Attributed to Jean Clouet

This entry is not a person. It stands for the question mark the Louvre sets before Jean Clouet's name on a panel, the Portrait of François I as Saint John the Baptist, in which the young king wears the saint's panther skin and holds a lamb across his knees. The museum means that Clouet is the likeliest hand, not a proven one.

The case was built on the face. In the early 1900s the Ghent art historian Georges Hulin de Loo, who went on to own the panel until 1947, set the king's features beside Clouet's official portraits of François, and the name slowly took hold. The Louvre lists a second candidate with its own question mark, a painter called Polet, probably Jean's brother or nephew, known only from a few mentions in the archives.