Portrait of a Clergyman (Johann Dorsch?)

The National Gallery of Art keeps a question mark inside this painting's title, and that question mark is roughly 300 years old. Dürer signed and dated the portrait in 1516, in Nuremberg, and left no name on it. The name came much later. An inventory drawn up in 1719 for the Praun family of Nuremberg, who had owned the picture for generations, lists it as the likeness of Johann Dorsch, once pastor at Saint Johannis, painted on parchment by Albrecht Dürer. The clerk was writing some 200 years after the sitter sat, and nothing in the picture confirms him. Other names have been proposed since, and none has held. The one thing that inventory got exactly right is the parchment. Dürer worked here on a sheet of parchment, later laid down on fabric, at a moment when a portrait this size would almost always have been painted on wood.