Portrait of a man, half-length, in a black coat

After Titian, Jacopo Tintoretto was the most important portraitist working in Venice in the second half of the sixteenth century. Although his early portraits show the influence of Titian, they are nonetheless distinguished by a directness that came increasingly to characterize his works. This quality can be seen in the present portrait, which has been dated to no later than 1560 by Pallucchini (loc. cit.). The dark color of the sitter's jacket and the absence of any attributes add to the immediacy of the image and focus the viewer's attention directly on his face and hands. These features can also be found in other works dated to the same period by Rossi (op. cit., p. 44) such as Portrait of a man (Museo Cerralbo, Madrid) and Portrait of a young man (Galleria Doria Pamphily, Rome).