Portrait of a Young Man with a Dog

Low down in the middle of this canvas are the letters AN. XX, Latin shorthand for aged 20, and they are nearly all we know about the sitter. Niccolò dell'Abbate painted him around 1545, in his native Emilia, years before he left for France. The young man sits behind a table with a plain cloth, against an austere background divided in three, and the whole picture keeps to blacks, whites and greys. The museum reads it through an ideal of the 16th century, the cult of the individual pursued by a show of modesty and measure. Then the composure breaks. His reading has been interrupted, his glance has strayed towards us, and the dog looks out as if it were in on the joke. On the back are traces of three Torlonia seals and the number 13. The picture probably came from the Valenti Gonzaga collection, and the Torlonia inventories of 1855 and 1892 both listed it as a Giorgione.