Portrait of a Young Man

On the back of this small canvas, 28 centimetres tall, three painters wrote that it is an early work by Silvestro Lega and signed underneath: Plinio Nomellini, Mario Galli, and one of the Tommasi brothers, all Tuscan artists of the generation after his. Handwritten authentications like those were how pictures changed hands in Italy before the Second World War, and this one reached the gallery in 1947 as a gift from the Florentine collector Leone Ambron.

The museum dates it between 1855 and 1860 and does not know who the young man is. The same catalogue entry records the doubt: Giuliano Matteucci, who compiled the catalogue of Lega's work, finds the attribution too uncertain on stylistic grounds and leaves this portrait out of it. The gallery files it under Lega's name, and the picture has never appeared in the big monographic surveys.