Study for a Portrait of a Man (Cardinal Niccolò Albergati?)

Beside the face on this small sheet, Jan van Eyck wrote himself 16 short lines, so faint today that they could be fully read only under ultraviolet light. They are a painter's colour list, set down in the dialect of the Maas valley, the region he is thought to have come from. The hair ochre-brown, a sanguine red between the eyes, a paler forehead, a dark yellow wart, grey stubble on the chin. That stubble is not drawn here at all. It turns up only in the oil portrait now in Vienna, which follows this drawing closely but is about 40 percent larger and a little wider. Whose face this is cannot be proved. The name Cardinal Niccolò Albergati was attached to the painting only in the 17th century, and Albergati, a Carthusian monk, would have worn a tonsure and a habit rather than this fur-lined robe. Dresden catalogues the sheet simply as a portrait of an older man, made around 1435 to 1440.