Portrait of a man, possibly a pilgrim,

1520s

After sojourns in Venice and Rome and a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1520, the ecclesiastic and painter Jan van Scorel returned to Utrecht in 1524. There he stood at the forefront of the first generation of Netherlandish Romanists, and was renowned for importing to the Low Countries visual idioms of the art of the Italian peninsula, especially motifs from Roman painting. Scorel’s expertise in the foreign style bolstered his popularity with well-traveled patrons, a factor instrumental in his ability to found a tradition of representations of pilgrimage brotherhoods comprised of such pious and wealthy individuals. The likeness seen here is probably an example of this type of portraiture, and corresponds with the artist’s practice of dissociating the patron from any explicit religious content or narrative scene.