Portrait of a Young Man

German portraits around 1500 are mostly sober faces. A portrait recorded a man's standing, and a mouth doing anything irregular was the sort of thing a painter quietly corrected. This small panel, painted in oil on spruce somewhere between about 1500 and 1510, keeps its sitter's crooked, one-sided smile exactly as it was. The museum in Budapest treats that untidied mouth as the point of the picture, and quotes Dürer's own rule that the more closely work follows life, the better it will look.

Whether Dürer painted it is a separate question. Budapest gives it to him without qualification. Fedja Anzelewsky, whose 1971 catalogue is still the standard list of Dürer's paintings, left it out, and other scholars have handed it to his pupils Hans Baldung Grien or Hans Süss von Kulmbach. The young man has never been identified. One old proposal makes him Endres, the artist's younger brother, a goldsmith in Nuremberg.