Man with a Halberd

Of the eight surviving fragments from the painted hall of the Visconti house on via Lanzone in Milan, this one has never quite fitted with the rest. Brera lists it, like its companions, under Bramante. The handling, though, is softer and the quality noticeably different, and the golden curls have been compared closely with the hair in Leonardo's portrait of Ginevra de' Benci, now in Washington. Leonardo was working in Milan for the same court in exactly these years, around 1486, so some scholars have proposed that he took a hand in this figure, while the painted frieze from the same room has been claimed for another Florentine, Antonio del Pollaiolo. Nothing in the documents settles it. The piece is the odd size too, 95 centimetres by 115, where the man with the two-handed sword hanging beside it in room X runs to nearly three metres.