Hidden Portrait Found Beneath Titian Masterpiece

It turns out that even history’s most successful artists occasionally recycled their own canvases. A revered religious masterpiece by Titian, Venice’s premiere painter of the Renaissance era, recently revealed a centuries-old civilian portrait hiding beneath its crackling oil-painted surface.

Titian, born Tiziano Vecellio in 1488, defined the aesthetic of Northern Italian Renaissance painting with his virtuoso brushstrokes, luminous colors, and dynamic compositions. With the help of his renowned Venice studio, Titian produced hundreds of paintings before he died in 1576. While he explored various subjects and styles in his work, Titian revisited the theme of Ecce Homo on several occasions. According to the Gospel of John, “Ecce homo” (Latin for “Behold the man”) were the words spoken by Pontius Pilate when he presented Jesus Christ, bound and wearing a crown of thorns, to an angry crowd before his crucifixion.

Each version of Ecce Homo by Titian varies in size and composition. The largest and most famous version, dated 1543, belongs to the Kunsthistorches Museum in Vienna, Austria. Another lesser-known iteration of Ecce Homo, painted in the 1570s, became the subject of a recent research and conservation project. Experts at the Andreas Pittas Art Characterization Laboratories at the Cyprus Institute (APAC) were originally tasked with documenting the Titian painting’s materiality and state of preservation. They ended up making an unexpected discovery: shrouded beneath the artist’s visible brushstrokes was a previously undocumented portrait of a man.

Microscope Reveals New Insights into Titian’s Artistic Process

Titian scholars have long known the artist to repurpose partially finished canvases. In this case, however, Titian took a completed portrait of a man, turned the canvas upside down, and painted Ecce Homo directly on top of it—which “points to an experienced, confident artistic hand,” according to Bakirtzis. He continued, “The close documentation and analysis of the materiality of painting layers led to a better understanding of the artistic strategies employed by the Renaissance master and his studio when reusing canvases.”

Despite sharing a canvas, Titian’s Ecce Homo and Portrait of an Unknown Man are remarkably different from each other. According to Bakirtzis, the two compositions “were intended for different clients and audiences. Unfortunately, this is as far as we can go until further research allows us to either identify the depicted man, or we find ways to date the paintings.” Bakirtzis continued, “We cannot really estimate how much earlier the first painting is. Any suggestion remains hypothetical and based on stylistic observations.”

Researchers at APAC collaborated with Erato Hadjisavva, a Cypriot artist and the dean of the Athens School of Fine Arts in Greece, to recreate Portrait of an Unknown Man. Together, they are also investigating how the presence of the original portrait, which Titian flipped 180 degrees before repainting the canvas, would have influenced the composition of Ecce Homo. “In our discussions, Hadjisavva said that [turning the canvas upside-down] helped to visually weaken or neutralize the portrait composition, thus facilitating the execution of the overpainting,” explained Bakirtzis.

Bakirtzis also said that, in the original portrait, “parts of the facial characteristics, the contours of the man’s face, for example, part of his jawline, follow the painting execution of the ropes tying Christ’s hands. There are some other details in the background space and room represented in the portrait, which also facilitate the drawing of the Ecce Homo composition.”