Alte Pinakothek audio guide,
five stops, free.

He is looking straight at you. Not past you, not over your shoulder. Straight out, dead centre, almost perfectly symmetrical, and that is the whole scandal of this small panel of lime wood.

In 1500 nobody painted themselves like this. A portrait was a three-quarter view in northern Europe and a profile in Italy. A full frontal, symmetrical face was what you saw in a church. It was the pose kept for Christ. Albrecht Dürer was twenty-eight, and he took it. The museum says it plainly on its own label: he based the style of this portrait on icons of Christ the Saviour, with the hand raised in the sign of a blessing. Depending on how you read that, it is either enormous arrogance or a statement that the ability to make things comes from God.

Look at the two inscriptions, both set at the level of his eyes. On the left, the year 1500 and his monogram, a capital A with a small D nested under it. Putting the date above the initials gives them a second reading, Anno Domini. On the right, four lines of Latin in a cartouche so small you have to lean in, and shaped, oddly, like a butterfly. Albertus Durerus Noricus ipsum me propriis sic effingebam coloribus aetatis anno XXVIII. I, Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg, portrayed myself in appropriate colours, aged twenty-eight years.

Twenty-eight mattered. In the medieval scheme of the ages of life it was the year you stopped being young, so the picture marks a turning point in his life and the turn of a century at once. It may have been made as part of a celebration of the new hundred years by the circle around the humanist Conrad Celtes, which Dürer belonged to.

Now go closer, and look at the fur. That coat is a Schaube, and the collar is marten. Every hair is a separate stroke of the brush, shaded from tip to root, so the pelt catches the light differently across his chest. It is showing off, and it may also be a small lie. The clothing laws of the time reserved marten for rich men of the city elite, men eligible to sit on the town council. In 1500 Dürer was neither. He was only elected to Nuremberg's Great Council in 1509.

One more thing, and it is the strangest. His hand is at the bottom of the picture, fingers curled into the fur, and the other hand is not in the painting at all. This is the only painted self-portrait in which Dürer does not show the hand he works with. He also gave himself brown hair here. In his other self-portraits it is reddish blond.

The disguise worked better than he can have intended. Around 1520 Sebald Beham used this face as the model for a woodcut of Christ, and most experts took that print for a Dürer until the nineteenth century.

The panel hung in public in Nuremberg from shortly before his death in 1528, and the city kept it for nearly three hundred years. In 1805 it was sold to the Bavarian royal collection. That is why he ended up here, in the first room of the Alte Pinakothek, still looking straight at you.

The most powerful man in Europe, sitting in a chair, dressed from head to foot in black.

Charles the Fifth, Holy Roman Emperor, made Titian his court painter in 1533 and raised him to the nobility. In 1548 the two of them were both at Augsburg for the imperial diet, and Titian painted the emperor twice while he was there. Once on horseback, the picture that now hangs in the Prado, and once like this.

Find the date first. It is cut into the stone parapet on the right, level with his hand. MDXLVIII.

Then look at the two halves of the canvas, because they do not agree with each other. On the left everything says empire. Gold brocade, a marble column, a red carpet, a fringed chair with tassels. On the right, a landscape so thin and so quickly brushed in that you can see straight through it. And in the middle, the face, with no flattery in it at all. The long Habsburg jaw. The tiredness. The eyes going somewhere past your shoulder. The museum's own description puts it exactly: the columns and the carpet and the brocade carry imperial dignity, while the face shows the ruler's age and exhaustion with no idealisation.

Here is the part that surprises people. The museum also says that Titian largely handed the execution over to an assistant in his workshop, probably Lambert Sustris, working from a sketch in Titian's own hand. That thin landscape on the right is very likely Sustris rather than Titian. There may even be a lost first version by Titian himself, somewhere, gone.

Titian was not complaining about Augsburg. He called the imperial city the glory of the world, and told his friend Lorenzo Lotto that he was surrounded by every favour of the court and of the emperor. He was at the top of his profession, painting the emperor himself, and he handed most of the work to somebody else.

Four and a half centuries later Henry Kissinger looked at this canvas and wrote about it in his book World Order. He called it a haunting portrait, and said it reveals the torment of a man who can neither reach spiritual fulfilment nor work the levers of hegemonic power. Whatever you make of Kissinger, it is a fair account of what is in front of you. The most powerful man alive, painted by the best painter alive, looking as though he would rather be almost anywhere else.

Give it a moment before you try to read it, because at first it is only a landslide of bodies.

Then the shapes come out. At the top, small and in red, the archangel Michael, bursting out of a shaft of light between dark clouds, and everything below him is falling. That is the entire picture. Rubens has left out the thing every other Last Judgement puts in the middle: Christ as judge, and with him the idea that some people are going the other way. There is no upward current here. There is only the fall.

Look at how it is built. Sinners, devil-shaped figures and hybrid creatures that are half animal and half demon are pressed into a diagonal that turns, about halfway down, into a whirling mass. The museum's own line for it is that the diagonal makes the pull of hell's fire visible. The text it points to is the Gospel of Matthew, chapter twenty-five, verse forty-one.

Now let your eyes go soft. In places the colours run into one another until you cannot say where a body ends and a cloud begins. For 1621 that is a genuinely strange thing to have painted.

The commission came from Wolfgang Wilhelm, Count Palatine of Neuburg, who had already had two judgement pictures out of Rubens. The Great Last Judgement of 1617, the one filling the end wall of the room you have just walked out of, and a smaller version in 1619. Around 1620 he asked for this one, for his palace chapel. It reached Munich in 1806 from the gallery at Düsseldorf, by way of Mannheim.

And then, shortly after eleven in the morning on the twenty-sixth of February 1959, a man walked up to this panel and poured furniture paint stripper down it. The liquid ate through the paint to the chalk ground underneath, mostly in the middle, and destroyed about a fifth of the painted surface. He was traced to a guesthouse and arrested within a short time, and he was sentenced to three years and eight hundred thousand marks in damages. Under questioning he said the painting he had actually come to destroy was Dürer's Four Apostles, elsewhere in this museum, and that he had given up on it because there were too many visitors standing in front of it.

So a good deal of what you are looking at in the centre of the panel is restoration. It took years, and it worked.

The picture has had an afterlife the count could not have imagined. An Australian band called Parkway Drive put part of it on an album cover in 2018, and a version of it keeps turning up in the second and third seasons of the Netflix series Dark. Four centuries on, when somebody needs an image of hell, they still come back to this panel.