Among the twenty-one paintings by Titian displayed in that treasure-house that is the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, one of the finest and best preserved is a magnificent likeness of the poet and historian Benedetto Varchi (1503–65), a Florentine humanist. The handsome young man is portrayed wearing a dark, unadorned academic’s gown; the object of his serene but oblique gaze is unseen at right. What Varchi nonchalantly holds in his right hand is probably a petrarchino, or small edition of Petrarch’s sonnets. As in his best portraits, Titian conveys to the viewer a direct and natural glimpse of the sitter who was a confident, congenial intellectual. Executed about 1540, at the midpoint in the humanist’s career, the portrait projects an aura of repose and equilibrium despite the fact that Varchi was in exile, shuttling between Venice, Padua, and Bologna after having run afoul of adverse political winds.
It is interesting to speculate how radically different an image we would have of this quintessential Florentine, had he been portrayed by his compatriot Agnolo Bronzino (1503–72). The fact that this portrait never materialized is puzzling; not only were the painter and the humanist exact contemporaries, they knew each other well and their artistic and intellectual pursuits often intersected over the tumultuous decades that straddled the second, temprorary, overthrow of the Medici in 1527.
This event was a brief and unsuccessful rekindling of the republican embers that had smoldered in Florence since the days of the firebrand monk Savonarola
