Bernhard Strigel

Bernhard Strigel spent almost his whole life in one Swabian town, Memmingen, running the busy workshop his family had built there. Born around 1460 and trained probably under the Ulm painter Bartholomäus Zeitblom, he might have stayed a capable provincial master of altarpieces if the most powerful man in Europe had not taken an interest in his portraits.

That man was Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, who summoned Strigel to Vienna in 1515 and again in 1520 to portray the imperial family. The group he painted then is his best-known work: Maximilian beside his late first wife Mary of Burgundy and their dead son Philip the Fair, the living and the long-gone assembled as one dynasty for the record. The emperor kept him in favour, employed him repeatedly at Augsburg, Innsbruck and Vienna, and eventually raised him into the nobility.

Strigel's portraits are plain and watchful, faces set against dark grounds with little flattery. He kept working in Memmingen until his death in 1528, still the head of the family shop that had made his name.