Portrait of a Young Man

By the time this was painted, around 1480, Bruges was full of foreigners. Italian bankers and merchants kept houses and offices there, and the young man looking out at us, with his particular haircut and costly clothes, was almost certainly one of them: an Italian doing business in the north who sat for the city's most sought-after painter. For a long time nobody believed a Fleming had made it. The portrait was given to Antonello da Messina, the Sicilian who had learned this same close, patient realism, and only much later returned to Memling. He sets the man near and high, one hand resting as if on a ledge just out of view, while behind him the land falls away into a small, hazy distance. The panel reached Venice with the Manfrin collection and was bought for the Accademia in 1856.