Head of a Man

A head of an old man on a canvas under half a metre high, with nothing around him. This was never a commissioned portrait. Painters kept heads like this in the studio, worked up from someone in front of them in a sitting or two, to be drawn on later when a picture needed a face. What is disputed is when it was made. The gallery dates it to about 1590 to 1592, which puts it in Bologna, before Annibale Carracci had ever worked in Rome. Other catalogues push it into the second half of the decade, by which time he had moved south for good, and the difference decides which city the old man was sitting in. On the hand itself nobody has wavered. In every catalogue the gallery has published, the picture has stayed under Annibale's own name, as Palatina 166.