35. Giovanni Ambrogio de Predis, Maximilian I, 1502
Max was a Hapsburg, and his portrait—though touched up somewhat to improve the shape of his lips and the overhang of his chin—is proof of how urgent it was for dynasts such as himself (or such as the current British royal family) to contract marriages well beyond their gene pool. His marriage to Mary of Burgundy produced his heir, the short-lived Philip the Handsome (see this page), an infinite improvement in Hapsburg looks, though Philip’s heir, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (see this page), was at best only a very slight improvement over his grandfather. The emperor is shown in profile, as if on an ancient coin, the hope being that the solemnity of the presentation will soften the egregiousness of the nose, too famous to be remodeled. (illustration credit 35)
36. Albrecht Dürer, Self-Portrait, 1500
Dürer, the great artistic figure of the Northern European Renaissance, was much influenced by Italian models but was hardly their slavish imitator. Rather, offering no compromise to possible Italian disapproval or puzzlement, he enjoyed injecting quirky Germanic elements into his work. Here, he does something no one before him had done—he created history’s first stand-alone self-portrait. And what do you know? It’s Albrecht as Jesus Christ. Or perhaps Christ as Albrecht. It is, at any rate, the direct ancestor of Rembrandt’s self-portraits as well as those of so many other artists. No one has ever conclusively interpreted the curious positioning of Dürer’s right hand—actually his left, since this portrait was made before a mirror. Dürer’s other hand is not shown because it was the one the artist was using to paint this portrait. Despite the Christ identity and the elaborately coiffed hair, there is no reason to think that this twenty-eight-year-old artist meant to present himself as an unblemished ideal: his eyes are badly misaligned, evidence of Dürer’s underlying self-knowledge. (See also Dürer’s unforgiving nude self-portrait, this page.) (illustration credit 36)
37. Albrecht Dürer, Jakob Fugger, c. 1519
Despite his experimental side, Dürer was deft at depicting things (and people) exactly as they were. Here is a man with such a steady, steely gaze, such a firm mouth, and such an unyielding jaw that he could only be … the world’s most unrelenting banker. Fugger introduced double-entry bookkeeping throughout Europe (after encountering it in Venice); shipped cotton, silks, and spices from their Eastern origins to European markets; and gradually gained a virtual monopoly over the mining of silver and copper. His far-flung European offices kept in touch with one another and with the home office in Augsburg by means of Fugger’s newsletter and his exclusive messenger service—business innovations still relied on in our day. Fugger backed the election of Charles V as Holy Roman Emperor and the election of Leo X as pope. Most European monarchs were in his debt. He seems never to have made a mistake. And in his piety he established homes for the elderly poor, called Fuggerei, still in operation. (illustration credit 37)
38. Raphael, Heraclitus, 1510
This is a detail from Raphael’s large mural The School of Athens, the artist’s dramatically symbolic depiction of the great philosophers of ancient Greece. Heraclitus was known as the “Weeping Philosopher” because of the sadness of his vision of existence. As the model for this figure, Raphael surreptitiously used a fellow contemporary artist, the great Michelangelo. Dejectedly introspective (and not at all sparkly Raphael’s type), the figure even wears Michelangelo’s smelly old boots—the ones he hardly ever took off. The mural is one of an extraordinary series in the Stanze di Raffaello (Raphael Rooms) within the Vatican Palace. (illustration credit 38)
39. Raphael, Portrait of Pope Leo X, 1518
Though Richard Marius calls him “a decent human being,” Leo was also a humanistic sensualist who thought of himself as a fortunate temporal ruler rather than as a spiritual leader who had received a divine call. He was completely unprepared to meet the challenge of Luther. Though Raphael has attempted to put some purpose in his expression, the cardinals on either side somewhat undercut a sense of spiritual seriousness. To the pope’s right stands his smarmy cousin Giulio, a Medici bastard, who would reign as Pope Clement VII. Far more concerned with European power politics than with theological questions, Giulio-Clement would let the Lutheran challenge and then the matter of Henry VIII’s divorce fester unresolved till no resolution was possible. And carrying on in the pleasure-loving pontifical tradition, he left the papacy penniless. (illustration credit 39)
40. Lucas Cranach, Martin Luther as a Monk, 1520 (left) (illustration credit 40)
41. Lucas Cranach, Portrait of Martin Luther, 1529 (right)
