Portrait of Jacob of Savoy

The man in this small panel is Jacques of Savoy, Count of Romont, painted by the Bruges master Memling around 1470, when the sitter was still in his twenties. Within a few years he would be one of Charles the Bold's senior commanders in the Burgundian Wars. Swiss Confederate armies shattered the Burgundians at Grandson and Murten in 1476, and the count's own lands around Lake Geneva, the Vaud, passed from his family to Bern for good. Turn the panel over and you find his full coat of arms held up by two lions against a black ground, the heraldry of the very rank those defeats would hollow out. So the likeness of a man who spent his last campaigns fighting the Swiss now rests in Basel, on Swiss ground.