Portrait of a Young Man

The unidentified sitter - no more than fifteen or sixteen years old - stands before an extensive landscape and stares at the spectator with self-confidence. The view of the walled city of Florence in the middle ground at left indicates that he was Florentine.

Formerly the painting was attributed to Botticelli, only in the 1930s it was recognized as a work by Biagio d’Antonio, a prolific Florentine painter, a contemporary of Botticelli. Biagio was one of the team of artists including Botticelli, Cosimo Rosselli, Perugino, Domenico Ghirlandaio, and Luca Signorelli who decorated the side walls of the Sistine Chapel in 1481-82.

Biagio’s talent for portraiture is evident in the animated faces he painted in the Sistine Chapel. The present painting is one of the three surviving autonomous portraits by Biagio, all of them bust-length portrayals of young men standing before landscape background. The portrait in the Metropolitan Museum is the earliest, reflecting Verrocchio’s sculptural style, it probably dates from about 1470.