The Apostle James the Elder

Dürer painted this head of the apostle James in 1516, in glue-based tempera on a thin canvas rather than on the panels or copperplates he was known for. It has a companion nearby, a head of the apostle Philip made the same year, and the two are almost certainly the start of a set of all twelve apostles. That set was never finished. Only these two heads exist, both intense, deeply lined, turned as if listening to something outside the frame. James appears as an older man with a broad brow and a heavy beard, the paint thin enough that the weave of the cloth shows through in places. Ten years later, back in Nuremberg, Dürer returned to the same subject on a much larger scale in the panels now called the Four Apostles.