Christoph Amberger

Christoph Amberger painted the faces of the richest city in 16th-century Germany. He worked in Augsburg, home of the Fugger banking family whose loans underwrote emperors, and he became the portraitist the city's merchant patricians turned to when they wanted to be shown in the confident Italian manner.

Little is fixed about his early life, not even exactly where or when he was born, though he trained in Augsburg, probably under the painter Leonhard Beck, and married Beck's daughter. A study trip to northern Italy left its mark on his colour. When the emperor Charles V held an Imperial Diet, a grand political assembly, in Augsburg in 1530, Amberger painted his portrait, and the sitter was pleased with it.

He kept almost entirely to portraits, and that has cost him attention, because the towering reputation of his contemporary Hans Holbein the Younger has stood in front of him ever since. He is often called the last major painter of the Augsburg Renaissance, and he died there in 1562.