Pompejus Occo (1483-1537), Banker, Merchant and Humanist

Pompejus Occo came to Amsterdam around 1511 as the agent of the Fuggers, the banking house of Augsburg, and he also handled money for King Christian II of Denmark. His house, known as Het Paradijs, was a meeting place for scholars and artists, and he commissioned woodcuts from several of them, among them Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen, the father of the man who painted this panel around 1531. Dirck Jacobsz shows him behind a stone ledge in a beret and a coat lined with spotted fur, against a mountain landscape. Occo's coat of arms, a golden eagle on a blue field, hangs from a branch at the upper right. The panel's authorship was not always so clear. At a London sale in 1895 it went under the name of Jan van Scorel, the Utrecht painter who had studied in Italy.