Bildnis des Straßburger Johanniterkomturs Balthasar Gerhardi

Baldung's portrait of Balthasar Gerhardi, Strasbourg Hospitaller Commander, from 1528 depicts a senior official of the Knights of Saint John—the military-religious order that had defended Rhodes until their expulsion by the Ottomans in 1522 and was seeking a new base that would eventually be Malta. The Hospitaller commander in Strasbourg represented both a religious and military authority, and Baldung's portrait gives Gerhardi the formal dignity appropriate to a senior representative of one of Christendom's most prestigious institutions. The 1528 date—just six years after the fall of Rhodes—places this portrait in the context of the Order's crisis and displacement, and Gerhardi's portrait may carry the implicit weight of that historical moment of chivalric institution under threat. Baldung's Strasbourg connections made him the natural portraitist for the city's senior ecclesiastical and military figures.

The commander's portrait combines Baldung's precise physiognomic observation with careful rendering of the Hospitaller vestments.