Portrait of a young man

Filippino Lippi's Portrait of a Young Man, held at the Rijksmuseum, exemplifies the Florentine portrait tradition of the late fifteenth century as it was being gradually transformed by contact with Flemish and Venetian alternatives. Filippino — son of the great Fra Filippo Lippi and trained partly under Botticelli — brought a distinctive emotional sensitivity to portraiture that set him apart from more rigidly linear contemporaries. His sitters tend to inhabit their images with greater psychological presence than workshop convention would ordinarily allow. Young male portraits of this type served a social as well as artistic function: they documented the appearance of a family's heir at a significant moment — perhaps betrothal, inheritance, or the attainment of civic majority — and were kept as part of the family archive alongside documents and account books. The Rijksmuseum version shows Filippino's characteristic handling of silhouette against a plain ground, with the face modelled in the cool, precise Florentine manner.

Panel painting in the Florentine tradition relies on a cool, light ground with careful underdrawing to establish the profile or three-quarter silhouette before painting. Filippino's flesh tones are characteristically delicate — pale with warm undertones and subtle pink at the cheeks — avoiding the heavy chiaroscuro that was then developing in Lombardy. The sitter's clothing is described with attention to texture if not full decorative elaboration.