Portrait of a Man

When Domenico Ghirlandaio painted this head around 1478, he was still a young Florentine building his reputation, roughly the years he was frescoing a chapel in the hill town of San Gimignano. Who the sitter was, nobody now knows. For a long stretch the panel wasn't even counted as his. Sold from Berlin in 1924, it was reassigned to Sebastiano Mainardi, his brother-in-law and studio hand, before scholars gave it back to Ghirlandaio himself. A later cleaning changed how it reads. Under a brown film of oxidised varnish lay a bright green ground, the cool colour Florentine painters liked to set a face against. With that haze lifted, the man's plain, alert look is exactly the kind of likeness Ghirlandaio was becoming known for.