Ritratto di un uomo con una statuetta

For a long time nobody could say who this young man was, and the guesses kept turning out wrong. Louis XIV bought the painting as a portrait of the famous Florentine sculptor Baccio Bandinelli, painted by Sebastiano del Piombo. Both halves of that were mistaken. A known self-portrait of Bandinelli shows a different face, and the hand here is Bronzino's, the cool court painter of Medici Florence, working around 1550. What the picture does say plainly is that the sitter was a sculptor. He holds a small statuette, a Bacchus with a little satyr at his side, the kind of thing a sculptor showed to prove his trade. One guess is that he is Pierino da Vinci, a nephew of Leonardo and a real talent who died young at 23. If so, the small Bacchus in his hand may be the only surviving record of a sculpture now lost.