Portrait of a Young Man

Pinned to the wall behind this young man is a small sheet of parchment, with a painted image at the top and a Latin prayer beneath. The image is the Holy Face, the likeness of Christ believed to have been miraculously imprinted on a cloth, and prayers like this one had a practical purpose. People believed that reciting them shortened the time a soul would spend in purgatory. The rest of the picture is just as exact about what he owned. He wears a red houpelande, a long fur-trimmed gown, and a gold signet ring, and his hair is shaved at the temples and the back as fashion then demanded. He holds a small gilt-edged prayer book with tassels, and in the purse at his belt are wax writing tablets and a metal stylus, the notebook of a man who had to keep records. The National Gallery suggests he may have been an Italian merchant. His eyes look off to one side, perhaps toward another panel, now lost. On the back, a hand of the 18th or early 19th century wrote Luca d'Olanda, the Italian name of the Dutch painter Lucas van Leyden, who was born decades after this was painted.