Portrait of a Young Man

By around 1560, when this portrait of an unnamed young Florentine was painted, its author is genuinely uncertain. It has long carried the name of Agnolo Bronzino, court painter to Cosimo de' Medici and the great specialist in cool, polished likenesses of Florence's elite. Other scholars give it instead to his pupil Alessandro Allori, whom Bronzino raised almost as a son and trained so closely that the younger man's hand can be nearly impossible to tell from the master's. That difficulty is the whole story here. By 1560 Bronzino was in his late fifties and Allori was gradually taking over the family workshop, painting in a manner all but identical to his teacher's. Even today the gallery lists the picture under both names, unwilling to decide between them.