Portrait of the Nuremberg Painter Michael Wolgemut

Dürer painted this to remember the man who taught him. Michael Wolgemut ran the Nuremberg workshop where the teenage Dürer trained in the 1480s, and by 1516 the old master was in his 80s. Dürer sets him against a plain ground and spares him nothing, the reddened eyelids, the loose skin, the thin white hair, because he held that a true likeness came from exact looking rather than flattery. Across the panel he wrote that Albrecht Dürer had portrayed his teacher Michael Wolgemut in 1516. Three years later he returned to it and added a second line: that Wolgemut had died, aged 82, on Saint Andrew's Day of 1519.