Portrait du Pérugin

For most of its life, no one was sure what this small portrait even was. Hanging in the Florentine galleries by 1704, it was catalogued as a picture of Martin Luther by Hans Holbein. A century later it was called a portrait of the sculptor Verrocchio, painted by Lorenzo di Credi. Only in the 1930s did scholars land on the reading it carries today: a likeness of the painter Perugino, made around 1504 by his young pupil Raphael, though that attribution is still argued over. What has never been in doubt is the face itself, a heavy-jawed, watchful man captured with the plain honesty of early Renaissance portraiture, set against a dark ground with the sitter turned slightly to one side.