Portrait of an Arbitrator or Mathematician

The man in black is doing sums. He holds a piece of chalk and writes figures straight onto the tabletop, and on that same table, also in chalk, Barthel Beham left the date, 1529. For a long time the museum called him an umpire, keeping score at an archery contest or a ball game. Today it prefers to call him a Rechenmeister, a master of reckoning, the name German cities of the time gave to the teachers who taught arithmetic to merchants' sons. The fixed stare, the museum says, shows the calculation going on inside his head. A glass of wine stands beside him, and his seal ring carries a coat of arms with the initials HS, which nobody has yet matched to a name. He has a companion portrait of a woman, painted the same year, and the same table runs through both panels.