Famed Titian Painting Reveals Hidden Portrait

Below the surface of an oil painting by Italian Renaissance master Titian, experts have identified a previously unknown work by the artist using scientific analysis, the Andreas Pittas Art Characterization Laboratories at the Cyprus Institute (APAC) announced in a press release for an exhibition of the painting at the Limassol Municipal Arts Center.

Researchers from APAC were initially tasked with documenting the materiality and state of preservation of Titian’s Ecce Homo (1543). As they prepared the piece for conservation, the team took preliminary precautions to examine it under a microscope. There, different color pigments revealed themselves in the cracks of the painting’s surface.

“Microscopic observations of the craqueleure of the painting allowed us to document the stratigraphy of the canvas and to detect, through the cracks, the existence of different pigments under the Ecce Homo composition,” APAC director Nikolas Bakirtzis told Artnet News.

Ecce Homo depicts Jesus Christ bound, wearing a crown of thorns, and standing next to the Roman official Pontius Pilate. The painting underneath, however, is an image of an unknown man with a mustache holding a quill and standing next to a stack of papers. As such, it has been dubbed Portrait of an Unknown Man by the team.

Titian flipped the canvas when he began Ecce Homo, making it upside down to the Portrait of an Unknown Man, and painted directly over top the original. Experts believe this impacted some characteristics of this iteration of Ecce Homo, which was a commonly painted theme for the artist.

“We found that parts of the facial characteristics, the contours of the man’s face, for example part of his jawline, follow the painting execution of the ropes tying Christ’s hands,” Bakirtzis added. “There are some other details in the background space and room represented in the portrait which also facilitate the drawing of the Ecce Homo composition.”

The tone of the works, however, varies greatly as they would have been made for different clients. Ultimately, the discovery sheds greater light on how the artist worked by reusing the canvas.

Further analysis will be needed to date and to identify the man in the original painting.