Porträt eines jungen Mannes

Bellini was an old man when he painted this, around 1505, and it is the last of his portraits that survives. He had been the leading painter in Venice for decades. That very year the young German Durer was working in the city and wrote home that Bellini, though very old, was still the best of them all. For a whole career he had set his sitters against a flat dark ground. Here, for the only time we know of, he opened a window behind the man and let in a strip of quiet landscape and pale sky. He signed it on a little cartouche painted to look like a slip of paper resting on the marble ledge along the bottom edge.