Italian, Venetian, A Man in Black

A dark-haired, rather fleshy young man with a prominent nose and a distinct five o‘clock shadow on his chin, jowls and upper lip is shown in an interior. To his left, a window opens onto a hilly landscape with a walled city on the shore of a lake, under a cloudy sky. We don’t know who he was, but he appears to be in his twenties and wears the cap, mantle and stole worn by Venetian citizens and aristocrats (also seen in A Man with a Pink by Andrea Solario).

The style of the painting, with the sitter depicted close up and strongly lit, shows the impact of one of the greatest Italian portraitists, Antonello da Messina on Venetian painting. Portrait of a Man is one of the most accomplished of Messina’s surviving portraits, and shows how he had absorbed developments in Netherlandish portraiture of the fifteenth century, as seen in Jan van Eyck’s Portrait of a Man (Self Portrait?) and Robert Campin’s A Man. Netherlandish painting was greatly admired in northern Italy, and under its influence late fifteenth-century artists moved away from the earlier tradition of profile portraits – such as Alesso Baldovinetti’s Portrait of a Lady – to a more naturalistic way of depicting their sitters.

Here the artist has modernised Messina’s tradition by including the window with the landscape, an idea also taken from Netherlandish painting, as seen in Portrait of a Man (Jan van Winckele?) by Dirk Bouts.