Saint Philip

This head of the apostle Philip is painted in a technique Dürer rarely used and that rarely survives: thin glue-based colours brushed onto a fine, unprimed canvas, known in German workshops as a Tüchlein. Cloth paintings like this were light and cheap to make, often used as substitutes for costly panels, and most have perished, because the fragile surface cannot really be cleaned or varnished. This one, dated 1516, came through the centuries intact and eventually entered the Uffizi here in Florence. Philip is given the face of a tired, aging man, the brushwork looser and quicker than in Dürer's polished panels. Because the paint sits so thinly, the woven threads of the canvas stay visible under the pigment when you look closely.