Portrait of a Young Man

When this small panel entered the Medici collection, everyone was sure they owned a Raphael. A 1675 inventory lists it that way, and the name stuck until 1910, when scholars finally recognized the hand of Lorenzo Lotto. Look at why the confusion lasted. The young man is pushed right up to the surface, cut off just below the neck, staring straight out with wide, slightly anxious eyes. That close, unsettling directness owes more to the north than to Venice. Around 1505 to 1507 Albrecht Durer was working in Venice, and his prints were everywhere in Italy. Lotto, still in his twenties, absorbed that German appetite for exact detail and inner tension, and turned it on a single face barely 29 centimetres high.