Portrait of a Young Man

In the 1920s Lionello Venturi, then professor of art history in Turin, made a bold suggestion about this small portrait of a young man. He thought it might have been painted as the companion to Leonardo da Vinci's portrait of Ginevra de' Benci, the young Florentine woman Leonardo painted in the 1470s, now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Venturi dated the panel early, to about 1475 to 1480.

Others saw it differently. In 1928 the German scholar Bernhard Degenhart placed it after 1499, some 20 years later. The Galleria Sabauda now keeps a broad dating to the late 15th century. The young man is painted in tempera on a panel only 44 centimetres high.