Portrait of a Young Man as David

In Venice in the 1550s a portrait could double as a costume piece, with a living sitter cast as a hero from scripture or myth. This young man is cast as David. He stands in front of the scene of his victory, holding the giant's huge sword, while behind him the body of Goliath lies in the grass and the Philistine army breaks and runs. The National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo thinks the sitter's own name was probably David, and that the same man may appear in a portrait in furs by Paolo Veronese now in Budapest. The battle is painted so freely that the historian Kenneth Clark, who once owned the canvas, said it brought Delacroix to mind. Scholars have dated it anywhere from the mid-1540s to the late 1550s, and the museum, which bought it through the London dealers Agnew's in 1972, favours the later date.