Portrait of a Young Man With a Book

The small book in this young man's hands is a petrarchino, a pocket edition of Petrarch's love poetry, and Lotto has caught him just as he looks up from it, a finger still marking his place. In the 1520s in northern Italy a volume of Petrarch was the mark of a certain kind of man, cultivated and a little in love with being in love, carrying the poems small enough to keep on the body. Lotto painted this around 1526, in the years he was moving between Bergamo and Venice. We do not know who the sitter was. Even Lotto's own account books, which he kept in meticulous detail, say nothing about him. The face went unnamed so long that when the painting was left to the city of Milan in 1876, no one there could even say who had painted it.