Portrait of a Man (formerly identified as Torquato Tasso)

The museum dates this panel between 1580 and 1599. Through those same years Torquato Tasso was the most argued-over poet in Italy, let out in 1586 after seven years shut in the hospital of Sant'Anna in Ferrara, then dead in Rome in 1595 before the laurel crown being prepared for him could be placed. This panel looked the part. A bearded man at half length, shelves of books behind him, an hourglass, a crucifix. In 1899 its owner, the painter Niccolò Fontani, showed it at the Uffizi as a portrait of Tasso and put Alessandro Allori's name to it. The ring on the sitter's hand undid that. A Tasso specialist noticed it carries a horseshoe, an emblem the poet never used, and a comparison with the authentic likenesses in 1979 agreed. The panel was still hanging as Tasso in an exhibition devoted to him in 1985. The state file now calls it a portrait of a man, by an Emilian hand.