Doge Pietro Loredano

Sometime between 1567 and 1570, Jacopo Tintoretto stood in front of Doge Pietro Loredano (1482–1570) and began to draw, with a brush loaded with lead white, directly onto a canvas prepared with a dark, reddish brown ground layer. At around fifty years of age, Tintoretto was well established in his career as an artist and had been appointed court painter to the ruling Venetian doges in 1559, succeeding the now elderly Titian. Pietro Loredano was in his mid eighties and, though he had just assumed the office of doge, was feeling the weight of responsibility in a period when the power and influence of the Venetian city state appeared to be unravelling.

The portrait of the doge shows a vulnerable old man in a position of tremendous power. Despite its apparent informality, the portrait was worked up from an initial rendition of the sitter in a formal pose. Tintoretto began by depicting the doge with an upright, regal stance, a slight turning away of the head, the neck vertical – all of these elements reflecting the conventions for this type of court portrait. X-radiography has shown, however, that the artist then altered the painting, and thus the sensibility it imparts, by changing the neckline to bring the head more into the shoulders and by lifting the waistline to increase the sense of age. It is this reworking of the pose, the redistribution of the body mass, and the revealing of the old man within the figure of the mighty doge, that direct our attention to Tintoretto’s remarkable achievement.

Text by John Payne from Painting and sculpture before 1800 in the international collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2003, p. 34.