Portrait of a Man holding a Scroll and Gloves

Corneille de Lyon's Portrait of a Man Holding a Scroll and Gloves from 1549 belongs to his late career male portraiture, when he was refining his format to its most elegant and efficient form. The scroll and gloves were standard attributes of learned status—the scroll implying scholarship or legal office, the gloves signaling the gentlemanly rank that distinguished the educated professional from the manual tradesman. By 1549 Corneille had been the dominant portraitist of the French court for nearly twenty years, and his male portraits from this decade show an increasingly assured economy of means: the backgrounds more luminous, the characterization more immediate, the handling of costume more refined. The sitter remains unidentified, a testament to how completely the social networks that once gave these images meaning have dissolved.

The portrait extends beyond the pure bust format to include hand attributes, while maintaining Corneille's characteristic colored ground and precise technique.