Portrait of Jacob Schwytzer

In 1564 Zurich had been a Protestant city for a generation, its churches stripped of images decades before. A painter after grand work turned instead to the living, to the men who ran the city. Jacob Schwytzer was one of them, the standard-bearer who carried Zurich's banner in the field. Tobias Stimmer, then only 25, painted him at full length and life size, the whole man standing before you rather than a head and shoulders. On the back of the panel is a rhymed verse, and an older description records that it once accompanied a painted figure of Death. The grand living presence on the front, the reminder of mortality on the reverse, kept for the family who owned it rather than for any visitor.