A Schoolmaster at His Lectern with His Pupils

This is a small panel, 34 by 38 centimetres, and the museum and the reference books do not agree about what is on it. Brera catalogues it as a schoolmaster at his lectern with his pupils, painted somewhere between 1505 and 1515 and given to Amico Aspertini. The Italian state catalogue reads the same panel as something close to a joke. The teacher is far too big for the boys around him, the lectern and the chair disagree about where they are standing, and he teaches out of doors in contemporary dress, scraps of parchment tucked in his hat and slippers on his feet, which has led to the suggestion that a particular living man was being mocked. Elsewhere the picture travels under another name, Saint Cassian, the schoolmaster of Imola whose pupils were made to kill him with their iron writing styluses around the year 303. It arrived in 1929, a gift from the art historian Corrado Ricci.