Busts of a young man and a young woman in profile

Copy of a niello print formerly kept in the Durazzo collection (n. 2869), of which two original impression survives (Cabinet Rothschild at the Louvre; British Museum, London).

The work may be dated to the end of the fifteenth century and attributed with some confidence to the Bolognese school. The young man and woman are probably portraits of actual people, a betrothed or recently married couple. Their arrangement, facing each another in profile, conforms to conventional quattrocento practise for pendant portraits of husbands and wives.

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.