Bust of a Young Man

No one knows who this young man is. In 1880 the connoisseur Giovanni Morelli, who told painters apart by the way they drew ears and hands, gave the canvas to Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo. Until then the Borghese had listed it as the work of Pier Francesco Mola, a painter of the following century. Later scholars saw the youth as Saint John the Evangelist, a study for a Deposition that Savoldo painted in 1537, once in Berlin and now lost. Others read him as a portrait of a patron from the circle of Gasparo Contarini, a Venetian statesman who became a cardinal. No document settles either idea, and the museum now dates the canvas to around 1527, ten years before that Deposition. He leans towards us in a white shirt and a dark fur-trimmed jerkin, one hand open above a length of gold-patterned cloth.