Bindo Altoviti

A young man turns his head to look back at us over his right shoulder, his long blond hair falling loose to his shoulders and a long sideburn tracing the jawline, against a flat, luminous ground of emerald green. He wears a soft black cap, a blue garment splitting over the shoulder with a ruffle of white at its wide neckline, and on the hand held to his chest a gold ring set with a green stone. Raphael painted the portrait around 1515, at the height of his Roman years, for the Florentine banker Bindo Altoviti — a sitter of his own generation and a friend of the artist’s circle — and its glancing pose and close, informal intimacy are unlike anything else in his portraiture. The panel stayed with the Altoviti family in Rome and Florence until 1808, when it was sold through Johann Metzger to Ludwig I of Bavaria and presented to the Alte Pinakothek in Munich; it was traded to Agnew’s and Duveen Brothers in 1938, acquired by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation in 1940, and given to the National Gallery of Art in 1943. The painting is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.