Portrait of a Young Man

The laurel wreath on this young man's head and the scroll of verses under his hand were added to the panel after it was painted. The Pinacoteca di Brera says so, and reads them as a later attempt to fasten a name onto an anonymous sitter. The name proposed was Gerolamo Casio, a poet from Bologna. Around 1500 Boltraffio was in Bologna working for the Casio family, painting an altarpiece for their chapel, and the identification was made by comparing this face with a figure in that picture. Laurel was the emblem of a crowned poet, so whoever added it was arguing the case in paint. The portrait belongs to that Bolognese stay in other ways too. The sitter is pushed off the centre of the panel and the colour is brighter than in the Milanese work, which is usually put down to the example of Perugino and of Venetian painting.