Follower of Paolo Veronese
The story
Across 16th-century Europe, princes and collectors wanted to know what the Ottoman sultans looked like, and painters supplied them in whole sets, one sultan after another in turban and silk, the likenesses often passed from copy to copy. Venice, which traded with Constantinople and fought it by turns, was one of the places such sets came from.
Follower of Paolo Veronese is the label a museum uses for a painter who worked in Veronese's manner and whose own name has been lost. It makes no claim that he ever trained in the master's studio.
Sultans carrying this name include Selim I, Bayezid I, Murad II and Murad III, each about 70 centimetres tall, in the Bavarian State Painting Collections. Their series came from the Kunstkammer of the dukes of Bavaria in Munich, the princely cabinet of rarities, and the latest ruler in it, Murad III, came to the throne in 1574. Also under this name is a small pair of virtues, Faith and Charity, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
