Portrait of a Young Man
Sandro Botticelli (c. 1445-1510) · c. 1475-1500
A young man in a red cap and a dark tunic looks straight out of the panel at you, his face turned very slightly to one side. Nothing distracts from him: no landscape, no inscription, only a dark ground and the light on his cheek, his firm mouth and the strands of hair escaping under the cap. He is perhaps twenty. A thin red line runs around the edge of the composition and probably marks the limit of the original frame.
Botticelli painted the portrait in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, when the frontal, close up portrait was a new idea in Florence, where sitters had traditionally been shown in profile like figures on ancient coins. The directness of the gaze, the sober colour and the simple modelling of the face give the picture a modern feeling. The sitter has never been identified. The panel was bought by the Louvre in eighteen eighty two from a private collector through the auctioneer Charles Pillet, and at that time it was catalogued as Florentine school, attributed to Filippo Lippi; the attribution to Botticelli came later and is now generally accepted.
Did You Know? A thin red line running around the picture marks where the original frame once sat.
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