Portrait d'un jeune homme

By 1495, when this was painted, Perugino was one of the busiest painters in Italy, running workshops in both Florence and Perugia, and a boy named Raphael would soon pass through his shop as a pupil. The sitter here, though, has slipped out of history. On the back of the panel a long inscription, now almost rubbed away, once named him Alessandro Braccesi. But that Braccesi was already a working notary by 1474, far too old for this smooth young face, so the name was quietly dropped. For years the picture itself was handed around to other painters, from Lorenzo di Credi to Raphael, until the connoisseur Giovanni Morelli returned it to Perugino. Unusually for him, he set the boy against a plain dark ground with no landscape behind, so nothing pulls the eye off the face.