Shown from the thighs up, a pale-skinned man wearing armor and holding an arrow stands in front of a wine-red curtain drawn aside to show a cloud-streaked sky in this square painting. The man’s body is angled to our right, and he looks at us from the corners of his brown eyes. He has gray brows, flushed, high cheekbones, a straight nose, and his lips are closed under an ash-brown moustache over a long, gray beard. His gray hair is close cropped. His pewter-silver armor is lined and banded with gold, and decorated with lions’ heads at the shoulder we can see and across the tasset, spanning his hips. He holds the arrow in his left hand, to our right, so one end points toward his chest. The other hand rests by his side on a baton or hilt of a weapon. The curtain shows the edge of a column and stone banister, close behind the man’s far shoulder. Ivory-white clouds touched with pale pink are against a teal-blue sky in the right third of the painting.
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Shown from the thighs up, a pale-skinned man wearing armor and holding an arrow stands in front of a wine-red curtain drawn aside to show a cloud-streaked sky in this square painting. The man’s body is angled to our right, and he looks at us from the corners of his brown eyes. He has gray brows, flushed, high cheekbones, a straight nose, and his lips are closed under an ash-brown moustache over a long, gray beard. His gray hair is close cropped. His pewter-silver armor is lined and banded with gold, and decorated with lions’ heads at the shoulder we can see and across the tasset, spanning his hips. He holds the arrow in his left hand, to our right, so one end points toward his chest. The other hand rests by his side on a baton or hilt of a weapon. The curtain shows the edge of a column and stone banister, close behind the man’s far shoulder. Ivory-white clouds touched with pale pink are against a teal-blue sky in the right third of the painting.

National Gallery of Art · Painting

Agostino Barbarigo

Follower of Veronese

Date
possibly 17th century
Medium
oil on canvas
Dimensions
overall: 102.8 x 102.4 cm (40 1/2 x 40 5/16 in.) framed: 125.1 x 125.4 x 8.9 cm (49 1/4 x 49 3/8 x 3 1/2 in.)
Classification
Painting
Accession number
1957.8.1
Credit line
Gift of Lewis Einstein
Time span
1551 to 1600
Department
CIS-R

Subjects and terms

  • painted surface
  • male
  • portrait
  • Venetian
  • Renaissance
  • Italian Paintings of the Sixteenth Century
  • Barbarigo, Agostino
Provenance

Henry Doetsch [1839-1894], London; (his estate sale, Christie, Manson & Woods, London, 22 and 24-25 June 1895, no. 43, as by Tintoretto); David L. Einstein [1839-1909], London;[1] his son, Lewis D. Einstein [1877-1967]; gift 1957 to NGA. [1] Ellis Waterhouse supplied the information about the elder Einstein's purchase of the painting at the Doetsch sale in a note dated 22 July 1980, in NGA curatorial files. A red wax seal on the reverse of the painting has not yet been identified; the seal has an unmarked shield surmounted with the profile head of an antlered deer and to the left of the shield, the impressed numbers "129."

NGA object ID 43704. Collection metadata is reproduced under CC0. This work is included because its NGA published-image record is marked open access; visitors should recheck the source record before substantial reuse.