Agostino Barbarigo

Follower of Veronese

National Gallery of Art

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.