Portrait of a man

In 1506 Augsburg was one of the richest cities north of the Alps, an imperial free city where German merchants managed money for emperors and popes. Hans Burgkmair the Elder was its leading painter, and around these years Emperor Maximilian I began handing him the vast woodcut projects that would fill the next decade. This small portrait belongs to his quieter trade. The sitter is unnamed, a man of the merchant class against a dark ground, with nothing to look at but his face and his hands. Burgkmair paints him in the older German manner, close and sober, even as Italian ideas about light and grandeur were already reaching Augsburg along the same trade routes that made the city rich.