How you can use this image
This image is available to be shared and re-used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence (CC BY-NC-SA).
This image can be reproduced in any way but your use of it cannot be for any kind of commercial purpose. Any work you create using this image must also be
Wherever you reproduce the image or an altered version of it, you must attribute the original creators (acknowledge the original artist(s), the person/organisation that took the photograph of the work) and any other stated rights holders.
Review our guidance pages which explain how you can reuse images, how to credit an image and how to find more images in the public domain or with a Creative Commons licence available.
DownloadNotes
Add or edit a note on this artwork that only you can see. You can find notes again by going to the ‘Notes’ section of your account.
The painting is listed in the catalogue of the Sloane collection as ‘A half length of Vesalius? [sic] by Antony More’. This attribution was subsequently accepted by the Museum and it appears thus in nineteenth-century printed lists of ‘Paintings in the Museum’. Sloane’s doubts about the identity of the sitter as the Belgian anatomist and physician Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) – he inserted a question mark after the name – are now thought to be well founded and it has been suggested that the painting seems to be by a Fleming of about 1540. The portrait is not entirely unlike that of Vesalius in the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, but it bears little resemblance to that in his book ‘De humani corporis fabrica’ (1543), attributed to the German artist Jan van Calcar (c.
Title
Portrait of an Unknown Man
Date
c.1540
Medium
oil on panel
Measurements
H 83.3 x W 64.2 cm
Accession number
Painting.25
Acquisition method
purchased as part of the Sloane collection, 1753
Work type
Painting