Portrait of Francesco Prospero Urbani

For most of the 19th century, guidebooks to the Palatine Gallery listed this head as the work of an unknown hand. The Medici inventories had already gone both ways on it, calling it a Barocci in one entry and a copy after Barocci in another. A catalogue of 1937 gave it to Barocci himself, with a stated margin of doubt, and recent opinion has come down on the side of his own work.

The sitter is named only by an old inscription on the back, Monsignor Prospero. From that he is identified as Francesco Prospero Urbani, a Franciscan with a substantial church career who was close both to the painter and to the duke at Urbino.

Cleaned for a Barocci exhibition in Urbino in 2024, the picture turned out to have been laid in very fast, in the same shorthand he used for the self-portrait he made near the end of his life.