Portraits of Johann Valentin Andreae
Five of the most readily available portraits of Johann Valentin Andreae are displayed below. Some of these images may be subject to copyright and should not be reproduced without authorisation from their owners: they are shown here solely for purposes of scholarly comparison. It should be obvious from the uniformity of features and pose that some of these are revisions of others, with signs of age added or removed, and dates altered, as appropriate.
There are other portraits in existence, which I shall scan in as opportunity allows.
1. Andreae in 1628 at the age of 42.
The inscription round the portrait reads: IOHANNES VALENTINVS ANDREÆ
HERRENBERGENSIS WIRTEMBERG: NATVS MDLXXXVI. XVII Aug. AO 1628 –– Johann
Valentin Andreae of Herrenberg in Württemberg, born 1586 on the 17th August. In
the year 1628.
In the top right of the print there is the shield of the Andreae family showing the coat of arms: argent, a saltire between four roses gules. In the top left corner there is a helmet bearing the Andreae crest. The link between this and the coat of arms of Martin Luther is discussed in J.W. Montgomery (1973) Cross and Crucible.
2. Andreae in 1639 at the age of 53:
The original of this is held in the Württemberg Landesmuseum in Stuttgart; it
was reproduced in the catalogue of an exhibition ‘Johann Valentin Andreae
1586-1986’ in the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, Amsterdam.
The inscription round the portrait reads: IOH: VALENT: ANDREÆ CONS. ET ECCLES. WIRTEMB. –– Johann Valentin Andreae, of the Württemberg Council and Church. Andreae was appointed to be court preacher and consistorial counsellor in Stuttgart in 1639. The motto written below the portrait reads: In te Domine speraui, non confundar in æternum. 16 Æta: 53. 39 –– I have trusted in thee O Lord, I shall not be cast into eternal confusion. 1639, aged 53.
The four coats of arms by which the portrait is surrounded represent the families of his four grandparents:Top left: ANDREÆ (the coat of arms granted to his paternal grandfather Jakob Andreae on 10 September 1554)
top right: MOSER (the arms of his maternal grandfather Valentin Moser von Filseck).
bottom left: ENTRINGER (Anna Entringer was Andreae's paternal grandmother; the coat of arms has three ducks ('Ente') in a punning reference to the family name).
bottom right: HILLER (Margarete Hiller was his maternal grandmother)
2a. Andreae in 1639 at the age of 53, second version:
This plate appears to owe to good deal to the picture above, with the addition of a deal of curly hair and the addition to the inscription round the portrait of "T.D." after the rather clumsily spaced "ANDREÆ". This presumably stands for "Theologiae Doctor" and is inconsistent with the date given, since Andreae was awarded the Doctorate in Theology in 1641. (He was pressed to complete the formalities for this academic promotion by the prochancellor of Tübingen University, and the costs were borne by his patron, Duke August v. Braunschweig-Lüneburg.)
3. Andreae in 1648 at the age of 62.
This plate is signed by Wolfgang Kilian (1581-1662) a member of the distinguished Kilian family of engravers. It repeats the Andreae coat of arms and crest in the top right and left corners, as in the 1628 portrait (1. above). Over the portrait stands the motto SUFFICIT –– It is enough, perhaps alluding to Andreae's exhaustion at this stage in his life. The book, candle, skull and hourglass are conventional sybols, and the roundel below the portrait containing a crescent moon (luna) alludes to Andreae’s patron Duke August of Braunschweig-Lüneburg - the plate was incorporated in Andreae's publication of his correspondence with Duke August, the Seleniana Augustalia of 1649 and has been reproduced fairly often in recent times - the van Dülmen edition of Andreae's Theophilus, Paul Anthony's Ein schwäbischer Pfarrer im Dreißigjährigen Kreig, etc
This is part of an argument proposed by Manly
P. Hall and others to the effect that Francis Bacon, after writing the
plays of Shakespeare, faked his death and moved to Germany to adopt the identify
of Johann Valentin Andreae. 
The space on the rectangle on the right is however plainly intended to be filled in with the year and date of Andreae's death, corresponding to the birth date and year in the rectangle on the left. It was used in precisely this way in the example of this plate provided in Montgomery's Cross and Crucible (vol.1).
4. Posthumously published portrait of Andreae.
This plate, which appears to be signed at the bottom by Melchior Küsell (1626-83), is clearly based on the Wolfgang Kilian plate (3. above), albeit with a modified nose and a stronger outline on the moustache. It is posthumous in the sense that it includes the birth and death dates of Andreae on the inscription beneath the portrait bust: VIR DEI JOH. VALENTINVS ANDREÆ N MDLXXXVI AVG XVII O MDCLIV IVN XXVII. –– A man of God, Joh(ann) Valentin Andreae b(orn) 1586 August 17, d(ied) 1654 June 27.
Above the head of the portrait is another inscription, only partly readable, in the form of a motto: DEO CON-----VS NVNQVAM CONFVSVS –– Con--- in God, Never Confused.
