Still life with ram head

Still Life with Ram Head, dated 1601, is the earliest work in this group and one of the most unusual in Castiglione's output. If the date is correct, the artist was barely adolescent — he was born around 1609 by most reckonings, making this attribution problematic unless the date is a later addition or misread. The Prado's painting belongs to the vanitas still-life tradition, in which a ram's skull or head serves as a memento mori alongside other objects suggesting mortality and the passage of time. Castiglione's mature work rarely produced pure still life without figures; this early or atypical work therefore represents an interesting departure. The Prado acquired it through the Spanish royal collections that were rich in Flemish and Italian genre pictures.

The ram head is painted with close attention to the texture of the wool and the solidity of the horn, using directional strokes that model the three-dimensional form convincingly. A dark background focuses attention entirely on the object, in the Flemish still-life tradition. The handling is more controlled than in typical Castiglione pastoral work.