Portrait of an Unknown Man and His Wife

For a long time the man in this double portrait was thought to be a king. He was identified as Christian II of Denmark, the exiled Danish ruler whose wife was a sister of the emperor Charles V, which is why a Netherlandish court painter might plausibly have shown him. Today no one is certain who he and his wife were. Bernard van Orley worked in Brussels as court painter to Margaret of Austria, who governed the Low Countries, and he gave his sitters the sober richness of the northern courts. Beside the figure runs a line from the Gospel of Matthew, A fructibus eorum cognoscetis eos, by their fruits you shall know them. On the back of the panel there was once a coat of arms that might have named him. It has worn away.