A Portrait in the National Gallery by Charles Kingsley

"Any one who goes to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, may see two large and beautiful pictures -- the nearer of the two labelled 'Titian,' representing Bacchus leaping from a car drawn by leopards. The other, labelled 'Francia,' representing the Holy Family seated on a sort of throne, with several figures arranged below -- one of them a man pierced with arrows. Between these two, low down, hangs a small picture, about two feet square, containing only the portrait of an old man, in a white cap and robe, and labelled on the picture itself, '_Joannes Bellinus_. ' Now this old man is a very ancient friend of mine, and has comforted my heart, and preached me a sharp sermon, too, many a time. I never enter that gallery without having five minutes' converse with him; and yet he has been dead at least three hundred years, and, what is more, I don't even know his name. But what more do I know of a man by knowing his name?

Whether the man's name be Brown, or whether he has as many names and titles as a Spanish grandee, what does that tell me about the _man_? -- the spirit and character of the man -- what the man will say when he is asked -- what the man will do when he is stirred up to action? The man's name is part of his clothes; his shell; his husk. Change his name and all his titles, you don't change _him_ -- 'a man's a man for a' that,' as Burns says; and a goose a goose. Other men gave him his name; but his heart and his spirit -- his love and his hatred -- his wisdom and his folly -- his power to do well and ill; those God and himself gave him. I must know those, and then I know the _man_. Let us see what we can make out from the picture itself about the man whom it represents. In the first place, we may see by his dress that he was in his day the Doge (or chief magistrate) of Venice -- the island city, the queen of the seas.