Head of an Old Man

Baldung's Head of an Old Man from 1516 is another of his powerful character studies from the same year as his Freiburg Cathedral altarpiece—his greatest work—demonstrating that his intense engagement with major devotional projects was accompanied by smaller-scale explorations of the aged human face as an expressive subject. The 1516 date at the height of his career gives this head study a particular significance as evidence of the concentrated energy and observation that informed his most ambitious work. Aged faces held particular fascination for Baldung as vehicles for the kind of psychological complexity and accumulated life experience that younger faces could not convey, and his head studies of old men developed alongside his devotional figures of prophets, apostles, and Church fathers in whose aged physiognomy he found compatible expressive material.

The aged face is rendered with vivid descriptive power, Baldung's precise line capturing the specific character of individual features with expressive intensity.