This sketch painted by the great Sienese painter Beccafumi in 1546 is one of the most fascinating obscurities in art history. It is one of the lesser known pieces at the Louvre eventhough it looks well ahead more than 300 years without any pretension or will but only by chance. The style in which it is painted must have seemed ultra modern not only to his contemporaries but also to Beccafumi himself for it clearly shows signs of abstraction which even in sketches of that time were unusual, given the fact that the art of painting had just reached the highest level of naturalism in portraying people with virtually photographic precision. If you hang this picture next to a Cezanne portrait of roughly 330 years later they truly seem to come from the same period. Imagine Bach having written „Sympathy for the devil“!