Head of a Laughing Youth

When the Borghese household drew up an inventory of its pictures in 1693, the clerk listed the painting as a laughing buffoon. A young man grins out at us with narrowed eyes, a white cloth wound on his head like a turban and a crumpled ruff at his neck. Nobody knows who he was, and the picture was never finished. It is oil on a sheet of paper, later glued onto canvas, and around the headdress you can still see the drawn outlines underneath, with the paint laid on thin in some places and thick in others. The art historian Roberto Longhi gave it to the young Annibale Carracci in 1928, and it is now dated to around 1585, while he was still working in Bologna. The family kept it until 1902, when the Italian state bought the Borghese collection, and today it is held in the gallery's storerooms.