Portrait of a Benedictine Monk (?) Aged Forty, at Prayer

Halfway up the right side of this small panel, Gossaert signed in abbreviated Latin, Ioannes Malbodius pingebat, John of Maubeuge was painting this. He came from Maubeuge, a town in Hainaut, and from 1516 on he used only this learned Latin form of his name. The tense is the point. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder reported that the great painters of antiquity, Apelles among them, signed in the imperfect, as though the work were still unfinished and open to correction, and Renaissance artists who had read him took up the habit.

The sitter is unknown. The Louvre's title calls him a Benedictine monk aged 40, at prayer, and keeps a question mark over his order. The portrait is dated 1526, a few years before Gossaert's death. It was sold at auction in Louvain in 1861 and given to the Louvre in 1872 by the lawyer and collector Jean-Baptiste Foucart.