Ecce Homo

This picture can be compared with Simon de Châlon’s Ecce Homo, also executed on panel but of slightly smaller dimensions (33 x 22 cm.), now in the Borghese Gallery, Rome (see P. Della Pergola, Galleria Borghese, I Dipinti, II, Rome, 1959, p. 173, no. 255, fig. 254). Both that and the present picture are thought to be early copies after a lost Ecce Homo by Andrea Solario, autograph versions of which are in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, John G. Johnson Collection, and in the Museum der Bildenden Künste, Leipzig. The prime version is thought to have been painted between 1507 and 1509 (see D.A. Brown, Andrea Solario, Milan, 1987, p. 212, under no. 50) during Solario’s trip to France where he was working for Cardinal Georges d’Amboise. The existence of a second copy after Solario (a Mater Dolorosa) in the Borghese, signed by de Chalons and dated 1543 on the reverse, would suggest that both the Borghese Ecce Homo and the present panel date to the same period.