Marriage Coat of Arms of the Families Duerer and Holper. Verso of the Albrecht Dürer the Elder portrait

Most visitors see only the front of Dürer's portrait of his father. Turn the panel over and there is a second painting from the same year, 1490. Two coats of arms lean together on it. One belongs to the Holper family, the family of Dürer's mother, Barbara. The other, an open door, belongs to the Dürers, and it is almost a pun. The family had come from a village in Hungary called Ajtós, a word that means door, and after settling in Nuremberg his father shortened the name to Dürer. Painting joined family arms on the back of a portrait was ordinary practice in German workshops, a way of recording a marriage on the object itself.