Portrait of Margaret of Austria (1584-1611), Queen of Spain

Entry

The sitter, Margaret of Austria (1584-1611), was the daughter of Charles II (1540-1590), Archduke of Austria-Styria, and younger sister of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II (1578-1637). Her marriage by proxy to King Philip III (1578-1621) of Spain in 1598, when she was fourteen and a half, was performed at Ferrara by Pope Clement VII and took place in a joint celebration with that of Albert (1559-1621), Archduke of Austria, and Isabella Clara Eugenia (1566-1633), the Infanta of Spain (see nos. SK-A-509 and SK-A-510), in Valencia in 1599. The marriage was happy and fecund; she had eight children among them the future King Philip IV. The Queen exerted influence on her husband’s direction of affairs; she was partly responsible for his support of the Emperor, which can be seen as a factor in Spain’s decline during the long reign of her son.²

This portrait, correctly identified as of Margaret of Austria in the 1880 museum catalogue, is to be questioned as a likeness in so far as it lacks the prognathous characteristic notoriously peculiar to the Habsburgs. Whether there is an explanation of this other than the incompetence of the artist is unclear. It is already evident in what Kusche claims to be replicas of the earliest portrayal of the sitter in Spain, the painting by Philip’s court painter Juan Pantoja de la Cruz (1554-1608) of 1601.³

However, her jaw is unremarkable in the early likeness engraved by Antonius Wierix II (1555/1559-1604)⁴ as a pendant to the engraved portrait of her husband, in the first state of which he is described as prince, which dates it to before his father’s death in 1598.⁵ The prototype of the former print is not known; possibly it was a miniature sent to Philip before Margaret’s arrival in Spain, perhaps at second hand.⁶ The print may in turn have influenced the rendering of the face in the present picture, a suggestion that would carry greater weight if the face of Philip in the printed pendant was like the face in the painted pendant, also in the Rijksmuseum (SK-A-507. But that is not the case.

The museum portrait of Philip in all probability derives, if not at first hand, from that by Pantoja de la Cruz in the Palazzo Reale, Madrid.⁷ The attribution of the latter is due to Kusche who rejected Sánchez Cantón’s earlier description of it as a poor copy possibly after Rubens.⁸ The dating of circa 1603 by both authors seems too late, irrespective of an incipient beard and moustache in themselves perhaps rather sparse for a young man in his mid-twenties. Indeed, the sitter may be even younger than in the first extant portrayal – according to Kusche – of him as king of circa 1601.⁹ He was shown there in armour that he had originally worn as a youth (see SK-A-507); but Soler del Campo has observed the anachronistic use of suits of armour at this period.¹⁰

That the Palazzo Reale portrait originally had a pendant depicting Margaret of Austria is established by a copy which was offered with such a rendering on the London market in 1997 (when described as from the studio of Frans Pourbus II (1569-1622)).¹¹ The prototype of this portrait of Margaret is most likely also the indirect source of the Rijksmuseum portrait. And so just as the present portrait of Philip is a generalized, softened and sweetened derivation of the Palazzo Reale portrait, so to a lesser extent is the Rijksmuseum portrait of Margaret of the likeness in the presumed copy. The queen’s elaborate, pearl and jewel encrusted costume is the same. In the Rijksmuseum portrait, the plumes of the headdress can be described as red and white – the colours of the duchy of Burgundy and of Austria.

The handling of the costume and armour in the Rijksmuseum portraits differs from that of the faces, and while the former could be thought to be the work of a competent journeyman hand active in the early seventeenth century, it might be questioned whether the rendering and appearance of the faces are typical of that time. But as matters stand, there is no indication that the faces have been repainted; and there is no firm evidence to throw doubt on the museum’s dating of the pair to circa 1600.

The museum has long considered the two paintings to have been executed by a Flemish (in 1976 ‘south Netherlandish’) hand. Zandvliet ascribed the present portrait of Philip to the studio of Frans Pourbus II;¹² but this can be ruled out as that artist was never in Spain. As proposed above, the ultimate prototypes must have been by Pantoja de la Cruz; his portraits of the royal pair were despatched to various European courts including that of Brussels.¹³ Although such portraits are not listed in the many inventories of Antwerp seventeenth-century estates which have been published, a demand for them would have existed in circles wider than the court – witness the Wierix prints – and prototypes for their production would – it is assumed – have been available in the Archducal collection in Brussels, if not through mercantile channels. Further, while use of copper as a support seems to have been rare in the seventeenth century in Spain,¹⁴ it was common in Flanders or certainly in Antwerp. These somewhat tenuous factors seem the main reasons for believing the origin of the museum portraits to be southern Netherlandish. It could be that the two portraits are the product of a Brussels workshop with connections to the Archducal court. It may be that his workshop specialized in the production of such copies of these sitters and of their relatives, the sovereigns on the Netherlands, see SK-A-509 and SK-A-510, with labour divided between the execution of the faces and costumes. Apart from the Rijksmuseum pendants of Philip and Margaret, there can be cited the pair in the Phoebus Foundation, Antwerp,¹⁵ and that already referred to on the London market in 1997.

Gregory Martin, 2022