Портрет африканца (Кристоф ле Мор?)

In the early 1500s Europeans usually painted Africans only as servants at the edge of someone else's scene. This is the earliest surviving European portrait to treat a specific Black man as its sole subject, dressed as a gentleman of the Brussels court with a sword at his hip and fine gloves in his hand. The small badge on his cap shows the Virgin of Halle, a pilgrimage shrine near Brussels that the court liked to visit, so he had made that journey himself. He may be Christophle le More, an African bodyguard of Emperor Charles the Fifth, though that identification remains a guess.