Portrait of Felix Platter (1536–1614)

In 1584, when this portrait was painted, Felix Platter was about 48 and near the peak of a long career as Basel's city physician and professor of medicine. The year before, he had published a book on the structure of the human body in which he argued something then unusual: that the seat of sight is the retina, a role long assigned to the lens of the eye. Bock shows him plainly and close up, the face lit carefully against a dark ground, dressed as the respected doctor he was. Platter would go on serving the city through decades of plague and teaching, and hold the office of rector at its university more than once.