Bernardino Licinio, 'Portrait of Stefano Nani', 1528

The inscription on the stone parapet tells us that this is a portrait of seventeen-year-old Stefano Nani from Auro painted by Licinio in the year 1528. Auro is a village in the Alps to the north of Brescia in Lombardy, which at the time was ruled by Venice.

Stefano is presented as a pensive young man, gazing dreamily into the distance. He leans his elbow on the inscribed parapet, his gloves in his hand and his other hand on his hip. Licinio has made the bulk of Stefano’s clothes fill almost the whole composition in order to create a sense of his imposing physical presence despite his young age. The angle of his broadly spread arms directs our attention up in an inverted ‘V’ to his pale oval face against the plain beige background. The fur lining of his open black robe is shaped almost as an arrow pointing to Stefano’s brightly lit face. Licinio has used a restricted range of colours in tones of white, black, grey and creamy beige to create a calm, harmonious image. The pensive mood, restricted palette, plain background and subtle use of light and shade, particularly in the skin, suggest the influence of Titian or perhaps Giorgione, which would be expected in a Venetian portrait of 1528.

Stefano’s gold chains (which form another ‘V’ shape) and his jewelled gold rings would once have appeared more prominent, but the painting is covered with a discoloured varnish which makes everything appear more brown than it should. The pendant hanging from the chain appears to be a gold tooth or fang, which may have been a kind of toothpick. Other portraits made in northeast Italy in about 1520 also feature toothpick-like jewels. Lucina Brembati, a noblewoman from Bergamo, wears a similar pendant from a chain round her neck in the Venetian artist Lotto’s portrait of her painted in about 1518 (now in the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo). Bernardino Licinio belonged to a family of artists from Bergamo who worked from the island of Murano in the Venetian lagoon and from Venice itself, where this type of ornament seems to have been fashionable. However, by mid-century they were no longer in style – Della Casa’s Galateo, written in the 1550s deplores wearing toothpicks as uncouth.

Although this youthful portrait depicts Stefano Nani as a dreamer, records reveal that he went on to become an important senior civil servant in Venice and held the posts of ‘Scrivan delle Rason vecchie’ in 1542 and he was also ‘Scrivan of the Scuola della Trinità’ in Venice. ‘Scrivan’ translates as ‘Scribe’. There is another version of this portrait in the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome.