In the next 10 minutes, we're going to be looking  at this young man, a portrait painted by Alessandro

di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, better known today as  in his own lifetime as Sandro Botticelli.

We're going to be asking ourselves  what devices and techniques Botticelli

has used in order to create such a  captivating image, and also exploring why

such a seemingly simple portrait was in its  own day very unusual and even revolutionary.

To many, the name Botticelli conjures  a mythological world, populated by

centaurs and deities and nymphs, or perhaps  to others the name more readily calls to mind

a heavenly realm with the resplendent Virgin  Mary, surrounded by a host of heavenly angels.

But Botticelli, ever the versatile artist, was  also a talented and prolific painter of portraits.

There are about 14 portraits by him which are  more or less securely attributed, and a handful of

others which are plausibly his. That's about three  times more than the number of surviving works

by his master Fra Filippo Lippi, and also by any of his  Florentine contemporaries including Leonardo

da Vinci and Domenico Ghirlandaio, and actually  Botticelli really holds a kind of special place in

the early history of Italian portraiture, not just  for the quantity of portraits that he produced,

but also for the range. He produced portraits  of all different sizes and formats, and his

special ability in this genre seems to have  been this real prowess when it comes to

understanding how the formal qualities of  a portrait can inform its emotional tenor,

and i think this is nowhere more the case than in  this little work here. A little under life size, the

portrait shows a young man's head and shoulders  against a dark monochrome backdrop. The sitter's

identity is not known, but we can see that he is  an adolescent boy on the threshold of adulthood,

who meets our gaze with the kind of confidence  of youth. He wears a red cap over these thick

chestnut curls which fall just above his shoulders. His brown tunic is edged with fur, and overlaps

and is tied at the top with a cord, and around his  throat we can see the rounded collar of his white

undershirt. Except for the flash of red in his cap, the overall palette in this picture is very muted,

and Botticelli is really relying here on light  instead of colour to pick out its details. Notice

how the light catches the pointed metal  caps on the tunic's knotted fastening.

The boy's face is bathed in a strong light from  the upper left, and his features are carefully

described by soft passages of shading. The  effect of the painting's dramatic lighting is to

lend a real immediacy to the young man's presence, and this immediacy is further enhanced by the

portraits tightly cropped format, and also by the  impenetrable background, both of which serve to

propel the sitter forward into our space. Other  than a brief stint in Rome where he was summoned

in 1481 to contribute to a cycle of frescoes in  the Pope's newly built Sistine Chapel, Botticelli

saw out the entirety of his career in Florence.  This portrait was almost certainly painted in

around 1485, when Botticelli was really at the  height of his creativity and innovation, having

solidified his status as a favoured painter among  the ruling Medici family. And during these years,

there was really no shortage of opportunities  for patronage. At the beginning of the 15th

century, independent portraits were really rare in  Florence. Consistent production only really began

in the 1440s and 50s, in line with an increasing  interest in classical texts which celebrated

the portraits power to perpetuate an individual's  accomplishments fame or dynastic connections. When

Botticelli was a boy, the few portraits that were  produced were invariably painted in strict profile.

This format for the portrait had a kind of  historic clout because of the profile portraits

of emperors that were found on Roman coinage, and  even though this strict profile format persisted

for portraits of women in Florence, by and large  all the way through to the end of the century, but

from about the 1450s, portraits of men increasingly  showed the sitter turned towards the viewer,

and this had a really interesting visual effect  because the encounter went from being one of an

observation of a person's physical likeness  to a direct engagement, where the viewer

had the opportunity to bear witness to the  inner workings of the sitter's mind, and in this

portrait it is precisely that kind of encounter  that Botticelli seems interested in provoking.

He's taken the newly forged three-quarter turn  and placed his sitter head-on so that he faces

the viewer with his whole body and not just with  his head. Images en face, or face on, like this,

were fantastically rare in portraiture. Typically  they were the reserve of images of Christ or more

specifically of depictions of the so-called veil  of Veronica, the miraculous cloth which had borne

the imprint of christ's features after he used  it to wipe his face as he walked to Calvary.

Botticelli's decision to use this frontal pose  could risk the portrait becoming static because

he hasn't got the natural flow and movement of  the body that the three-quarter term turn might

have afforded him. But he does a couple of clever  things in order to counter this potential effect.

First of all, he makes sure that the head is  slightly off-centre, and he also tips the chin up

slightly. Both of these have an enlivening effect,  and help us to keep really engaged with the sitter.

And there are other ways that Botticelli really  broke with convention here, both the convention of

his own earlier portraiture, and that of Florentine  portraiture more broadly. In his earlier works,

Botticelli had typically placed his viewer outside, perhaps against a blue sky, or a landscape, or in

front of a window. A number of his early works  also include identifying attributes or items of

clothing which might help the viewer to situate  or even identify the sitter. Botticelli's decision

to strip away these identifying factors of the  backdrop and potential identifying attributes

seems to reflect his real interest and engagement  in Netherlandish portraiture. The tight crop and

the frontal pose also reflect his interest in this  type of portraiture which we know was extremely

popular in Florence at this date. We have records  of a number of works by artists working in the

Netherlands tradition which were in Florence, in  particular the works of Hans Memling, and we know

that these were highly sought after by patrons  in Florence, and much admired by local artists.

But even though Botticelli is so clearly  engaging with the Netherlandish tradition,

this work is unmistakably his. It  has Botticelli written all over it,

and I think the reason for this is to do  with this artist's very unique ability

to fuse the universal concepts of beauty with the  oddities and idiosyncrasies of individual likeness.

So in many ways here, Botticelli is offering us an  image of idealised male beauty. The high forehead

and pronounced cheekbones and jawline, the straight  nose and soft downturn lips, all operate within a

cannon of male beauty which Botticelli himself  was actively codifying in his art at this date.

And it's one that we see replicated many times  in his images of both angels and pagan gods.

And yet at the same time, this is a carefully  individualised portrayal. The boy's mouth is

unevenly shaped, and the shape of each eye, with  these heavy creased eyelids, is also different.

And what these details do is assert the  individuality of the sitter, and convince us that

we are observing a true likeness. And actually, it's  been pointed out that Botticelli paints different

elements of the face from very slightly different  angles, so while the eyes are painted head on, the

chin is seen from below, and this has the effect  of allowing Botticelli to exaggerate the individual

features of the sitter's face, while also  introducing these distortions, which really

captivate our interest. As I've already mentioned,  we do not know the identity of this young man, and

it's unlikely we ever will. Perhaps he was the  son of one of Botticelli's patrician patrons.

Perhaps the decision was taken to depict him  at this stage in his life because he was just

launching his career, maybe in politics, or perhaps  he was going away to perform military service. More

than one scholar has suggested that this sitter  may have been a member of Botticelli's workshop.

Botticelli ran a large workshop consisting  primarily of young men, and it is intriguing to

think that this young man may have been among them.  Certainly the immediacy and intimacy of this work

seems to suggest that this was a sitter that  Botticelli knew well, perhaps someone that he

loved, or maybe this sensation is the product  of Botticelli's artifice. We may never know,

and herein lies the mystery of this intriguing  little portrait. If you'd like to know more

about art history, click here or here. Thanks  for watching, and we'll see you next time.