Presumed Portrait of Andreas Vesalius

In 1543 a 28-year-old anatomist from Brussels published the book that showed how much Galen had got wrong about the human body. The drawings for it were made in Venice, and from Vasari onwards people have placed them in Titian's shop. Two years later a Venetian shop painted this bearded man in black, and he has been called Andreas Vesalius ever since.

Both halves of that are unsettled. The gallery prints the sitter's name with a question mark and gives the painter as Titian's workshop, the old attribution to Titian himself having been argued away long ago. The Italian state catalogue lists Jacopo Bassano, Giovan Battista Maganza and painters from Bergamo and Venice among the other proposals.

By 1545 Vesalius had left his chair at Padua for the court of the emperor Charles V, where he worked as a physician and wrote almost nothing further on anatomy. The picture moved around the palace for three centuries, through the alcove bedchamber, the Sala di Saturno and the Sala di Ulisse, and has hung in the Sala di Marte since 1937.