Portrait of a Man

Dürer signed and dated this panel in his late years, and the last digit of the date is hard to read. Many scholars prefer 1524; the museum reads 1521, the year he came home from the Netherlands, and argues it from the picture itself. He had gone back to a plain half-length format he mostly abandoned after 1500, the kind he used on that northern journey and dropped again from 1522, when he painted only busts. All the attention falls on the face and the hands against a dark ground, and the sitter's name is lost. The picture has a long afterlife. The story usually told is that Nuremberg gave it to Charles I of England in 1636, together with Dürer's famous 1498 self-portrait, though the museum is careful here: the records of that gift name the self-portrait and a portrait of the painter's father, not this panel. What is certain is that it was hanging in the royal palace in Madrid by the inventory of 1789, and entered the Prado in 1827.