Master of the Mornauer Portrait

The single picture that gives this anonymous painter his name almost hid who made it. It is a portrait of Alexander Mornauer, town clerk of the Bavarian town of Landshut, a broad-faced man in dark clothes holding a letter addressed to himself. Mornauer held that municipal post from 1464 until 1488, which is roughly when he sat for it.

At some later point a restorer tried to turn the panel into something more saleable. When the National Gallery in London bought it in 1990, examination showed that both the brilliant blue background and the shape of Mornauer's tall hat had been added long after, almost certainly to pass the work off as a Hans Holbein, a far more valuable name. Cleaning stripped the additions away and returned the sitter to his plainer original setting.

Who actually painted it is still open. Scholars have proposed the Tyrolean painter Michael Pacher and the travelling artist Joos Amman von Ravensburg, without reaching agreement, and the master's hand is now traced through a small group of other portraits and religious panels placed in southern Germany between about 1460 and 1488.