Portrait of a Young Man

Dürer painted this small panel in 1500, the same year he finished the famous self-portrait that hangs a few rooms away in the same Munich museum — the one where he faces us head-on, styled almost like Christ. This young man, whose name is lost, gets a quieter treatment: a plain dark ground, a red cap, the careful modelling of a face lit from the side. Dürer was 28 and at the height of his powers as a painter of likeness, fresh from his travels in Italy. By 1616 the picture was recorded in the Praun collection in Nuremberg, the artist's home town, where it stayed for generations before reaching the Bavarian royal collection.