Portrait of a Young Man

There is a line of Latin painted on this panel: VITA SI SCIAS VTI LONGA EST. Life is long, if you know how to use it. It comes from Seneca's dialogue on the shortness of life, and around 1491, in the Milan of Ludovico Sforza, a motto like that was a way of saying what you had read. The court kept humanists on the payroll, the presses were turning out classical texts, and a young man sitting for his portrait chose a sentence to be seen with. Who painted him has been argued over for a century. The picture has been given to Giovanni Ambrogio de Predis, a Milanese portraitist, and before that to an anonymous hand known only from a similar portrait now in London. The Pinacoteca di Brera gives it to Boltraffio, who was about 24 when it was made and working in Leonardo's circle in the city.