Duas cabeças masculinas

This is a tiny thing, hardly bigger than a postcard, and for a long time it carried the name of Hieronymus Bosch, the great painter of nightmares from 's-Hertogenbosch. Scholars have since pulled back from that: today it is filed under his circle, painted by someone close to him around 1480. Two men in elaborate headdresses lean together, and the panel has sometimes been called Annas and Caiaphas, the two high priests who questioned Christ before he was handed to the Romans. The heads have the sharp, slightly grotesque character Bosch made his own, which is part of why his name stuck to it for so long. It came to the museum in Rotterdam with the founding bequest of Frans Boijmans in 1847.