Head of a Halberdier

This weathered face is a fragment. The panel was cut down from a larger picture, and what that picture showed is no longer known; when the head reached the Prado in 1916, with the bequest of the Madrid collector Pablo Bosch, the register entered it simply as the head of an archer, a fragment. The museum does not give it to Hieronymus Bosch. Its record reads copy after Bosch, and dates the panel to the second half of the sixteenth century, two generations after he died, when his manner still sold well enough for versions to multiply. The man has never had a settled name either: archer in that old register, crossbowman in the catalogue today, halberdier outside the museum. What remains is one studied character, lined and heavy-lidded under a broad black hat, a red coat at his shoulder and the shaft of his weapon crossing behind him.