男子肖像

Dürer signed and dated this near the end of his life, in the mid-1520s, in Nuremberg. By then his home city had gone over to the Reformation, and Dürer — Germany's most famous artist — was painting fewer commissions and more portraits of the men around him, though this sitter's name is lost. He returned to a plain half-length format he'd mostly abandoned decades earlier, all the attention thrown onto the face and the hands against a dark ground. The picture has a long afterlife. In 1632 the city of Nuremberg gave it, together with Dürer's famous 1498 self-portrait, to Charles I of England. It later passed into the Spanish royal collection, which is how a Nuremberg man's face ended up in Madrid.