베토벤의 초상

By 1819 Beethoven was almost completely deaf and had largely withdrawn from Vienna's concert life. He was pouring himself into one enormous work, the Missa Solemnis, a mass he had begun for a friend's installation as archbishop and would keep revising for years past the deadline. It is that manuscript he holds here. Look at the sheet in his hand and you can make out words from the Credo, the section he was wrestling with while he sat. The commission came from Franz and Antonie Brentano, whom Beethoven called his best friends in the world, and Stieler worked from life over several sessions in the spring of 1820. It is the only portrait Beethoven is known to have actually posed for, which is why nearly every image of him since has borrowed this face.