According to the Latin inscription on the oak frame, the man who is portrayed here is Johannes Colmannus (1471-1538), the second-to-last prior of the Delft Convent of St Agatha, one of the richest convents in the Netherlands in its time. He is portrayed at three-quarter length, clad in a dark cloak with brown fur lining and a beret, seated in a wooden armchair and holding a little red book. Between his right thumb and index finger he holds a faded carnation, formerly red, probably a memento mori referring to resurrection through Christ.13 On the upper left wall we see a coat of arms hanging from a lion’s head. It contains three mallets on a red background, and a cartellino with ‘67’, the age of the sitter at the time of portrayal. The coat of arms appears on the sitter’s ring as well. The portrait belongs to a group of six paintings by Heemskerck that were recorded in 1667 by the historian Dirck van Bleyswijck as hanging in the Town Hall of Delft and which are thus assumed to have originally been Delft commissions. Colmannus hung in the Orphanage Chamber. Considering the identity of the sitter it is likely that the portrait was painted to hang in the chapel of the Convent of St Agatha, in a row of prior portraits in the ‘Gallery of Confessors’, and that it was removed to the Town Hall by city officials, possibly as early as 1570-72, the beginning of the Delft Reform.14 On the basis of the sitter’s age, the painting is generally dated 1538, the year in which Colmannus was 67.15 At the same time, though, Colmannus’s death at the very beginning of 1538,16 together with the content of the inscription, which translates as ‘Maarten’s artful hand has done this so that Colmannus should not be completely carried off by death’, caused scholars from the late 19th century on to regard the painting as a posthumous portrait.17 Preibisz suggested that the inscription might have been painted on the frame after the sitter’s death, in which case the portrait might not have been posthumous. Unfortunately, technical analysis has been unable to resolve this question, and the inscription was already on the frame by the time Bleyswijck saw it in 1667. As Harrison remarked, considering the relatively short space of time between Heemskerck’s return from Rome, most likely in 1537, and Colmannus’s death in early 1538, the lack of documentation disclosing any contact between the prior and the painter, and bearing in mind that the Delft fire of 1536 had probably left the prior preoccupied with rebuilding the damaged parts of St Agatha’s, it seems unlikely that the painting was commissioned during Colmannus’s lifetime. In that case it is likely that the learned Cornelis Musius (1500-72), Colmannus’s successor and a personal friend of Heemskerck, ordered it, and that he composed the Latin distich on the frame, either in late 1538 or shortly afterwards.18 Colmannus is generally considered to be Heemskerck’s first extant portrait after his return from Rome.19 The Italian influence is noticeable in the painting’s dependence on an influential Italian portrait type, developed by Raphael around 1512 in his Portrait of Pope Julius II, in which the sitter is depicted at three-quarter length against a neutral background, seated in an armchair slightly turned away from the picture plane. Heemskerck probably studied this painting whilst in Rome, though he might have come into contact with the portrait type before his Roman period through Jan van Scorel’s Portrait of Pope Adrian VI.20 Heemskerck used Raphael’s composition for several other portraits in the years immediately after his return from Italy.21 (Ilona van Tuinen)