Portrait of an Architect

We do not know who this man is, and we do not know who painted him. What we can read is in his hand: he holds a pair of compasses, the tool of anyone who set out lines on a building site or a drawing board. So he is remembered by his trade rather than his name, and the catalogue calls him simply the architect. The panel was made around 1480, most likely by a Bavarian master in southern Germany, at a moment when portraits of ordinary working professionals, and not only princes and saints, were becoming something worth commissioning. The compasses do double duty. They point to how he earned his living, and they were also an old emblem of measure and reason. In 2021 the picture travelled to Amsterdam for a Rijksmuseum show of Renaissance faces, still nameless after five centuries.