Portrait of Fridrich Rorbach

Conrad Faber, the leading portraitist of the patrician families of Frankfurt-am-Main, painted this panel as one half of a marriage pair. It is dated 1532; its companion likeness of the sitter’s wife, Katherina Knoblauchin, is now in the National Gallery of Ireland, and the two share the same fanciful mountain landscape behind the figures. Fridrich Rorbach appears in a broad feathered hat and a richly furred coat, his name, age, coat of arms and the date inscribed on the back of the panel, which the pair would originally have framed as a document of their union. The crisp detail and the heraldic self-confidence of the image belong to the artistic flowering of the German cities in the early sixteenth century, when the wealth of the free imperial towns supported a vigorous school of secular portraiture. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.