Margrave Casimir of Brandenburg-Kulmbach

When Cranach painted him in 1522, Casimir of Brandenburg-Kulmbach, a Hohenzollern prince ruling in Franconia, was about 40 and had already deposed his own father. In 1515 he and his brother George removed Margrave Frederick, whose lavish spending had sunk the family's lands in debt, and shut him in a tower room of the Plassenburg, the castle above Kulmbach. The old man stayed there for 12 years. Casimir kept to the old Church and to the Habsburgs while his brother went over to the Reformation. Three years after this portrait, when the peasants of Franconia rose in 1525, he crushed the revolt so harshly that he was remembered as the Bloodhound. In the town of Kitzingen, after promising mercy, his men blinded 58 townspeople. He died in 1527 at Buda, of dysentery, on campaign in Hungary for the Habsburg archduke Ferdinand. Some versions of this likeness hang the chain of the Order of the Swan, his family's order, around his neck. This Vienna panel, which scholars take as Cranach's original, has none.