Portrait of an Old Man

This worn head of an old man is a fresco, a fragment cut from a wall and now framed like a panel painting. Nobody knows who the man was, and nobody is entirely sure who painted him. It is usually given to Filippino Lippi and dated to around 1485, though some scholars have argued instead for Masaccio, an earlier Florentine master. The confusion has its own logic. Filippino was the painter chosen, decades after Masaccio's death, to finish the frescoes Masaccio had left incomplete in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence, so the two hands were bound together in the same walls. The fragment has hung in the Uffizi since 1771.