A Young Man

Painted around the year 1500, this portrait is the oldest work in the collection of Dulwich Picture Gallery. Gazing into the distance, a faint smile plays across the lips of this mysterious sitter. While his identity is as yet unknown, he has been portrayed with a detailed realism, right down to the individual strands of wispy, wavy hair which glint golden in the sunlight. Out of frame to the left, an Italian sun beats down onto the sitter and landscape behind, creating tiny glints in the man’s glassy eyes. Although this portrait was likely painted in the Tuscan city of Florence in Italy, its detail and hard-edged realism draw inspiration from northern European works of art which had been brought back to that city by travelling merchants and were made available to artists.

The cropped format of this portrait is likely because it has been cut down at some point in its history. This was common practice among dealers of early paintings in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who would frequently prioritise the most important parts of a larger picture for sale. According to a customs stamp on its reverse, this portrait was exported from Florence. It was later purchased by the founders of Dulwich Picture Gallery as a work by the Italian Renaissance artist and inventor, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). Today though this portrait is thought to be by one of Leonardo’s contemporaries – Piero di Cosimo (1462-1522). Piero worked on important commissions such as the Sistine Chapel in Rome, and is perhaps best known for the distinctive figures and imaginative details which appear in his works which range from altarpieces and portraits to landscape and pageant designs. At odds with this picture of success, the sixteenth-century artist and biographer Giorgio Vasari (1511-74) described Piero as a wild and eccentric artist, who became increasingly reclusive later in life.