The grizzled, lax jowls and etched, careworn brow in this work by Peter Paul Rubens imbue the subject with a sense of gravitas and immediacy. Although Rubens’s naturalistic rendering seems to summon the presence of a live model, the painting is in fact a copy after an early 16th-century portrait attributed to Joos van Cleve. For Rubens, the imitation of masterworks was a fundamentally generative act. He built an expansive collection of prints, wax replicas of antique statuary and Renaissance paintings as fodder for his creative imitations. Rubens’s practice of copying was so focal that it formed the subject of his theoretical treatise, De imitatione statuarum (On the Imitation of Statues). True to the text’s guidelines, Rubens made judicious use of the original by Cleve, most notably by refining the original sitter’s nasal deformation. Through such dynamic interventions, Rubens reconfigured past art in pursuit of the new.