Brother Martin was once a bone-thin friar, consistent with his extreme penitential practices. By the time of his marriage in 1529 to Katharina von Bora, however, he had relaxed considerably. Both food and beer were entering his life in ever larger measures. Thereafter, he became even bigger, inspiring the common phrase “as fat as Martin Luther.” (illustration credit 41)
42. Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of Sir Thomas More, 1527 (top left) (illustration credit 42)
43. Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of Erasmus, 1534 (top right) (illustration credit 43)
44. After Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of Henry VIII, 1536–37 (lower left) (illustration credit 44)
45. Hans Holbein the Younger, Anne of Cleves, 1539 (lower right)
The first three subjects each provided inspiration for more than one picture by Holbein, the German master who became the sixteenth century’s most celebrated portrait painter. This portrait of the swaggering Henry is a copy, one of many (commissioned by loyal lords) from the original, which perished in a late-seventeenth-century fire. In actuality, Henry’s legs were quite stumpy, and both the width of his shoulders and the prominence of his codpiece have been much enhanced by stuffing. Unfortunately, Holbein outdid himself with Anne of Cleves, giving her a far more winning aspect than she exuded in person. Henry, enamored of this portrait, set in motion the train of events that would bring the German princess to England’s shores to become Henry’s fourth wife. Seeing Anne in person did nothing for Henry’s codpiece, however, to such an extent that he could never bring himself to sleep with her and soon engineered their divorce. But Anne was an agreeable girl who made the best of things: she remained in England in her own castle as the official “sister” of the king and attended all the royal family parties. (illustration credit 45)
46. Titian, Portrait of Isabella d’Este, 1534–36
Isabella, the domineering marquise of Mantua, considered herself the “First Lady of the Renaissance.” When she was about sixty, she invited Titian to paint her. She was not amused at the result and flew into a rage at Titian (Tiziano Vecellio). So the artist, bowing to the inevitable, repainted Isabella’s face as it might have looked when she was twenty. The marquise was much mollified. (illustration credit 46)
47. Michelangelo, Portrait of Vittoria Colonna, c. 1540
Vittoria, the granddaughter of the ridiculous Federigo da Montefeltro (Plate 32), was the quintessence of sixteenth-century cool. Married at nineteen to a Aragonese prince, whom she came to love, she mourned his long absences as he fought the French in northern Italy; and she arrived at an almost pacifist position against the violence of her times. From her idyllic home on the island of Ischia in the bay of Naples, she sent forth beautiful rime amorose (love poems) and meditations deeply critical of European society in both its political and religious aspects. Her husband’s death from battle wounds, sixteen years after their wedding, left her close to suicide; but she rallied, establishing abiding friendships with some of the leading cultural leaders of her day, especially with Michelangelo. She became more and more part of the growing Catholic wing that wanted conciliation with Martin Luther and other reformers. By the time she died in her late fifties, she was under suspicion by the forces of the Counter-Reformation. (illustration credit 47)
48. Anthonis Mor van Dashorst, A Spanish Knight, 1558
I chose this image, though far less well known than the other portrai
ts in this gallery (perhaps because it hangs in Budapest), for its eloquent humanity. In most of the other faces we can read the limits of human character. This one, it seems to me, speaks of moral strength—what one critic has even called “spiritual elegance.” We are not certain of the man’s identity, though his gold buttons and red fleur-de-lis mark him as a knight of the Order of Saint James. He was probably a well-known courtier, close to the Spanish king, Philip II. The artist has taken the trouble to paint his subject’s somewhat sparse moustache and beard hair by hair. In the modeling of the face there is a subtlety that is reminiscent of Titian at his best. (illustration credit 48)
49. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Painter and the Buyer, c. 1565
This sketch has long been taken as a self-mocking self-portrait of Bruegel himself—the artist tired, dissatisfied perhaps with his work and certainly with the price being offered for it; the silly would-be buyer, beguiled, though nearly blind and already dipping his right hand into his purse to produce his lowball offer. Bruegel’s origins are a mystery. He may have come from Antwerp, though from which level of society has long been a matter of controversy. That his subjects were nearly all peasants has led some critics to the shaky conclusion that he was from the peasant class. That he found much comedy, satire, and even surrealism in the interactions of peasant life is undeniable, but that he awarded the peasants as much dignity and humanity as anyone else is just as undebatable. He ended his days in Brussels in his mid-forties, by which time he was, like Vittoria Colonna, feeling political pressure from the forces of Reformation and Counter-Reformation. (illustration credit 49)
