Les Amants de Gotha

Almost every painted panel that survives from German lands around 1480 shows a saint, a Madonna, a scene from scripture. This one shows two people in love and nothing else, which makes it the oldest large secular double portrait to come down to us from Germany. A man and a woman lean together beneath scrolling banners. He wears a wreath of wild roses; she holds a single rose and toys with the lacing at his collar. The words on the banderoles carry an exchange between the two. They are probably a real couple, most likely a young count of Hanau and his bride, though that certainty has faded with time. The anonymous painter is known only as the Master of the Housebook, named after a book of drawings once kept in a noble family's library.