Who was the best-dressed fellow in Renaissance Europe? Well, a strong candidate must surely be Matthäus Schwarz (1497-1574), a man so obsessed by clothes that he had 137 paintings of himself commissioned throughout his life to chart the development of his dress sense. Now, a new exhibition called A Young Man’s Progress at the Fitzwilliam Museum has brought together a fashion designer, a photographer and a Cambridge academic to try to re-imagine some of these paintings in a modern setting.

An accountant for the supremely wealthy Fugger merchant family, Schwarz was able to spend a fortune on clothes, pushing the boundaries of fashion in the 1520s and 30s and was so influential that his sartorial autobiography has been dubbed the ‘first book of fashion’.

At the Fitzwilliam, snaking up a staircase in a far-flung corner of the museum, copies of five of the paintings from the collection are on display next to large-scale photographs imagining how Schwarz would have looked had he been around today. But this small exhibition is actually trying to do more than that, as it claims to tell the ‘fictional story of Matthew Smith, a young man from North London who is obsessed with clothes’.

As a lightly humorous, somewhat parodic exploration of fashion then and now, the exhibition works well. It is particularly interesting how the artist sisters, Maisie Broadhead and Bella Newell, use modern fabrics, designs and colours to recreate a Renaissance style in a fresh, modern way. A wide-brimmed hat on Schwarz is a modern-day flat-cap in the photo. A dapple-grey horse becomes a grey scooter and a mighty lance is translated as an iPhone.

Yet the exhibition as a whole still lacks depth, not only because it is small. Any notion of the fictional journey of a character called Matthew Smith is totally absent. Whereas Schwarz’s own images capture him at different stages of life, all you see in the photos is the same chiselled Topman model posing in a variety of digitally doctored environments (in front of a council estate, in a dark, cobbled alleyway).

It is also puzzling that they have opted for so many urban outfits in the photographs: tracksuit bottoms and trainers abound but this seems at odds with the fancy regalia donned by the Renaissance man and certainly does not give him the same status he would have had at the time. Fairly incomprehensibly, crumpled-up beer cans and cardboard Stella boxes have also been strewn all over the floor in some of the photos. Was Schwarz a heavy drinker? Is this a crude attempt to show that ‘Matthew Smith’ is a young man?

Searching for a message in this small exhibition is likely to be a fruitless endeavour but it was nevertheless intriguing to see how the artists give the paintings a modern twist.

A Young Man’s Progress is on at the Fitzwilliam Museum until Sunday 6th September

Admission is Free