Portrait of David Joris

This is the portrait of a man who spent his last years pretending to be someone else. When it was painted, around 1540, David Joris was one of the most wanted religious figures in the Low Countries, a former glass painter turned Anabaptist prophet whose visions and pamphlets had put a price on his head. A few years later he slipped into Basel with his family and his savings and settled as a respectable citizen under a false name, Johann van Brugge, joining the Reformed church and living quietly among neighbours who had no idea whom they were dealing with. He died in that disguise in 1556 and was buried with honour in the church of Saint Leonard. Three years on, the secret came out, reported to the authorities by a member of his own family. In May 1559 the city exhumed his body and burned it along with his books, as the remains of a heretic. The panel here, worked in tempera on wood, is one of the few likenesses that survive of the man Basel knew only as Johann van Brugge.