Portrait of a Man

Very few independent portraits are firmly given to Vittore Carpaccio. The surest is the Young Knight in a Landscape in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, signed and dated 1510 on a slip of paper in the grass, and even that canvas passed as a Dürer until 1919. Most of the faces Carpaccio painted from life are in his big story pictures for the Venetian confraternities, where members of the brotherhood stand in the crowd, as in the scene at the Rialto Bridge he painted in the 1490s for the Scuola di San Giovanni Evangelista. Those crowds are what scholars compare when they weigh a single head like this one.

The man is shown to the waist and turned to the left, his hair worn long under a dark cap, a ring on the hand at the lower edge. A dark backdrop hangs behind him, and at either side a strip of sky and open country shows through. The museum keeps the cautious label, attributed to Carpaccio. The panel came to Boston together with a portrait of a woman of the same size, and the two are catalogued as a pair.