Matthäus Schwarz

His Latin was not good enough for him to emulate his brother by becoming a monk, so he worked for his father and then became a merchant's apprentice in Milan and Venice, where he learned accounting techniques.

He began to work for the wealthy Augsburg merchant Jakob Fugger in 1516, and wrote manuscript on accounting entitled Dreierlay Buchhaltung (three-fold bookkeeping) in 1518.

[1] From 1520 to 1560, he commissioned artists to make accurate watercolor paintings of him on parchment, showing him in his fashionable dress, possibly as an appendix to his autobiography.

The portraits include front and rear nude portraits of Schwartz in 1526 aged 29 (when he had become "fat and large" - some of the earliest fully naked male images in Northern European art), and his recovery from a stroke aged 52, as well as pictures of his festive clothing for the visit of Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor for the Diet of Augsburg in 1518, for Anton Fugger's wedding in 1527, and for a visit of the Ferdinand, Duke of Austria in 1530, the somber black mourning robes for his father's death in 1519, and ending with a picture of Schwartz as an old man mourning the death of Anton Fugger in 1560.

Schwartz added manuscript comments to the images explaining when each outfit was worn, and his Latin motto, Omne quare suum quia (every why has a because).

Schwartz has been nicknamed "Kleidernarr" (literally "clothes-fool"), although Groebner speculates that the meticulous cataloguing of his clothing may be an extension of his accountant's desire to document everything.