Portrait of a Man

Tommaso Lunetti's Portrait of a Man, dated 1521 and now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is attributed to a Florentine painter of modest reputation who worked in Florence in the early sixteenth century. Lunetti's name appears in Florentine documents of the period and his paintings reflect the conservative current of Florentine portraiture in the generation after Ghirlandaio and before Bronzino transformed the genre into the vehicle for Medici court ideology. The portrait of an unnamed man captures the physiognomic realism and psychological directness that Florentine painters had cultivated since the quattrocento, here filtered through the more relaxed humanistic atmosphere of the early Cinquecento. The Metropolitan's Italian painting collection includes this work as documentation of the broader Florentine portrait tradition beyond its most celebrated practitioners.

The three-quarter portrait presents the sitter with clear physiognomic specificity against a neutral or architectural ground. Florentine precision of draughtsmanship governs the modelling of the face with careful attention to the structure of the skull beneath the skin. Costume is rendered simply and without elaborate display. The sitter's gaze is direct and self-composed in the manner of Florentine humanist portraiture.