Portrait of a Young Man

Dürer painted this small panel in 1500, the same year as the famous self-portrait in which he faces us head-on, styled almost like Christ, and both pictures belong to the same Munich museum. The museum admits frankly that the young man struggles to hold his own beside that self-portrait. He is a quiet, close study on a limewood panel less than 30 centimetres high, and nobody knows who he was. His history, though, can be traced unusually far back. By 1616 the picture was recorded in the Praun collection in Nuremberg, Dürer's home town, the art cabinet of a merchant family that stayed together for almost two centuries. In 1809 the Bavarian crown prince Ludwig bought it from the Nuremberg dealer Frauenholz.