Portrait of a Young Man with a Red Beret

For a long time nobody was sure who painted this small panel. A young man with long hair under a red beret emerges from a dark ground. It came from the collection of Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici and was catalogued for years under the name of Lorenzo di Credi, while other scholars floated Giuliano Bugiardini and Giovanni Cianfanini. Only after a cleaning in 1977 did Umberto Baldini propose Filippino Lippi, son of the painter Filippo Lippi, and the next year Giuseppe Marchini agreed. The debate matters because that name sets the date around 1485, when portraits like this, plain and close up against darkness, were still a fairly new idea in Florence.