Sneaking back with another post from Belgrade, as I was intrigued by so many of the artworks in the National Museum of Serbia. This is Man with a Rosary, a sixteenth-century oil painting on a wooden panel by the Flemish artist Joos van Cleve. The sitter’s identity has been lost, but his expensive fur collar suggests that he was prosperous, while the rosary prominently displayed between his fingers presents him as a man of faith.
Van Cleve became a master in Antwerp in 1511, later held senior positions in the city’s painters’ guild and operated a substantial workshop. He was sufficiently well regarded as a portrait painter to work for the French court, where he painted Francis I. However, I found this unidentified man rather more intriguing than another formal portrait of a king, as there are already rather a lot of those.
I wonder whether the sitter would be pleased that his portrait has survived, although I imagine he would consider it sub-optimal that no-one now knows who he was. He evidently budgeted for the fur collar and a leading portrait painter, but not for a sufficiently durable name badge. Nearly five centuries later, we therefore know how he dressed, what he looked like and how he wanted to be remembered, but not the relatively fundamental detail of what he was called. It is an unexpectedly successful piece of personal branding apart from that minor omission. His name disappeared, but his face has survived in Belgrade and, after all this time, he still looks quietly pleased about the arrangement.