A Prophet

For a picture this size, we know surprisingly little about who painted it. It is the companion to a Sibyl of identical dimensions, a life-size figure on a strip of rocky ground against a dark background, and the pair may once have served as the doors of an organ. The 19th-century scholar Cavalcaselle first gave both panels to Vittore Carpaccio, the Venetian, and that is the name they still carry at the Uffizi. Later specialists were not so sure. Some heard Ferrara rather than Venice in the drawing and colour and placed the pair around the turn of the 16th century in that court's orbit. Others pointed to the circle of a Lombard painter nicknamed Pseudo-Boccaccino. The prophet himself gives no help with the argument. He simply stands, holding to the old idea that the prophets of Israel had foretold what the sibyls foretold too, wrapped in heavy drapery that the shadow swallows below the knee.