Portrait of a young man with a lute

Most of Bronzino's sitters hold still, and hold something that says who they are, a book, a glove, a sword. This young man is doing something instead. He has a lute in his hands and glances up as if interrupted mid phrase, one string still under his fingers. We do not know his name. He wears the plain dark clothes of a well off Florentine around 1532, and the lute marks him as one of the amateur musicians who filled the city's private rooms, where playing well was part of being thought cultivated. Scholars have spent whole essays trying to name him and to work out what he is playing, and have settled neither question.