Portrait of a Man

For most of its recorded life this panel was an Andrea del Sarto. The state catalogue describes what is there plainly enough, a half-length figure turned three-quarters to his left, a close-fitting coat drawn in at the waist by a sash, gloves, a beret.

In 1909 Carlo Gamba took the picture away from Sarto and gave it to Domenico Puligo, and in the same breath decided who the sitter was. He proposed Pietro Carnesecchi, a Florentine churchman who had served the Medici pope Clement VII and was beheaded in Rome in 1567 for heresy. The name stayed attached for decades.

It came off in 1986, when Costamagna and Fabre pointed out that Puligo repeated the same handsome face across his portraits, so a resemblance proves nothing. The catalogue now calls the sitter unknown and the title is simply a man. The attribution to Puligo, argued on style alone, has held.