The face of Johann Ulrich Zasius, the sitter for The Jurist, was the butt of a cruel joke played by Arcimboldo.

Also known as The Lawyer, the portrait shows a face mangled by the "French disease," syphilis, which French, and other, soldiers would bring back from the front as a report of their "conquests" in the "field of battle." Zasius lamented that he had wasted his youthful years, convinced that he was a reincarnated form of Bacchus, the Roman deity of drunkenness and sex, who supernaturally avoided STDs. A bust in Zasius's hometown shows his "rough facial features." In this awful case, the whole face of Zasius was "ruined," and "only a few miserable hairs were left on his chin."

Arcimboldo's accurate still-life composition made everyone in the court of the Prague Habsburg Emperor Rudolf II, where Arcimboldo was court painter and Zasius was an accountant, recognize Zasius immediately, evoking great laughter and pleasure in the Emperor. Although monarchs assume their roles by the doctrine of Divine Providence, in many cases, like this one, monarchy often ends up more like the reign of Jabba the Hutt. The artist was so proud of his work that he signed and dated it on the back (maybe not the kind of karma you would want?). You reap what you sow, and one of Rudolf II's illegitimately sown seeds grew up to be an extremely violent man named Don Julius Caesar d'Austria, who his father eventually sentenced to life imprisonment.

To this day, many Germans are proud of Zasius, and he was the major figure in updating German law for a new era in which people saw Germany as the most civilized nation on earth, until the awkward 20th century, of course. Hebrew does not have curse words like English, but it does have phrases to curse people, and one of the harshest is "may his/her name be blotted out." Certainly the Rhineland Jews spoke words like those against Zasius who scholars call one of the pre-eminent figures of German humanism, with his pal, Erasmus. If he's a humanist, the barrier to entry must be pretty low: of his infamous rulings against Jews was one setting a precedent to baptize babies against their parents' will. He named it De Judaeis parvulis babtizandis quaestiones tres, and stated his opinion that a boy in Freiburg, Zasius's place of residence, was legally converted by church authorities against the wishes of his parents, because Jews, with an older, but nonetheless less accurate view of Divine Providence, have no right to "stand in the way of the inheritance of eternal life."

Having failed to mount campaigns to convert large nations by force, in the context of the "Holy Roman Empire," we were "servants of the emperor," and thus, all of our rights rested entirely on the Emperor's Grace, and he could withdraw them at any time. The Jewish community in Prague was desperate, and, as legend has it, an ancestor of the great violinist Yehudi Menuhin, a Rabbi nicknamed the Maharal, summoned the Golem, made from clay, with some very high-tech Divine Names to defend the Jewish people from the pogroms of Zasius and his brothers-in-arms.