On either side of the portrait stand conventional symbols of life, death and mortality: a candle on the left and an hourglass on the right; these are surmounted by representations of the sun and moon respectively. While this gives the plate something of an alchemical or Rosicrucian look, the intention is surely simply to indicate that on this plate the coats of arms on the left (sun = male) side relate to Johann Valentin Andreae, and the coats of arms on the right (moon = female) relate to his wife Agnes Elisabeth Grüninger.
In the four corners of the plate are family coats of arms.
Top left: ANDREÆ, though in an unusual form. The upper half of the shield bears the coat of arms granted to Jakob Andreae in 1554, but the lower half depicts the arms of the family of Jakob's wife, Anna Entringer. The crest attached to the helmet over the shield is also a combination of the two families: it has the Andreae saltire and roses on two wings as usual (see eg 1 above) but has added the Entringer duck to the helmet. This would appear to imply that Anna Entringer was an heiress.
top right: GRÜNINGER (the arms of the family of Andreae's wife, Agnes Elisabeth Grüninger).
bottom left: MOSER (the arms of the family of Andreae's mother, Maria Moser)
bottom right: EFFERN (the arms of the family of Andreae's mother-in-law, Barbara Efferen)
The shields running down the left (male) side of the picture represent the eight families making up Johann Valentin's great-grandparents. It is a curious feature of this section that all the heraldic beasts are facing to the right, presumably by artistic licence of the engraver:
1. ANDREAE (the familiar saltire and roses, for J.V.A's great-grandfather Jakob Endriss the blacksmith, born at Möckenlohe near Eichstatt 1498, died 1566);
2 WEISSKOPF (for Anna Weisskopf, born Gundelfingen about 1500; the widow of a blacksmith, she married Jakob Endriss. 'Weisskopf' = ''Whitehead', hence the image on the shield of a fair-haired person).
3. ENTRINGER (for Johann Entringer, a merchant and administrator at Tubingen. 'Ente' = 'Duck', hence the shield bears three ducks);
4. PALMEN (for Anna Palm, his wife. 'Palm tree' on the shield.)
5. MOSER (for Balthasar Moser born Stuttgart 1487, died 1552, a chancellery lawyer whose son was ennobled as Moser von Filseck. The charge on the shield appears to be a goat);
6. WINZELHÄUZER (for Moser's wife Appolonia, daughter of Ulrich Winzelhäuser, a judge and administrator. There would appear to be a ram's head on this shield)
7. HILLER (for Marx Hiller, who was Vogt at Herrenberg from 1544-7);
8. KURRER (for Catharina Currer, his wife. The upper part of the shield appears to have a lion rampant, the lower part is unreadable).
The shields running down the right (female) side of the picture represent the eight families making up the great-grandparents of Agnes Elizabeth Grüninger, wife of Johann Valentin Andreae. In this section all the heraldic beasts are facing to the left in the conventional way:
9. GRÜNINGER (for Agnes Elizabeth's paternal great-grandfather Martin Grüninger (born about 1490). The shield has three leaves, presumably in green, to represent the 'Grün' = 'Green' of their name; the figure on the crest appears to be holding a leaf);
10. BRAUNE (for Elisabeth Braun, who married Martin Grüninger about 1520 at Winnenden). Her family was not armigerous so is simply represented by the initial letter B).
11. FASNACHT (for Johann Fastnacht, born around 1492-1500 at Strümpfelbach). He was the father of the Elisabeth Fastnacht (1524-1611) who married Erasmus Grüninger in the next generation.); if the figure on the shield is in motley, it may allude to the Fastnachtsspieler who celebrated the end of Lent.
12. FAISLIN (for the Faisslin family of Elisabeth Fasnacht's mother; again one which apparently did not have a coat of arms, so is represented by the initial letter F).
l3. EFFERN (for von Efferen - as the simple shield divided fesswise suggests, this was a long-established family, but a cadet branch, if the label at the top is significant; this may explain why it was picked out to be repeated at the bottom of the print, with an elephant's head as the crest). Kaspar von Efferen was the son of Hartmann de Efferen, a knight (Adelsritter) in Cologne. He married Agnes Schilt there on 5 January 1530;
14 SCHILTER (for Agnes Schilt, born about 1505, died in 1575; again a simple, geometrical shield parted fesswise with a star in the upper half).
15. BUHLER (for Ulrich Bühler, father of the Barbara Bühler who married Heinrich Efferen and died in Winnenden in 1575. The beast on the shield may be a Bull = 'Bulle' punning on the name Bühler);
16. ROSLIN (wife of Ulrich Bühler, has a horse or stallion to play on the family name Roslin, for 'Ross' = stallion.)
The shields bearing F and B have been interpreted here as a way of including families which did not have any armorial bearings. Another interpretation - going back to the ever imaginative Manly P. Hall - is that these letters represent Francis Bacon, who, as noted above, is supposed to have passed himself off as Johann Valentin Andreae after his earlier twin careers as Shakespeare and Lord Verulam. Sooner or later someone is surely going to see Roslin as a cryptic allusion to Rosslyn Priory, confirming Andreae's supposed connections with the Grail, the Templars and the Priory of Sion...
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