Gonzaga Dynasty's boy

This delicate portrait is not by a certain author, nor is the identity of the portrayed character evident. The incisive and subtly evocative way of recreating the face and pose recalls the hand of Sofonisba Anguissola, an excellent painter who for a long time gravitated, for a part of her life, in the orbit of the Spanish court, before marrying in Palermo and then returning to Northern Italy. In any case, the child who shows us part of his face here has eyes full of suffused melancholy. Although the dress is already in the seventeenth-century style, the general attitude is more of the sixteenth century, precisely because the pensiveness of the protagonist steals space from the description of the splendor of his social position. His agnificent pinkish lips seem to tighten slightly to indicate a movement of reluctance or perennial inner reflection.