Portrait of a Jewish scholar, aged 33, seated half-length, in black robes and a black hat, a book in his right hand

The various inscriptions now evident in the painting were uncovered during a cleaning in 1966. The ancient Greek inscription reads, 'The worthy travel the eternal path through the ages', while that in Hebrew, yikhye 'may he live', is the mathematical equivalent of the sitter's age of thirty-three. The Italian text is a quotation from Mathew VII.21, 'Not everyone who says to me Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven'. That these can be taken as statements of religious intolerance is supported by the date on the painting, 1564, that is at a time when many Jews were forced into ghettos in Italy and thence to safety in northern Greece. It is probable the sitter was himself a Jew forced into Christianity, a converso who fled Italy for Greece.