Ritratto d'uomo con copricapo azzurro

This is a tiny panel, smaller than a sheet of paper, painted by Jan van Eyck in the early 1430s in the Low Countries. We do not know who the man is. He wears a blue chaperon, the twisted cloth hood of the period, and he holds up a ring between his fingers, which may mean he was a goldsmith or that the portrait marked a betrothal. For a long time scholars doubted it was really by van Eyck at all. Then a cleaning in 1991 let them look under the paint with infrared, and the underdrawing and the handling of the oil turned out to be unmistakably his. The panel ended up far from home. It belongs to the Brukenthal Museum in Sibiu, in Transylvania, built from the collection of an 18th-century Habsburg governor named Samuel von Brukenthal.