No object, no name

This is the limiting case of the whole system. The title records a saint and declines to say which, because the record has nothing to go on: a head, alone, without the object that would name it. Strip the wheel from Catherine, the keys from Peter, the lion from Jerome, and what remains is a face — and faces, unlike attributes, are not standardised. That is precisely why the convention exists. A saint is identifiable at a distance because of a thing, and a saint shown without the thing becomes anonymous the moment the picture leaves the wall it was made for.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1516 and gives the Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel, Switzerland as its location. The dimensions are 23.5 x 21.5 cm — one of the smallest entries in this collection, and close to square. It is filed under portraiture and Religion, with Northern Renaissance as the style and German as the nationality; the measured colour family is ochre.

The size is part of the problem

At these dimensions there is no room for a lion, a wheel or a tower. A head at this scale is a study of a face, and a study of a face cannot be captioned by an object it has no space to contain. The record and the picture arrive at the same silence from opposite directions: the title cannot name him, and the panel is too small to have told it how.