The sitter in this unusual oblong painting can be identified by the inscription on the frame as Joris van Egmond, Bishop of Utrecht from 1534 to 1559. He wears a black tabbaard gown lined with brown fur over a black doublet and a white shirt with a ruffled collar and cuffs, and has a black baret on his head.9 He is portrayed life-sized, turned slightly into three-quarter view against an undifferentiated green background. Joris rests his hands on the rounded form of a dark red, patterned cushion which can be seen in the lower left corner. In contrast to other portraits by Scorel in which the sitter makes eye contact with the beholder, Joris appears here distant and contemplative. His aristocratic appearance and formal pose are enhanced by the format, which emphasises the width of the shoulders and the expansive, silky surfaces of the costume. Joris van Egmond, the son of Magdalena van Werdenborgh and Jan I, Count of Egmond (for their portraits, see SK-A-1547, SK-A-1548), was a member of a family that was successively raised in political importance by the Habsburgs in the late 15th and 16th centuries. Joris had met the emperor, Charles V, when he was a student at Louvain in 1520; and Charles later sponsored Joris for church posts, securing for him first a canonry in Liège (1525) and, after some negotiations lasting from 1525 to 1532, the office of commendatory abbot of St Amand. In 1534, Charles V nominated Joris Bishop of Utrecht, and his consecration took place the following year. Joris was considered a wise church administrator in Utrecht, and was admired for his piety and learning.10 He was a generous patron of the arts with gifts of stained glass (in Utrecht, Haarlem, Gouda and The Hague), paintings, and additions to the bishop’s residence at Wijk bij Duurstede, which Charles V granted Joris in 1545.11 Although no one has doubted the attribution of this portrait to Scorel, there are various possibilities for its date. Some have assumed Scorel and Joris van Egmond were already in contact by c. 1530-31 and that the Rijksmuseum portrait dates from this period. Hoogewerff was the first to note this possible connection, basing his observation on a 1531 poem dedicated to Joris which praises an image of Christ by Scorel that the Egmond family owned.12 Another possibility for the date is c. 1533, when Scorel is known to have visited the court in Mechelen and presumably met the important cleric, Jean II Carondelet, whom Scorel depicted in a portrait that is remarkably similar in size and composition.13 With its green background and near “scalping” of Joris van Egmond’s head, the format of the painting is similar to Scorel’s portraits of Utrecht Jerusalem pilgrims. The greater space on each side of Joris’s figure, however, more closely parallels the spacing in the group portrait in the Utrecht series that is dated c. 1535.14 Although Scorel’s portrait layouts are routinely contour in type, the underdrawing of Joris’s head (fig. a) is similar to those portraits in the series of Jerusalem pilgrims that date from c. 1535 to c. 1541.15 It is most likely, then, that the Rijksmuseum painting depicts Joris van Egmond after he assumed the office of Bishop of Utrecht in 1534, or somewhat later, as is also implied by the dendrochronology. At that time Joris would have been in his 30s, and his lean face shows no signs of age. The overall style of the portrait with its strong illumination, opaque, flat painting in the flesh areas, and sense of pattern comes close to tendencies in Scorel’s later work around 1540. Moreover, in the underdrawing of the Rijksmuseum painting, Joris wears a ring - possibly a bishop’s ring.16 Although the artist often used an oblong format in his works, his adoption of it for a portrait is exceptional. There are only a few precedents. Several of Lucas van Leyden’s portrait drawings of the early 1520s use a wide, horizontal format, as do the portrait drawings in Dürer’s sketchbook made during his journey to the Netherlands in 1520-21.17 Friedländer made the interesting suggestion that these examples by Lucas and Scorel recalled the portrait busts by the German sculptor Conrad Meit,18 whose works would have been known at the court in Mechelen. With its strong horizontal presentation and more schematised portrayal of the sitter, the Portrait of Joris van Egmond represents Scorel’s venture into the realm of official portraiture. M. Faries, 2010 Literature updated, 2016