Raffaellino del Garbo, 'Portrait of a Man', about 1500

A bright orange curtain is drawn back to reveal a young man standing at a window. He rests the fingers of his right hand on the windowsill, and seems to fasten the stole over his black cloak with his left hand. His head is turned to the side, gazing at something or someone outside the depicted space. Two further windows give us a view of a mountainous landscape, a little town visible in the distance. With windows on three sides, the sparse and narrow setting seems like it might be a balcony.

During the fifteenth century there was a steady increase in the production of portraits as they were no longer commissioned solely by rulers or other high-ranking individuals. In Florence, wealthy merchants or members of noble families often wanted to have a portrait made that could be passed down to future generations. Such images would have commemorated the sitter after his or her death. In other cases, inspired by the poems of the fourteenth-century writer Petrarch, portraits were made to mark a marriage or as a token of love. Unfortunately, we don't know anything about this sitter’s identity, let alone his motivations. The handkerchief in his right hand may indicate that he is thinking of his beloved.

Raffaellino del Garbo is not really known as a portraitist. He trained with the Florentine artist Filippino Lippi, and assisted him in an important fresco cycle in the Carafa chapel of the Roman church of S. Maria sopra Minerva. Following this, Raffaellino established himself as one of the leading painters of religious images in Florence during the first quarter of the sixteenth century. Two such paintings, roughly contemporary to this portrait, are in the National Gallery’s collection: The Virgin and Child with Two Angels and The Virgin and Child with the Magdalen and Saint Catherine of Alexandria.

Because Raffaellino is best known as a painter of religious images, and in the absence of many other portraits as a point of comparison, scholars have only recently attributed this work to him. An inscription on the back actually names the German artist Albrecht Dürer, which may appear far-fetched: although Dürer visited Italy, he was far removed from Florence. But it is true that the sitter’s pose, with his hands on a parapet, and his placement at a window, recalls portraits painted north of the Alps.

In spite of his considerable output, Raffaellino is best known today for having trained Andrea del Sarto and Bronzino, whose fame eclipsed his own.