Portrait of Professor Fritz Burckhardt-Brenner

This was painted in 1868, the same Basel year Böcklin spent decorating a merchant's garden hall. The sitter is Fritz Burckhardt-Brenner, a Basel man of about 38 who taught mathematics and physics and later led the city's university. Böcklin gives him plainly, a scholar's steady look, with no myth anywhere in sight. The strange part came later. When Böcklin designed a set of carved faces, or mascarons, for the Kunsthalle in Basel, he is said to have turned Burckhardt into one of them, a scornful critic with a distorted, receding brow. The respectful portrait and the mocking mask are the same man from the same painter, a few years apart.