Michael Sittow
1525 · Livonian Confederation · Early Netherlandish painting
The story
Reval, the Hanseatic trading town on the Baltic now called Tallinn, is not where you would expect a painter for the Spanish crown to come from. Michael Sittow was born there around the 1460s, the son of a local painter, and went west to learn his craft in Bruges, quite possibly in the busy workshop of Hans Memling, the leading portraitist of the Low Countries.
By 1492 he was in Spain, working for Queen Isabella of Castile, and he became one of the best-paid artists she employed, known at her court as Melchior the German. He painted tiny, jewel-like devotional panels alongside Juan de Flandes, another northern painter in her service, and produced portraits of the royals whose marriages were stitching Europe together.
After Isabella died, Sittow kept moving between the courts her relatives controlled, painting for Philip the Fair, Margaret of Austria and Christian II of Denmark. Late in life he returned to Tallinn, joined the painters' guild there, and died in 1525 in the town where he had begun.
