Portrait of a Beardless Man

The man in this small panel told us his age and nothing else. The line across the top reads, in the German of his day, that when people counted the year 1521 he was 33 years old. There is no coat of arms, no letter, no tool of a trade, and his name is lost. The museum thinks he was one of the well-off merchants or mining entrepreneurs of Schwaz, the Tyrolean town where Hans Maler kept his workshop. The panel itself is Swiss stone pine, a wood of the Alps. In 1965 the Bundesbank, West Germany's central bank, put this anonymous face on its 500-mark note, and he stayed there until 1995.