Benjamin Block

1631 – 1690

German painter, his father and brothers were also painters. In 1655 he set off on a study tour to Italy, Through his brother, a canon in Vienna, he met Ferenc Nádasdy who invited him to Hungary. Of his paintings made there, the portraits of Nádasdy and his wife as well as that of Pál Esterházy have survived. At Loretto and Gyõr he painted altarpieces. Armed with a letter of reference from Nádasdy, he travelled to Italy in 1659 and was commissioned to paint the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher who later served as intermediary in a deal resulting in an order for a portrait of Pope Alexander VII. After working as a portrait painter in Siena, Florence and Venice, in 1664 he returned to Germany where he married and lived in Nuremberg with his wife, the painter Anna Catharina Fischer, until 1670. He made portraits for the margraves of Ansbach and the Vienna court.

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