Vincenzo Catena, 'Portrait of a Young Man', probably about 1510

This unidentified young man dressed plainly in black stares back at us from the canvas. He stands upright and motionless while behind him frothy clouds race across the sky. The composition has been carefully centred so that a vertical line could be drawn straight down the bridge of his nose and through the fastening of his jacket. The jacket appears to be of black velvet lined with dark brown fur – small tufts of which poke out from where it is fastened down the front. Catena has indicated all the individual strands of the man’s hair with minute attention to detail.

The head and shoulders view resembles the sculpted portrait busts that were popular in Venice at the time and is reminiscent of a modern passport photo. The symmetry of the composition draws our attention to the slight imperfections of the young man’s features: both his eyes slant slightly down to the right, his fringe is longer and his hair more tousled on the right-hand side. The young man’s impassive stare and expressionless lips record his appearance but reveal little of his personality.

Catena has limited his palette to mainly brown, black and blue, arranged into large areas of colour, creating a strong, arresting image. However, these blocks of colour form a pattern on the surface of the canvas rather than giving a sense that the young man is occupying a real space. This results in a feeling of psychological distance between us and the sitter. Catena may have been taught to paint by Giovanni Bellini and the crisp, formal style of this portrait is similar to those by Bellini, such as his Portrait of a Young Man of about 1490–5 in the National Gallery of Art Washington, or his Portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan of 1501–2.

The painting has been attributed to Catena for stylistic reasons since 1897. It may be the portrait recorded as the artist’s work in 1643. It was probably painted in about 1510 – about the same time that Titian, who was also closely aware of Giovanni Bellini’s example, painted his Portrait of Gerolamo (?) Barbarigo. Titian turns his sitter sideways into the picture space and captures Barbarigo’s momentary glance over his shoulder at us, creating a strong sense of realism and psychological intimacy. Catena’s portrait must have looked quite old-fashioned in comparison.

However, Catena was an accomplished portraitist, commissioned by important patrons such as Doge Andrea Gritti; the celebrated Italian poet Gian Giorgio Trissino (Louvre, Paris) and Raymond Fugger of the wealthy German banking family (Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Berlin). By the 1520s his style had become softer and more atmospheric in response to the work of Giorgione, with whom Catena had collaborated before Giorgione’s death in 1510. Catena’s later portraits also have a stronger sense of the sitter’s individual character, which may be derived from his knowledge of portraits by his Venetian contemporary Lorenzo Lotto.