Portrait of Bernhard Meyer zum Pfeil of Basel

The inscription gives the year 1513 in one corner and, in the other, that the sitter is 25 years old. The young man is Bernhard Meyer zum Pfeil, from a Basel merchant family, and in 1513 he was still just that, a cloth trader with a long career ahead of him. Nothing in the calm face hints that this same man would end up mayor of Basel, holding the office from 1548 until his death ten years later, steering the city through the aftermath of the Reformation. There is a small catch. The name and the coats of arms that identify him were not part of the original painting. They were added later, probably still in the 16th or early 17th century, by someone who knew, or believed they knew, whose portrait this was. Strip those additions away and you are left with an unnamed Basel gentleman of 25, painted about two years before the painter Hans Holbein the Younger first settled in the city.