Head of a Man with a Turban (after Iacopino del Conte)

In 1538 the painter Iacopino del Conte frescoed the Preaching of Saint John the Baptist in the oratory of San Giovanni Decollato in Rome, and among the crowd he placed a bearded man on horseback wearing a white turban. About 70 years later, someone copied that single head in oil on a sheet of paper, which was afterwards glued to a wooden panel. Here the face fills the whole sheet, above a fur collar and a gold clasp. The Galleria Borghese dates the copy to around 1605 to 1610 and assigns it to a Bolognese hand. The name behind it has kept moving. The family inventories once called it a head of Saint Thomas by Agostino Carracci. Later scholars proposed his brother Annibale, or Iacopino himself, and the most recent suggestion is Sisto Badalocchio, one of Annibale's pupils.