Bildnis eines jungen Mannes mit Barett und Handschuhen

Bernardino Licinio painted this Portrait of a Young Man with Beret and Gloves around 1520, a male portrait that combined the fashionable dress of the Venetian upper class with the psychological directness characteristic of his portrait style. The beret and gloves—both markers of fashionable dress in early sixteenth-century Venice—establish the sitter as a young man of social aspirations and modest wealth, while the direct gaze and precise physiognomy assert his individual identity beyond the social type his dress represents. Licinio's portraits of young men have a quality of engaged vitality—the sitter's presence direct and immediate—that distinguishes his work from the more formal staging of Titian's aristocratic portraiture while maintaining the Venetian school's characteristic warmth of coloring and sensitivity to light on skin.

The three-quarter portrait follows Venetian conventions established by Giovanni Bellini and Giorgione. Licinio's warm tonality and attention to the textures of the beret and gloves demonstrate his skill in rendering material surfaces.