Experts Say They’ve Found a Portrait of a Mysterious Businessman Hidden Beneath a Titian Masterpiece

Beneath a famous Titian painting, researchers have uncovered a portrait of an “unknown professional man.”

The never-before-seen piece has been hidden behind the Italian Renaissance artist’s Ecce Homo since roughly 1570. Now, a rendering of the mysterious portrait is on display in Cyprus.

Experts from the Cyprus Institute made the discovery while preparing the piece for conservation work. When they examined it under a microscope, they noticed odd colors showing through the painting’s craquelure, the web of fine cracks that forms on an oil painting over many years.

A preliminary X-ray performed in the institute’s Andreas Pittas Art Characterization Laboratories (APAC Labs) revealed an “underpainting,” according to a statement. Researchers then used advanced imaging techniques to reveal the complete portrait, which was painted upside down beneath Ecce Homo.

“It was like uncovering a puzzle,” Nikolas Bakirtzis, director of APAC Labs, tells Reuters’ Michele Kambas. “Once we started realizing that there [was] a complete work underneath, we became extremely excited. … We started looking into the layers … using a range of imaging methods and then at the same time physical, chemical [and] analytical methods that allowed us to look under the surface.”

Ecce Homo, also known as Christ Shown to the People, depicts the Roman governor Pontius Pilate presenting Christ to the people who will decide his fate. Christian iconography was a common theme for Titian, who’s known as Venice’s greatest 16th-century artist.

Titian reused canvases—a practice that isn’t uncommon in fine art. Researchers knew that Titian sometimes painted over partially finished pieces, but this case is unique because the underpainting is a completed portrait. According to the statement, the researchers hoped to get a better understanding of Titian’s “artistic strategies” and how the underpainting might have influenced Ecce Homo.

“The portrait that is underneath this painting is the portrait of a standing man,” Bakirtzis tells Reuters. “We have not been able to identify who this man is. He’s not one of the known patrons, for example, or friends or clients of Titian.”

Bakirtzis notes that the man appears “professional.” The portrait is set in an office, with its subject standing in front of a desk, touching a book or stack of papers with one hand and holding a quill in the other. “This is clearly the portrait of a banker, a lawyer—some professional man in his workspace,” he adds.

Titian turned the man’s portrait upside down before painting over it, and Bakirtzis thinks the artist then integrated elements of the first portrait into Ecce Homo.

“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 tells Artnet’s Adam Schrader. “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.”

Using the X-ray images, experts also recreated the hidden portrait. Their oil painting is now on display alongside Ecce Homo at the Municipal Arts Center in Limassol, near the island nation’s southern coast.

Sonja Anderson | READ MORE

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in Chicago.