Christoph Baumgartner

In 1543 the Baumgartners of Augsburg were rising. Five years earlier the merchant family had been admitted to the city's patriciate, and in 1543 the emperor Charles V raised one branch of it to the rank of imperial barons. The museum suggests this portrait may have been made for that occasion. The little Latin slip names the sitter as Christoph Baumgartner, son of Sebald, aged 29, and the year, 1543, is painted above his coat of arms. He wears red silk sleeves under a black jerkin, and behind him a window opens onto a distant mountain landscape, a device borrowed from Netherlandish portraits. Christoph lived until 1586 and held public office in the city more than once.