Bildnis eines Mannes, genannt Der Condottiere

Antonello da Messina painted this tight, unsmiling head in 1475, most likely in Venice. The man has never been identified. The nickname Condottiere, meaning a mercenary captain, came later and rests on almost nothing but his hard stare and a small scar on his upper lip. What Antonello is really showing off here is a technique still fairly new to Italy. He built the face up in thin layers of oil, so the skin, the eyes and the faint stubble catch the light the way real flesh does, without any hard drawn outlines. Painters in Venice studied what he was doing closely. He set the head against plain black, with a low parapet across the bottom, in the northern European way of framing a portrait.