Portrait of Barthélemy Aneau

Corneille de Lyon's Portrait of Barthélemy Aneau from 1540 depicts one of the most important humanist scholars at the Collège de la Trinité in Lyon, the institution that made the city a center of Renaissance learning under Francis I. Aneau was a poet, translator, and teacher who wrote on emblems and rhetoric and was deeply embedded in the literary culture of Lyon's golden age. His portrait by Corneille—the leading portraitist of the city—represents the intersection of humanist intellectual culture and the new art of individualized portraiture that both expressed and reinforced the Renaissance emphasis on the individual self. Aneau's subsequent fate was tragic: suspected of Protestant sympathies, he was killed by a Catholic mob in 1561, during the early violence of the religious wars that would devastate Lyon's intellectual life.

The scholar's portrait is rendered with Corneille's characteristic precision, the sitter's intellectual features captured with the detailed observation that made these small portraits so valued.