Portrait of a gentleman in his studio

A young man in black looks up from the pages of a large book, and everything around him seems to be about disappointment. Rose petals lie scattered and dead across his table. A small lizard creeps in from one side, an old emblem of coldness or of love gone cold. Behind and beside him lie the things he appears to be turning away from, a hunting horn, a lute, a dead bird, the pleasures of an easy life. Italians have long called it simply the sick young man. Lorenzo Lotto, drawn to inward, uneasy sitters more than most Venetian painters of the 1530s, leaves the man's exact trouble open, whether a real illness or a broken heart. The blue cloth slipping off the table is the same colour as the distant landscape through the window.