Bust of a young man and a young woman

Copy of a niello print from the Durazzo Collection, the original impression of which is now in the Cabinet Rothschild at the Louvre.

Altough once attributed to the Venetian school, this print belongs to a group of niello portrait prints generally recognized as having been produced in Bologna, in the circle of Francesco Francia, toward the end of the fifteenth century. It is presumably a portrait of an actual person whose hopeful motto, inscribed on the scroll, is characteristic fo the period.

The nielli of the Durazzo collection were reproduced in engravings by the owner himself, between the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, in Venice - as also specified by Malaspina in his catalog of 1824 - constituting a series that was circulated and collected by amateurs. Bartsch describes these copies in his volume published in 1811, a date that therefore constitutes the terminus ante quem for the execution. For the attribution to Maso Finiguerra, disputed by some scholars, see the summary in Zucker in The Illustrated Bartch,1993.