O Imperador Maximiliano I

Dürer drew Maximilian from life in Augsburg in 1518, sketching the Holy Roman Emperor during the imperial diet there. This oil portrait came afterward, and by the time Dürer worked it up the emperor was already dead, gone in January 1519. So the man looking slightly aside here was being painted from memory and a drawing, not from a sitter in the room. In his hands he holds a pomegranate, his personal emblem, its many seeds packed under one skin standing for the many peoples held together under one crown. Some read the fruit as a quiet stand-in for the imperial orb he can no longer hold. Dürer signs the work with a long inscription praising the dead ruler, and turns what began as a court likeness into something closer to a memorial.