Portrait of an Old Man (Pius Joachim)

In 1512 a young doctor of theology named Balthasar Hubmaier, not yet the radical reformer he would become, acquired this portrait, by then some 37 years old. It shows an ordinary elderly man in a fur hat and spectacles, holding a rosary, and no one now remembers who he was. Hubmaier turned him into a saint. He had a gold halo set behind the head and, on the back of the panel, wrote a Latin dedication to Saint Joachim, the father of the Virgin Mary, giving his own age as 27 years and 17 days and the date in late summer of 1512. The name on the front, Pius Joachim, comes from that dedication. Hubmaier later led an Anabaptist congregation and was burned in Vienna in 1528. The spectacles give the original sitter away, a small worldly detail no painter of the time would have granted a biblical saint.