"Late16th century, Italy" turns out to be a copy after Rubens

Sabbe, from Dijon in France, sell on 20 September 2015 the artworks from a castle (the kind of sales where many great artworks resurfaced in the first half of the 20th century), a nice collection though lacking obvious highlights. Many items seem somewhat overpriced or too optimistically described.

Lot 135 is described as an Italian School, late 16th century Ecce Homo, and estimated at 2,500 to 3,000 Euro.

The image looked familiar, and some searching lead me to Francisco Pacheco, early 17th century (1564-1664) Spanish painter. The above painting was sold in Italy in 2006 as an original by Pacheco, but I'm not really convinced that the quality of the work is good enough, to put it mildly.

So, the search continued, and as so often it turned out to be a reverse copy of a well-known work, in this case a ca. 1610 "Ecce Homo" by Rubens, now in the Hermitage. Whether the copy for sale is Italian or not is hard to know, but late 16th century it certainly isn't. The estimate seems over the top for a rather mediocre copy though (although at least in the torso of Christ, it stays much closer to the original than the "Pacheco" version does).

By the way, Lot 11 of the same auction, described tentatively as "Diana and Actaeon?", actually depicts Diana and Endymion. A quite nice picture and better value for money than the similarly-priced Ecce Homo at an estimated 2,500 to 2,800 Euro.