Portrait of a Warrior

A heavily bearded man looks out at us in a metal breastplate strapped over a leather jerkin, a broad beret on his head, an evening landscape behind him with a bay tree to one side and a walled town in the distance. He belongs to a particular world, Italy in the early 16th century, when a soldier of rank was often also a man of learning, caught up in the constant wars between the peninsula's states. For a long time the picture was thought to be by the Venetian painter Sebastiano del Piombo, and only late in the 19th century did critics give it to Dosso. It carries a harder history as well. In 1993 a Mafia car bomb in the Via dei Georgofili, right beside the Uffizi, damaged the canvas, and the cleaning that followed lifted off yellowed varnish and brought back the full strength of its colour.