Erasmus’s Nose

Desiderius Erasmus waited until he was fifty to have his portrait painted. Thereafter, images of the “prince of scholars” came thick and fast, including Hans Holbein the Younger’s oil portraits of 1523 and the celebrated engraving by Albrecht Dürer of 1526. The first, though, was the diptych portrait of Erasmus and Antwerp’s city clerk, Pieter Gillis, commissioned from Quinten Matsys in 1517 and sent to their mutual friend Thomas More that year (figs. 1 and 2). This much-discussed picture depicts the scholars in a studiolo stacked with books by ancient and modern authors, among themworks by Lucian and Erasmus’s own Praise of Folly. Erasmus is portrayed writing his Paraphrase of St Paul’s Epistle to