50. Tintoretto (?), Veronica Franco, c. 1575
Veronica took up the life of a Venetian courtesan upon walking out on her husband after one year of marriage. Though she faced intense competition (prostitutes made up more than a tenth of Venice’s population), she became well known—among visiting foreigners as well as Venetians—for her surpassing charms. She had been educated with her brothers by private tutors and felt at ease discussing philosophy and literature with her well-born customers. Her own poetry was admired for its combination of frankness and discretion. She had many friends, both among her fellow courtesans and among the Venetian literati, and perhaps but one enemy—a dissatisfied customer who wrote anonymously against Veronica as “a cow that could satisfy the entire Ghetto,” the neighborhood of Venice’s Jews. (Nothing like mixing a little anti-Semitism with your anti-feminism.) Veronica gave as good as she got and rallied other women to her defense. The man was revealed to be a local priest, who was later named bishop of Corfu and eventually died of syphilis. Veronica died in her mid-forties after weeks of fever, leaving a substantial will to provide for her two children as well as for prostitutes wishing to leave their profession. (illustration credit 50)
51. Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Portrait of Rudolf II, 1591
Arcimboldo was a novelty painter whose arresting jumbles of elements in the shapes of men delighted Europe. None of his compositions won greater fame than this portrait of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, great-great-grandson of Maximilian I. The artist, born in Milan, had spent many years in Vienna, then in Prague after the emperor made it his new capital. Just before Arcimboldo’s death, however, he returned to his birthplace and there created his portrait of Rudolf as Vertumnus, Roman god of gardens. Rudolf received the picture in Prague, fell in love with it, and would sit for hours gazing upon his own image disguised as an abundant collection of vegetables, flowers, and fruit. (illustration credit 51)
52. Sofonisba Anguissola, Self-Portrait at Easel, 1556 (illustration credit 52)
53. Sofonisba Anguissola, Self-Portrait, 1610 (illustration credit 53)
Born to a Cremona family of minor nobility, Sofonisba knew from an early age that she must become a painter, even though no one in Italy had ever heard of a woman taking up such a profession. Her doting father sent her to study with a local artist when she was fourteen. She was, however, forbidden by the customs of the times from sketching strange men or studying anatomy by viewing nude male models. So she became a portrait painter, mostly painting the members of her own family, pictures her father would send off here and there to encourage some publicity for his daughter. One of her portraits reached the eighty-two-year-old Michelangelo. His admiration bore fruit in an epistolary friendship and finally a visit by Sofonisba to Rome. Thanks to this association with il Divino, the young woman was invited to Madrid as court painter to Philip II. The sojourn in Spain eventuated in the artist’s marriage to a Spanish grandee, who would later die in a shipwreck, after which Sofonisba returned to her native Cremona, this time with a new, noble, and very young husband who had captained her ship of return. Eventually, they moved to Palermo, where they had first met and where Sofonisba would die in her early nineties. Her self-portrait at the age of seventy-eight (and another when she was nearly ninety) demonstrates that the artist had none of the scruples about her image that were evidenced by the outraged Isabella d’Este. Sofonisba was content to serve as truth teller.
NORTHERN IMAGES
54. Pieter Bruegel, Beggars, 1568 (illustration credit 54)
55. Pieter Bruegel, Wedding Dance, 1566 (illustration credit 55)
56. Pieter Bruegel, The Fall of Icarus, c. 1558 (illustration credit 56)
57. Pieter Bruegel, The Magpie on the Gallows, 1568 (illustration credit 57)
58. Rembrandt, Self-Portrait, 1627 (illustration credit 58)
59. Rembrandt, Self-Portrait, 1634 (illustration credit 59)
60. Rembrandt, Self-Portrait, 1659 (illustration credit 60)
61. Rembrandt, Self-Portrait, c. 1669 (illustration credit 61)
62. Rembrandt, The Return of the Prodigal Son, c. 1669 (illustration credit 62)
BY THOMAS CAHILL
THE HINGES OF HISTORY
Introductory Volume:
How the Irish Saved Civilization
The Making of the Ancient World:
The Gifts of the Jews
Desire of the Everlasting Hills
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea
The Making of the Modern World:
Mysteries of the Middle Ages
Heretics and Heroes
One additional volume is planned on
the making of the modern world.
ALSO BY THOMAS CAHILL
A Literary Guide to Ireland (with Susan Cahill)
Jesus’ Little Instruction Book
Pope John XXIII
A Saint on Death Row
Heretics and Heroes Page 39