Portrait of a Young Man

Florence in 1490 was a city on edge. The friar Girolamo Savonarola had begun preaching against luxury and vanity, and within a few years his followers would be burning fine clothes, mirrors and paintings on public bonfires. Botticelli was then the most sought-after painter in the city, and he worked right through those years. This young man, though, is caught in a plainer register. He wears a black cap and dark coat over a white collar, and he meets your eye almost straight on, rather than turning into the polite profile most Florentine sitters still preferred. We do not know his name. That near-frontal gaze was itself a fairly new idea in Italian portraiture.