Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg,

1523

Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg (1490–1545) antagonized Martin Luther through the sale of papal indulgences to repay an astronomic loan from the banker Jacob Fugger, which he had borrowed to secure the position of Bishop of Mainz. (This is the smaller of two engraved portraits made by Dürer, the first of which had been commissioned by the Cardinal in 1519.) As is characteristic of other Northern European bust portraits of patrons and intellectuals, Albrecht’s image is accompanied by a Latin epigram inscribed on a tablet intended to evoke ancient Roman tombstones. Here the hexameter "This is what his eyes, his cheeks, his mouth looked like" is an adaptation from Virgil’s Aeneid.