Portrait of a Young Man

The little stone block at the lower left gives this young man's age and the year, in Latin abbreviations. He was 23 in 1510. Who he was, nobody knows. Small heads like this, just over 30 centimetres tall, reached Venetian painting from Flanders, largely through Giovanni Bellini's workshop, and they were usually set against a plain ground. The Borghese points to what changes here. A real landscape opens behind the sitter, a slender tree, a winding path, a fortified house below a blue mountain, and the face gains space and air. He turns slightly away and looks off to our left. The panel's name has wandered too. A Borghese inventory of 1693 listed it as Pordenone, and in 1833 it was put down to Simone Cantarini, a painter born about a century after it was made.