An Unknown Man

Andrea del Brescianino was a Sienese painter active in the early sixteenth century working in the tradition of Sodoma and the broader current of High Renaissance figure painting as it reached Siena. This portrait, titled An Unknown Man, dated around 1520 and held by the National Trust in England, belongs to the significant corpus of Italian Renaissance paintings in British country house collections accumulated through the collecting tastes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While the sitter's identity has been lost, his image survives as evidence of the commissioning culture that employed painters like del Brescianino in Tuscany around 1520.

Del Brescianino places the unknown man in a clear three-quarter pose against a dark ground, the face lit with warm lateral light and modelled with careful gradation. The expression is composed and self-possessed, following the standard grammar of Italian Renaissance male portraiture.