The Painter Hans Burgkmair the Elder and His Wife Anna, née Allerlay

Hans Burgkmair was 56 and his wife Anna 52 when this double portrait was dated, in May 1529, and the painter wrote both ages into the inscription at the top. Both look straight out at us while Anna holds up a convex mirror, and in it their faces show as two skulls. The rhyme above spells it out in Augsburg German: such was the form of us both, but in the mirror nothing but that. The mirror itself carries the words 'know thyself' and 'O death'. For a long time the panel passed as Burgkmair's own work, though it bears the signature of his younger fellow townsman Lukas Furtenagel, and the museum thinks it may repeat a lost original. Burgkmair died two years later, in 1531.