Portrait of a Young Man

In 1547 the Florentine scholar Benedetto Varchi asked the leading artists of his city which was the nobler art, painting or sculpture. Bronzino wrote back in defence of painting, and a few years later he seems to have staged the same contest inside this portrait. Behind the young man a pink curtain is pulled aside on a statue of Bacchus, the god of wine, with a child satyr beside him. The sculpture exists here only as paint, in strange purplish tones beside the sitter's black wool and fine lace. His hands rest on a book with blank pages. When the picture turned up in 1823 in the collection of the English writer William Beckford, it was labelled as the young Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, a Jesuit saint born more than ten years after it was painted.