A Painting Banished to the Storeroom for 37 Years May Be a Bernini
A painting that sat in a Vienna museum's storeroom for nearly four decades, unloved and unattributed, is about to step into the spotlight as a work by Gian Lorenzo Bernini — the 17th-century Italian sculptor who designed the baldacchino in St Peter's Basilica and reshaped the face of Baroque Rome.
The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna will unveil Portrait of an Old Man in December as part of an exhibition titled "Bernini, Painter and Sculptor" at Palais Lobkowitz, centring on the newly attributed canvas (The Art Newspaper, 20 August 2026). Fewer than 20 paintings by Bernini are accepted as authentic, and he never signed his work — making every new attribution a high-stakes exercise in connoisseurship, the practice of judging authorship through close looking and comparison.
The painting, an oil on canvas measuring 62 × 47.7 cm and dated to around 1670, depicts the nearly life-size head and shoulders of an elderly man with dishevelled white hair against a dark background, his gaze fixed on the viewer. It entered the museum in 1920, bequeathed by the Viennese collector Richard Lieben, who had bought it in 1900; before that it passed through the hands of Baron Engelshofen, and nothing is known of its earlier provenance — the documented chain of ownership.
The attribution history reads like a guessing game. In 1920 the museum catalogued the portrait as a work by the Paris-based painter Philippe de Champaigne. Since then it has been variously assigned to an anonymous Italian artist, the French painter Jean Jouvenet, the Flemish portraitists Jakob Ferdinand Voet and Erasmus Quellinus the Younger, and more recently the Italian painter Baciccio. Until very recently the museum had settled on "anonymous 17th-century artist working in Rome." In 1989, for want of a firm name, the painting was sent to the storeroom.
Gudrun Swoboda, a curator at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, built the case for Bernini through comparisons with accepted paintings, drawings and sculptures. She points to the portrait's attention to space and anatomy — particularly the skull and facial muscles — and sees parallels with Bernini's marble bust of Louis XIV, now at the Palace of Versailles, especially in the corners of the mouth. She also identifies stylistic links to a self-portrait drawing in the UK's Royal Collection, dated to 1675–80 (The Art Newspaper, 20 August 2026).
Swoboda's most striking argument is technical. She says the paint layers in the face were applied the way a sculptor models a face in clay, using short bristle-brush strokes. A recent scientific examination confirmed that the painting was executed by two different hands. Swoboda believes the face is Bernini's and the lower portion was finished by another artist — possibly one of his sons.
What makes the attribution controversial is timing. It is usually assumed that Bernini ceased to paint around 1650, roughly two decades before the museum dates this portrait. Swoboda also speculates that the sitter could be Mario Chigi (1594–1669), a brother of Pope Alexander VII and a former military leader — which, if correct, would narrow the window considerably.
For a painting that has been called French, Flemish, anonymous and Italian over the course of a century, a name as large as Bernini's is a remarkable turn. Whether the art world agrees will be the conversation the exhibition opens in December.
