Guillaume Budé (1467–1540)  1536

Painter to King Francis I, Jean Clouet played a key role in establishing the Renaissance portraiture tradition in France, yet this is his only extant painted portrait. It depicts Guillaume Budé, librarian to Francis I and the leading humanist of sixteenth-century France. Similar to the sitter in Metsys’s Portrait of a Woman (32.100.47), Budé’s fingers hold his page, as if ...