Pierre Aymeric

Turn this little panel over and the sitter speaks. On the back, in his own hand, Pierre Aymeric wrote that he came from Saint-Flour and lived in Lyon, that he was about 26 years old, and that he had been portrayed there by Corneille de La Haye, from Flanders, painter to Queen Eleanor, the wife of King Francis I. He dated the note 11 April 1534, after Easter, and signed it.

The panel is only 16.5 centimetres tall. When it came to light in 1962 it gave scholars a fixed point for rebuilding the work of Corneille de Lyon, who signed nothing, and the Louvre bought it in 1976. Its label today is more careful. The museum now lists it as a product of Corneille's workshop rather than of his own hand, although the inscription names him. Aymeric, a merchant, later served as one of the consuls of Lyon, in 1554.