The Portrait of Emperor Maximilian I is an oil painting by Albrecht Dürer, dating to 1519 and now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, Austria.

Dürer had a portrait sitting with the emperor in Augsburg in 1518, making the drawing now in the Albertina, Vienna, from which he later produced two paintings and a woodcut.

As part of Maximililian's considerable programme of propaganda using printmaking, the artist was commissioned to make the huge multi-sheet Triumphal Arch woodcut to celebrate the emperor and his house, for which he was rewarded with 100 florins annually.

Copies of the sheets were sent to cities around the empire, to be pasted to walls in palaces and public buildings.

On the drawing's margin, he noted: "Is the emperor Maximilian that I Albrecht Dürer portrayed in Augsburg, up in the high palace, in his small room, Monday 28 June 1518".

Likewise the Emperor is endowed with many hidden qualities which became more and more apparent each day and continue to bear fruit.

"[1] Maximilian wears a gown with a very wide fur collar and a broad-brimmed dark hat, with a brooch in the center.

In the upper left is the Habsburg coat of arms and Golden Fleece chain, near a long inscription in capital characters which gives the titles and the deeds of the emperor.

VELITThe woodcut has the inscription "Imperator Caesar Divus Maximilianus Pius Felix Augustus", a grandiose classicizing bundle of epithets and titles, not generally used for the emperor in other contexts.

Katherine Crawford Luber compares the more famous Vienna painting, likely a commission from Maximilian himself, with the Nuremberg version, possibly a processional banner created for the coronation of Charles V. The Nuremberg shows a younger Maximilian with more emphasized symbols of Office and Rule (whereas the Vienna painting does not even show the Order of the Golden Fleece).

[2] The intimate meeting with Maximilian "high up in the palace in his tiny little cabinet" seemed to leave an impression on Dürer.

Luber opines that the woodcut The draughtsman drawing a portrait he produced later reflected this meeting.

[3] Luber writes:[4] The significance of Dürer’s Maximilian portraits cannot be divined from their surface appearances alone.

An understanding of how Dürer made the versions, repeating a single image, but disguising the repetitions, his crucial to interpretation of the portraits.

Dürer’s ability to synthesize the representational, political, and anagogical aspects of portraiture in a single series of productions bears further testimony to his creative genius.

In this unique group of portraits — drawing, woodcut, and two paintings – equivalence and variation converge within an unchanging structure as Dürer reveals and masters the complex task of Imperial portraiture.