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The image of Titian with his long beard and moustache, wearing a skull cap, dark clothes under a plaited fur vest and a heavy gold chain around his neck, is quintessential. Titian wanted it that way. It was the persona he crafted for the public through paintings and prints, embodying his creative powers, his intellectual grounding, and his social standing. Following his death, it became a visual trademark, inserted into new contexts by other artists and endlessly employed by publishers and printmakers in acknowledgement, celebration and illustration of the artist.
The two most famous iterations today are the painted selfportraits in Berlin and Madrid, of the 1540s and around 1562 respectively [Figs 6, 13], while one of the widest seen in its own time was the large 1550 woodcut by Giovanni Britto [Fig. 11].1 Contemporary sources, replicas and later copies, however, reveal that Titian painted several more in the latter half of his career, while a hitherto largely overlooked2 engraving of high quality, perhaps recording the earliest known likeness of the artist promoting himself, consolidates our understanding of the initial formulation - anachronistic terminology permitting - of this remarkable instance of visual branding.
It is a small, exquisitely detailed and executed engraving framing a bust-length depiction of the artist looking to his right [Figs 1-2]. His gaze is intent, if at a remove from the beholder; his hair and beard are ample, rendered with what appears to be a perpetually curling motion of the burin in effective graphic contrast to the thickly hatched, shaggy fur vest enveloping his body. Behind him weeds spring from cracks in a ruin that includes a collapsed vault and a broken column of the kind seen in Moroni's portraiture. In addition to the fur, Titian is wearing the signature skull cap and gold chain that we know from other depictions, most notably the Berlin Self-Portrait, with which the print also shares his general posture, though - as so often in prints made after a prototype - in reverse.
The inscription, written on an inset panel in the lower register, designed to appear like a stone slab, identifies the sitter by name and celebrates his professional status and the knighthood he was bestowed by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in...