Portrait of a Young Man (c. 1530): Art, History and Details

Portrait of a Young Man (c. 1530) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Dosso Dossi (Italian, c. 1490–after 1541).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Like other paintings from the Dossi workshop, this work conveys the sitter's social status and self-confidence. He holds a crumpled letter written in Italian. The words Asto, meaning "ship mast," and mare, meaning "sea," suggest that trade was a topic of this letter. References to anatomy and the word bella imply a discussion of the magnificence of human anatomy, an interest that spread rapidly during the Renaissance. The letter likewise communicates the young man's considerable education. This work was formerly called Portrait of Giuliano de Medici; however, the sitter's lack of resemblance to Giuliano caused art historians to discount this argument. Portrait of a Young Man was earlier attributed to Dosso's brother, Battista, before recently being considered a work by Dosso or a member of his workshop. As first suggested by Roberto Longhi, Portrait of a Young Man is now considered likely to be a work of an unidentified follower of Dossi from Friuli, Italy. The Friulian follower worked from 1510 until after 1530 and had connections to Dossi's hometown of Ferrara, accounting for this work's resemblance to Dossi's style. The dark outlines and large forms of the work are of a later style than Dossi's, suggesting that the artist was a follower rather than Dossi himself.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait of a Young Man
• Date: c. 1530
• Creator attribution: Dosso Dossi (Italian, c. 1490–after 1541)
• Culture: Italy
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil and gold on wood
• Dimensions: Framed: 128.2 x 102.2 x 11.5 cm (50 1/2 x 40 1/4 x 4 1/2 in.); Unframed: 97.2 x 77.5 cm (38 1/4 x 30 1/2 in.)
• Collection: P - Italian 16th & 17th Century
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1916.803

Collection credit

Holden Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Catalogue of Paintings, Part 3: European Paintings of the 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1982.
• Rubinstein-Bloch, Stella. Catalogue of a Collection of Paintings, Etc. Presented by Mrs. Liberty E. Holden to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1917.
• G. U. "The Holden Collection." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 4, no. 2 (1917): 19-34.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.