Page - 7 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

7The Image—Or from Whom (Not?) to Buy a Second-Hand Car is tempted to draw objective conclusions from subjective impressions: a le- gitimate procedure as long as one is an art-lover appreciating a great work of art—as is the case of Pope-Hennessy’s wonderful book—but inadmissible in a context of historical research. My own hypothesis is that, though good portraitists certainly do in fact manage to convey a psychologically convinc- ing image of the character of their sitter, it does not necessarily follow that— however convincing—it is either true or just. In any case the interpretation of that character remains very much in the eye of the beholder. My own personal—and therefore subjective—impression is that in his Strada portrait Titian was far less interested in the deeper internal ‘motions of the mind’ of his sitter than he had been when he painted, for instance, The Man with the Glove, the Young Englishman of the Galleria Palatina, or his two 1548 portraits of Charles v. Certainly I think that Pope-Hennessy’s reading was equally subjective: Titian’s repugnance of his sitter Pope-Hennessy thought he saw reflected in the painting was merely the projection of his own patrician dislike for the upstart tradesman he imagined Strada to be on the basis of the documentary evidence he quotes. Figure 0.6 Titian, Portrait of Jacopo Strada, detail of fig 0.1.