Head of a Roman

Böcklin painted this head in 1863, in the middle of a long stay in Rome where he lived through much of the 1860s. A young painter from the north in those years filled his canvases with the faces of local people, and this dark, strongly modelled study of a Roman man belongs to that habit. It carries none of the sea gods or lonely islands he would become known for later. It sits closer to ordinary studio work, a face examined for its own sake. What Rome gave him here is the light and the type, the sunburned, classical-looking head he could not have found back home in the north.