Portrait of a Young Man

In 1517 and 1518 Andrea del Sarto was painting an altarpiece of the Dispute on the Trinity for the Peri family of Florence, and one of its saints, Peter Martyr, has very nearly this young man's face. The likeliest candidate is Lorenzo di Matteo Peri, a stationer, who may have sat for the painter twice in those years. Earlier guesses did not hold. When the Gallery bought the picture in 1862 it was taken for a self-portrait, and others saw a sculptor holding a block of stone, though the preparatory drawings show a book from the start. Three red chalk studies in the Uffizi try out other poses. The jutting elbow was there all along, and the look back over the shoulder came later. On the wall behind him the artist painted his monogram, two interlaced letters A.