Toledo and paint the long, visionary figures by which he is known, but here the brushwork is still warm and natural. A signature in Greek letters, “Domenikos Theotokopoulos”, was discovered on the canvas only in the 1880s, by the Danish painter Johan Rohde. The picture itself reached the Danish royal collection in 1763, catalogued as a Tintoretto, and had earlier passed through the 1641 sale of Rubens’s estate in Antwerp and the collection of the comte de Vence. It is held in the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark).