Double portrait

Around 1500 in Venice a young painter we call Giorgione was quietly changing what a portrait was for. Instead of rank and finery he painted mood, a person caught inside a private feeling. This double portrait is usually dated near 1502 and read that way. A melancholy young man stares off, his head propped on his hand, while a second figure leans in behind him. In his fingers is a bitter orange, the small sour fruit Venetians linked with love and its disappointments. Whether Giorgione himself painted it is an old argument. When it reached this Roman museum just over a century ago it was catalogued as a Dosso Dossi, another Italian hand. A leading scholar gave it back to Giorgione in 1927, and specialists have been divided ever since, with recent opinion drifting again toward his name.