Portrait of a Young Man

Dürer dated this small panel 1507, the year he came back to Nuremberg after nearly two years in Venice. The sitter has never been identified. The Kunsthistorisches Museum suggests he may have been one of the German merchants in Dürer's Venetian circle, and allows that the picture could have been finished after the journey home. The unusual part is the back of the board. There Dürer painted an old woman, bare-shouldered and laughing, two teeth left in her mouth, gripping a bulging purse. Painters in Italy and in the north often gave the reverse of a portrait a kind of motto, usually a reminder that worldly goods do not last, and the museum reads this one as an allegory of greed. Both pictures share one board about 35 centimetres high, so only one of them can face the room at a time.