(Verona circa 1480–1555)
Portrait of a young man,
oil on canvas, laid down on panel, 60.5 x 45.6 cm, framed

Provenance:
Collection of Ira Spanierman, New York, until 2019;
art market, USA, 2021 (as Manner of Giorgione);
where acquired by the present owner

The present painting was until recently considered to be a late Giorgionesque composition. The background has been repainted.

We are grateful to Mauro Lucco for suggesting the attribution to Giovanni Francesco Caroto on the basis of a photograph.

The young man depicted appears to be a soldier, as a breastplate can be glimpsed beneath his cloak. The sitter’s hairstyle is typical of Venetian male fashion in the early 16th century. The pose of the man, who emerges from the dark background gazing toward the spectator in an oblique and absorbed manner, and the execution of the work also refer to early sixteenth-century Venetian portrait painting, influenced by the models of Giorgione and the young Titian. Lucco has described the composition as entirely innovative for a painting which should be dated to circa 1520.

An eclectic and itinerant artist, Giovanni Francesco Caroto trained in the workshop of Liberale da Verona, later moving on to work in Mantua with Mantegna. He then worked in Milan, where he came in contact with Leonardo’s circle, and after that, in Casale Monferrato, entering the services of William IX Paleologus in 1516. When his patron died in 1518, the artist went to Parma, where he painted the altarpiece of the Madonna and Child with Saints in the Church of San Giovanni Evangelista in that year. The present portrait belongs to this phase of Caroto’s activity, which includes works such as the Three Archangels and St. Catherine of Alexandria in Verona.

Caroto returned to Verona in 1523. He was by then an established master and influenced a new generation of painters active in the city, from Domenico Riccio, Brusasorci to Paolo Veronese. In addition to being a painter, Caroto was also a sculptor and a recent monographic exhibition of his work in Verona demonstrated the variety of his artistic career (Verona, Palazzo della Gran Guardia, Caroto e le arti tra Mantegna e Veronese, 13 May – 2 October 2022).