Portrait of a Young Man Writing

In January 1563 Cosimo I de' Medici gave the artists of Florence an academy of their own, the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, with Michelangelo, then 87 and living in Rome, named as one of its heads. Alessandro Allori, not yet 30, was among its first members. When Michelangelo died in Rome the following year and his body was brought home, Allori worked on the decorations for the funeral the academy staged that summer in the church of San Lorenzo.

This portrait belongs to those same years, and the museum dates it to about 1560 to 1565. A young man in black holds a pen in the act of writing. Who he was is not recorded.

The panel travelled a long way from Florence. It passed through the hands of Sir George Donaldson, a London dealer, and of Charles Sedelmeyer in Paris, was sold in Boston by the dealer J. Eastman Chase, and by 1895 belonged to George Nixon Black, who left it to the museum in 1929.