Portrait of a Man in Profile

By 1500 most Italian portrait painters had turned their sitters round to face the viewer, and a strict profile like this one already looked old-fashioned. In Milan, where Boltraffio had trained in Leonardo da Vinci's workshop, the format lasted a little longer, and he fills it with what Leonardo taught him. Shadow does the modelling. It rounds the heavy jowl, firms up the long nose and lets the eye sink beneath a dark cap pulled low over the brow. One hand is tucked into the tunic, a formal pose of the period. The sitter's name is lost. He was once taken for Gerolamo Casio, a poet from Bologna whom the painter knew, but his hair does not match other likenesses of Casio. Charles Eastlake, the National Gallery's first director, acquired the panel in 1855, and it reached the Gallery in 1924.