Portrait of a Youth

Around the time this panel was painted, Filippino Lippi was finishing something no one else in Florence had wanted to touch: the Brancacci Chapel, where Masaccio had left a fresco cycle unfinished some 60 years earlier. Filippino completed it in the mid-1480s, and matched the older painter closely enough that scholars have argued ever since about where one hand stops. The same problem sits on this portrait. He had trained with Botticelli and absorbed his manner so thoroughly that this picture was for a long time given to Botticelli more often than to him, and only in the last century did opinion settle on the younger painter. Nobody knows who the young man was. The panel reached Washington in 1937 with Andrew Mellon's founding gift, still catalogued as nothing more than a youth.