Portrait of a Man

The gallery dates this panel between 1520 and 1530, which in Florence was an unusually crowded ten years. The Medici were in charge at the start of it, thrown out again in 1527, and by August 1530 an imperial army had starved the restored republic into surrender. None of that shows in the picture. A young man turns three-quarters to his left, cut off just below the hands, in a cloak fastened at the chest, holding his gloves, a brimmed hat on his head. Nobody knows who he is. No inventory ever recorded a name for him, and the painter's name is itself a modern proposal. Antonio del Ceraiolo, a Florentine who took his nickname from his father's candle-making trade, was put forward in the last century and the gallery has kept it, while noting that other hands of the same generation come close enough to keep the question open.