Portrait de Jörg Fugger

This small portrait carries a date, and that is why it matters. On the back, before a restoration removed it, ran an inscription giving the sitter's name and the day, the 20th of June 1474. That makes it the earliest dated portrait by Giovanni Bellini, and probably his first surviving work in oil rather than the older egg tempera. The young man is Joerg Fugger, in his early twenties, a member of the Augsburg banking family who was living in Venice on business that year. Bellini turns him slightly, catches the light on the face, and lets oil do what tempera could not, blending the shadows softly into the skin. Portrait painters in Italy would follow this quarter-turned, close-lit format for a generation.