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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
