Portrait of a Knight of an Order

A banderole in this portrait carries five Latin words, VIVE MEMOR LETI FUGIT HORA. Live mindful of death, the hour is flying. The line comes from the Roman satirist Persius, and Bruyn backs it up with a skull and an hourglass. Above, he painted the year, 1531, and the sitter's age, 37. That is nearly everything the panel tells us about the man. The title says only that he was a knight of an order, and neither the order nor the name has been established. Bruyn spent his career portraying the townspeople of Cologne and the nobility of the Lower Rhine, and the museum reads this panel as one more of those likenesses. It belonged to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, the Habsburg governor of the Spanish Netherlands, whose collection became the core of the Vienna picture gallery.