Flanders was, together with Italy, one of the art centres in the second half of the fifteenth century which most contributed to the consolidation of portraiture as a genre in its own right. No longer solely depicted in works of historical or religious subject matters, the human figure now began to be represented in a different context. Portraits reached their zenith in the early sixteenth century and played a pivotal role in Renaissance art in Europe. Flemish painters garnered great fame and their models quickly spread throughout the continent. They were particularly popular in France and Spain, where they were hired to work at royal courts, and they inevitably had a major influence on the training of local artists.

The lower number of commissions for religious works led to the rise of portraits, whose growing demand made it a highly profitable genre. In fact, the portraitist was one of the earliest specialised painters. The best practitioners readily found work for monarchs, but the genre also accommodated many minor artists, who found in it a medium in which they could learn and experiment with new techniques. The increase in production led to countless anonymous works, often impossible to identify. That is particularly true of Flemish painters, as the notion of the artist in Flanders was more closely aligned to the widely accepted idea of the artisan, a fact which may explain the frequent absence of signatures on paintings until well into the sixteenth century.

During the Renaissance, portraits became a customary element in the decoration of private residences, which changed the way in which they were seen. Once viewed as strictly private in nature, portraits were no longer stored away in trunks and chests and were placed on the walls of the home where they took on a new function, like recalling cherished friends or relatives living far away or no longer with us. This led to the appearance of dynastic or family galleries on display in domestic environments, and smaller formats became more popular among European elites.

This anonymous work was painted in the Flemish style of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. It is a good example of how, notwithstanding the evolution of the genre, many painters still followed older patterns. The influence of Gothic portraits is visible in the two-dimensionality and the simplicity of the composition, as well as in the use of board instead of canvas, which was beginning to become the standard support. Technically speaking, the silhouette is outlined by a basic drawing which is then given to the body through the use of thin layers of flat colours that give the image a synthetic look perhaps more characteristic of an artisan.

Both the size and simplicity of the composition would lead us to describe this painting as a contemplative portrait. Standing out against the background, the face of an unidentified young man looks at the spectator with an inscrutable expression. The figure is depicted with clothing and hair in the fashion of the high society of the time. The painter paid special attention to the ornamental details, with a particular mention for the jewellery and the medallion, indicative of the sitter’s status. The portrait thus follows the conventions of the period, in which clothes and jewellery were the key elements in defining the sitter and his social class.