Point of View #16

Long not on show to the public: from July 22, Point of View # 16 showcases two early portraits by Christoph Amberger (Kaufbeuren c. 1500/05 – 1562 Augsburg), a Renaissance painter from Augsburg, that depict the patrician Ulrich Ehinger and his wife Ursula, née Meuting. In his best works Amberger combines ideas informed by Northern Italian painting with local traditions, and today he is regarded as one of the leading German artists of the generation after Dürer. The exhibition focuses not only this interesting artist – the world’s largest collection of his work is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum – but also on the two sitters, who were identified only a few years ago. Together with his elder brother Henry, Ulrich (Konstanz 1485 – 1537 Valladolid) was one of the best-known merchants from southern Germany in Spain, where they were agents of the Welsers, a merchant family from Augsburg who were among the leading financiers of the notoriously broke Emperor Charles V (emperor from 1519, King of Spain from 1516).

The two portraits were produced around 1531/33 and emphasise the sitters’ elevated social rank, a result of Ulrich’s commercial success and his financial dealings with the Spanish crown. The cross of Saint James on his doublet identifies him as a knight of the Order of Santiago (Spanish: Santiago (actually Sant Jago), i.e. Saint James) whose grandmaster was Emperor Charles V himself. Even the small silver scallop-shaped casket on the parapet that Ursula (Augsburg c. 1507 – 1588 Augsburg) has just opened may be read as a reference to the royal Spanish order of which the knights’ wives were also members.

Born into one of Augsburg’s leading merchant families, Ursula married Ulrich Ehinger in 1530; by 1533 at the latest he had settled in his wife’s hometown. The couple’s ties to Charles V probably also explain the remarkable fact that Amberger adopted motifs clearly informed by two portraits of the monarch he had produced in, respectively, 1530 (it survives in copies only) and 1532 (Berlin, Staatliche Museen). Note also the pomander watch in Ulrich’s left hand, one of the earliest extant depictions of a watch in European art.

Point of View # 16 is installed in the gallery housing the highlights of German Renaissance painting where Point of View # 15 - Cranach’s Judith with the Head of Holofernes - is also still on show. Our next Point of View, a painting by the Venetian artist Jacopo Bassano, will also be showcased in the appropriate setting – in his case the Italian Renaissance Galleries.