Emperor Maximilian I

On 28 June 1518 Dürer was let into a small room high up in the bishop's palace at Augsburg, where the imperial diet was meeting, and drew Maximilian from life in charcoal. He noted the date and the place on the sheet. The emperor was 59 and had come to press the electors into accepting his grandson Charles as his successor. They refused, and he died the following January. This canvas is dated 1519, so the man was already dead when it was painted. The same drawn head was carried over onto it. Dürer left the picture unsigned, worked on unprimed linen, and used it to settle the panel version now in Vienna, which carries a Latin inscription where this one has German. The emperor holds a pomegranate, his personal emblem, in the place where an orb would sit. The canvas stayed in Dürer's own house and passed later to the Nuremberg collector Willibald Imhoff.