Hans Muelich

Between about 1558 and 1570 Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria had the Penitential Psalms set by his court composer, Orlando di Lasso, copied into two huge parchment volumes, and Hans Mielich painted them. Page after page carries his miniatures, borders and portraits, and on one sheet Lasso himself appears among the musicians of the court. The two volumes are among the chief treasures of the Bavarian State Library in Munich.

Mielich, whose name is also spelled Muelich, was born in Munich in 1516, the son of a city painter. In the 1530s he worked in Regensburg, where he came to know the work of Albrecht Altdorfer, the town's leading painter. He went to Rome in 1541 and joined the Munich painters' guild in 1543. From 1552 he drew the jewels of Duchess Anna, the duke's wife, one by one for the court, and he painted Munich's patricians, grave faces above furs and black cloth.

His last great commission was the high altar of the Church of Our Lady in Ingolstadt, the Bavarian university town, finished in 1572 for the university's hundredth anniversary. He died in Munich the following year.