Giorgio Cornaro with a Falcon

Titian's portrait of Giorgio Cornaro with a Falcon from around 1537 belongs to his extended engagement with Venice's patrician families, whose social world he inhabited and whose faces he documented across six decades of portraiture. The Cornaro family were among the oldest of the Venetian nobility, their lineage including the doge Marco Corner and, most famously, Caterina Cornaro, who had briefly been Queen of Cyprus before ceding the island to Venice. The falcon identifies the sitter as a man of leisure and noble status — falconry was the aristocratic sport par excellence across Renaissance Europe, and to be portrayed with a trained bird of prey was to announce oneself as a man of cultivated authority. By 1537 Titian had developed his three-quarter portrait formula to its most confident expression, and the Cornaro portrait demonstrates the warm tonal harmony and psychological directness that made him irreplaceable as a chronicler of Venetian noble culture at its zenith.

Titian renders the nobleman with the confident, broad brushwork of his mature period, using rich, warm tones and the handling of the hunting falcon to convey the subject's aristocratic status and active lifestyle.

This portrait from 1537 has been conserved over the centuries. The falcon and the sitter's face retain their detailed rendering. The canvas has been relined. The dark background has become more uniformly opaque, but the central figures maintain their vivid characterization.