two assistants or servants spent some five weeks staying at Alfonso's Castello Estense in Ferrara from 22 February 1516 until the end of March. Titian normally painted on canvas, but the original use of the painting as a door necessitated the panel support here. It is Titian's earliest signed painting, and was perhaps signed to show he was not a court painter, as well as advertising his name in a prominent court outside Venice and its territories. The location of the signature on the pharisee's collar may support it being a self-portrait (see below), with the signature "identifying the subject like the inscription below the profile portrait on a coin". Reception and later composition The painting, which has been described as "Titian's sleekest, most polished early work", became famous. Giorgio Vasari thought the head of Christ "stupendous and miraculous" and that all artists at the time believed it to be Titian's most perfect painting. Carlo Ridolfi's biography relates that when he saw it, an envoy of the Emperor Charles V expressed surprise that any artist could compete with Albrecht Dürer so well. Much later Titian painted a larger composition of the subject (now National Gallery), perhaps to meet a demand for replicas. This was perhaps begun around 1543, but not completed until the 1560s; it was sent to Philip II of Spain in 1568. X-radiographs reveal that the gold coin in it was originally inscribed with "Ferrara". Context The figure of the pharisee has been claimed as a self-portrait by Titian, who was in his late twenties at the time. The same claim has been made for several figures painted in narrative scenes by Titian, notably, and perhaps more convincingly, the severed head of John the Baptist in his Salome (Doria Pamphilj Gallery in Rome and other versions), which is very close in date to this painting, and where the head does not much resemble the one here. Both paintings are examples of narrative subjects drawing on Titian's skill as a portraitist, as well as forming part of a number of paintings using the Giorgionesque type of composition showing two or three tightly cropped half-length figures with their faces close together, heightening the drama of their interaction. Other examples of this type are Lucretia and her Husband and The Bravo, both now in Vienna, and The Lovers (Royal Collection). Provenance The painting is part of the permament collection of Gemäldegalerie