Italian, 'Portrait of a Young Man', about 1518

This elegant young man is dressed in an expensive black coat lined with lynx fur and a fine linen shirt embroidered in white around the neckline with delicate scrolling patterns. He wears a soft black hat and a long gold chain, and has a gold signet ring on his finger. It is not possible to make out the emblem on the ring, which might have given us a clue to his identity. The costume has been dated to about 1518.

The portrait is strongly lit from the top left, throwing the right side of the young man’s face into shadow. On the lit side, the jaw and above the upper lip appear to be shaded with dark stubble. The paint, especially in the flesh tones, has suffered some cracking and damage, and the uneven colouring of the skin, particularly on the neck, may be the result of this. The young man’s hair has also lost a lot of its original definition, making it now appear somewhat flat. His body and face are angled three-quarters to the left against a plain green background, but he looks directly at us.

He holds what appears at first glance to be a black and gold silk tassel made up of three balls. The meaning or purpose of the tassel is unclear. The black balls may continue within and behind the young man’s hand, as there are two further dark circular shapes which may be additional balls, or may perhaps represent shadows. It is possible that the linked balls are a rosary to count out the man’s prayers, although the beads on rosaries are usually much smaller than these.

Although the portrait is damaged in places, we can still appreciate the high quality of the painting. The lynx fur is suggested by very fine directional brushstrokes which capture the varying textures and characteristics of the fur in different parts of the pelt, with the longer, paler belly fur fanning out at the edges of the collar. It is interesting to compare the technique of painting the fur here to that of the lynx fur collar in Titian’s Portrait of Girolamo Fracastoro. In Titian’s painting the soft fur is suggested by broad directional strokes and the dark spots by dragged blots of paint, whereas in this portrait every hair is meticulously represented by an individual mark of the brush. This minute attention to naturalistic detail is derived from Northern European portraiture. The way in which the light touches the pleats of the shirt and the links of the gold chain is also particularly beautifully observed and minutely depicted.

We do not know for certain who painted this portrait. In the past it has been attributed unconvincingly to Raphael, an unknown Milanese artist and Bartolomeo Veneto.