Portrait of Hendrik Liberti

He is holding his own music. The sheet carries a canon for four voices, and the notes on it can genuinely be read, although the words underneath cannot. Other versions of the portrait, and an engraving made after it, supplied the missing text: ars longa, vita brevis, art is long and life is short. The musician is Hendrik Liberti, born in Groningen around 1600, who took the organ of Antwerp cathedral in March 1628. Seven years before that he had published a book of his own motets in the city. Van Dyck painted him between 1627 and 1632, the years he spent back in Antwerp, and a variant of the picture was engraved by Pieter de Jode for the Iconography, van Dyck's series of printed portraits of people he thought worth recording. That print is why the name attached to this face has held. Brussels offered Liberti the court organ in 1635 and he stayed where he was.