Because it combines the monumental Italian conception of the portrait with the busy, small-scale Netherlandish approach to landscape, the attribution of this portrait was long disputed. Its recent ascription to the Netherlandish painter Peter de Kempeneer is the most persuasive proposal, since it offers a plausible explanation for the work’s conflicting “stylistic registers”. Trained in Brussels, de Kempeneer went to Italy as a young man, where he probably painted the portrait now at the Städel. Just a few years later, however, he went on to Spain, where he later became famous as Pedro Campaña.