The subject is the Ecce Homo: the moment when Pilate presents the scourged Christ to the crowd and to the chief priests. The face is bruised, swollen, and streaked with blood. Yet the painting does not dwell solely on suffering. There is something strange and powerful in this head: an almost Olympian presence, a robust beauty that resists humiliation. The almond-shaped eyes, full lips, and blond beard evoke less a broken man than a humiliated ancient god. The vivid red mantle on the left is an attribute of the Passion: it is the robe of mockery with which the Roman soldiers clothed Christ in order to ridicule him as King of the Jews. The work belongs to the Parmese milieu of the second quarter of the sixteenth century, a precise moment when the heirs of Correggio and Parmigianino were seeking their own artistic voice. Its stylistic horizon is twofold: on the one hand Parma, on the other Mantua —that is, the art of Giulio Romano, particularly the Sala dei Giganti and the Sala di Amore e Psiche at the Palazzo Te, with their distinctive blend of splendor and excess. It is from this tension that the painting emerges: a Parmese elegance infused with a harsher, almost caricatural expressiveness. The two names that naturally come to mind are Francesco Maria Rondani (Parma, – ) and Michelangelo Anselmi (Lucca, – documented in Parma until ). Rondani, the artist closest to Correggio, occasionally pushed his gures toward a heightened emotional intensity, notably in the frescoes of the Centoni Chapel in Parma Cathedral. Anselmi went even further in deformation: his scorched-looking faces, dusky palette, and taste for the grotesque reappear in his works at San Giovanni Evangelista, the Steccata, and in his drawings the head of Hercules in Hercules Overcoming Antaeus in the Louvre (inv. RF ) is not far removed from the present gure. The most compelling attribution, as suggested by Marco Tanzi, gravitates around A