Portrait of a Man

Painted around 1475, this small panel shows an unknown man in a red cap and leather jerkin, turned three-quarters toward us against a plain dark ground. That pose was a novelty in Italy. Antonello had picked it up from Netherlandish painting, where the strong side-lighting and dark background throw everything onto the face, and he was among the first to bring it south. For a long time people wanted the sitter to be Antonello himself, though that idea has been dropped. X-rays show he changed his mind as he worked, shifting the direction of the eyes. Italians knew the face well within living memory, since it was printed on the 5,000-lire banknote from 1979 to 1983.