Look at the sky behind this boy and you're seeing a color change. It was once blue. The pigment used for it has since turned gray, and the Met lists the boy as unidentified.
What you're looking at
A young man from the sixteenth century stands at the threshold of a doorway that opens onto a wide landscape, with a calm, easy air. One hand steadies a greyhound, a breed favored by Italian nobility. He wears a finely tailored costume and a sword, and his gilded codpiece was meant to signal status and virility. The Met's curators describe him as “a polished ideal of sixteenth-century Italian masculinity.” The details all point to rank and confidence.
A blue sky that turned gray
The landscape behind him was once punctuated by a sky painted with smalt, a blue pigment. Over the centuries it has turned gray with age. So the view beside him was bluer than the one you see now.
The boy nobody can name
The painting is dated “possibly 1570s,” and the Met calls the sitter unidentified. What is known is where it traveled. Its museum record traces it to the Martinengo family of Brescia, in northern Italy, by 1901. It then passed to the Florentine dealer Stefano Bardini, and around 1904 to the New York collectors Harry and Louisine Havemeyer. Louisine left it to the Metropolitan Museum when she died in 1929.
What to look for
Paolo Veronese, born in Verona in 1528 and working in Venice until his death in 1588, was known in his day for refined portraits and for illusionistic frescoes. Those are paintings on walls that trick you into thinking the space goes further than it does. Here he used the same trick on canvas. The boy stands right at the threshold of the doorway, so it feels as if he and his dog are standing in the same space as you. The Met says Veronese used his skills as an illusionist to create exactly that sense.