Portrait of a Man with a Ring

In 18th-century Bologna this small panel hung in the palace of the Boschi marquesses, whose inventories called it a portrait of Francesco Francia, a local goldsmith and painter. That label lasted until 1913, when it was published as the work of Francesco del Cossa, a painter from Ferrara who was working in Bologna in the 1470s. Even then the experts split. The American connoisseur Bernard Berenson gave it to Ercole de' Roberti, another Ferrarese painter, while the Italian scholar Roberto Longhi argued for Cossa, and the museum follows Longhi. The sitter has no name either. In 1915 the English art historian Herbert Cook proposed a member of the Este family, the dukes of Ferrara, because a diamond ring was one of their emblems. The museum suggests something plainer, perhaps a record of an engagement. Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza bought the panel in 1956, one of the first pictures he chose himself, and the ring that started the guessing still stands upright on the young man's fingertip, his little finger hooked over the stone ledge toward us.