Italian, North, 'A Man holding an Armless Statuette', before 1640

An ageing bearded man looks out of the painting, holding a statuette in his left hand. He is painted within an oval fictive stone frame and the foreshortened statuette emerges from the painted space into our own, making him seem all the more lifelike. This motif of a figure coming out of a fictive frame also appears in another painting in our collection – the Self Portrait by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo.

The presence of the statuette suggests that the man represented here may be a sculptor or a collector, but there are no other clues as to the sitter’s identity. The statue itself is probably a reduced copy, made of plaster, after an antique sculpture. The figure’s pose is close to that of a Roman marble sculpture made around 100 BC, known as the Borghese Gladiator (Louvre, Paris). It is also reminiscent of the Kassel Apollo, a Greek bronze sculpture of Apollo known through numerous Roman marble copies (the best of which is preserved in the German town of Kassel, from which the sculpture takes its name).

The identity of the painter remains a mystery. The work came into the National Gallery’s collection as by the Genoese painter Bernardo Strozzi – an attribution that was proposed again more recently. The picture is certainly Italian and has been associated with both Genoese and Venetian painters, on account of its loose brushwork and fluid handling of paint.

This painting was presented to the National Gallery by Francis Denis Lycett Green (1893–1959), a philanthropist who began buying pictures in the 1920s on the advice of some of the most notable art historians of his time. By the 1940s, Lycett Green’s collection consisted of over 130 paintings and was displayed in his country house in Goudhurst, Kent. A large proportion of his paintings went to the York Art Gallery but he also presented pictures to the National Gallery, including Giuseppe Bazzani’s Saint Anthony of Padua with the Infant Christ, a pastel portrait by Jean-Baptiste Perroneau, and a seventeenth-century painting of a woman resting on a sword (probably Saint Catherine of Alexandria).