Portrait of a Man

Around 1476 Antonello da Messina was in Venice, a Sicilian painter painting the city's merchants and patricians. The red jacket and black cap worn here are the ordinary dress of a Venetian patrician, and the man looks straight out at us with the faintest half-smile. Nobody knows who he is. He has been proposed as Michele Vianello, a Venetian whose portrait by this painter was recorded in 1532, and as a self-portrait. Neither idea has held. The Borghese inventory of 1790 listed the panel as a Giovanni Bellini, and only in 1869 did the German connoisseur Otto Mündler give it back to its true author. It hangs today in the Room of Psyche. There is no signature. Antonello often painted his name on a small slip of paper, and scholars think it may once have sat on the original frame.