Ritratto di Jakob Muffel

By 1526 Nuremberg had become one of the first big German cities to go over to Luther's Reformation, and Albrecht Durer, near the end of his own life, turned to painting the men who ran it. Jakob Muffel was one of them, a city councillor who had risen to serve as Nuremberg's mayor. Durer sets him against a plain green ground with nothing to distract from the long, spare face and the sidelong, thoughtful eyes, the kind of sober likeness the new Protestant city approved of. The Latin inscription across the top gives only his name, his age and the year. Muffel died that April of 1526, and Durer himself would follow two years later.