Portrait de Hieronymus Holzschuher

Dürer painted this in Nuremberg in 1526, two years before his death and in the thick of the Reformation, which had split his city. The sitter, Hieronymus Holzschuher, was a senator of Nuremberg and a firm supporter of Luther, and Dürer knew him as a friend. By now Dürer was less interested in flattery than in truth. He records the man at 57 with unnerving directness, the swept-back grey hair, the reddish curls of the beard picked out one by one, the sharp blue-grey eyes fixed on you. There is no setting at all, just the face turning out of a plain blue ground, which throws all the weight onto that gaze. It was painted the same year as his portraits of two other Nuremberg notables, and it hangs now in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin.