Portrait of a young man – Hermitage Museum – Saint Petersburgh
Standing out against a dark background, this detailed portrait depicts an anonymous young man: his appearance presents details of strong realism, such as the slight squint of the left eye, and this absence of idealization recalls the centralization of the human personality typical of the full Florentine Renaissance, allowing to date back the work to about 1500.
The gaze of the young man, depicted in the foreground, rests directly on the viewer, establishing a correspondence between painted plane and real space, and giving an intimate character to the representation.
The small canvas, originally in the collections of Tsar Nicholas I, entered the collections of the Saint Petersburg Hermitage in 1850. The paintins is preserved at the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburgh.
