Portrait of Archduke Albert of Austria (1559-1621)

Entry

Albert (1559-1621), Archduke of Austria, wears the breastplate and pauldrons of a parade garniture, the collar and jewel of the Order of the Golden Fleece and the knotted, red armband of the captain general of the army of Flanders. Unlike in the case of the portrait of Philip III (1578-1621), King of Spain (SK-A-507), the armour is no longer extant although similar suits do exist.²

There can be no doubt as to the identity of the sitter in the present portrait, as the face conforms with other portrayals of the archduke, in particular with the engraved portrait by Johannes Wierix (1549-c. 1620) of 1600.³

The present painting has long been considered the pendant to the portrait of the sitter’s wife, Isabella Clara Eugenia (1566-1633), Infanta of Spain (SK-A-510). As husband and wife and joint sovereigns of the Netherlands, they were depicted together, and, in this case, the supports are of the same material. But unlike the pendant portraits in Bruges⁴ for instance, the proportions of the sitters relative to each other and to their respective supports differ and the impact of the present image is weaker. It is possible therefore the Rijksmuseum portraits were not executed as pendants (although the same size) but rather that they were subsequently assembled as a pair.

The portrayal of the face is close to that devised by Frans Pourbus II (1569-1622) in the full-length in Madrid,⁵ which is most likely the artist’s prime original executed, along with the pendant of the archduchess, between around 5 September 1599, when the couple made their entry into Brussels, and the artist’s departure for Mantua in the summer of the following year. Comparable is the bust-length portrait of the infanta in Estonia which Ducos has described provisionally as a simplified copy of Pourbus’s original likely to have been made ‘vers 1600’.⁶ He places other copies, or derivations, after the original full-lengths in Madrid between 1600 and 1615.⁷ The Rijksmuseum portrait is most likely the product of the same putative, Brussels workshop that produced the portraits of King Philip III ((SK-A-507) and his consort (SK-A-508), and related pendants, where in her case a prototype deriving from Pourbus was employed. However, the armour is executed in a manner very similar to that in the portrait of Philip III and in that of the version of Albert in Bruges where the same prototype for the face was used.

As son of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II (1527-1576) and co-sovereign of the Spanish Netherlands, the sitter has been described as ‘the Most serene, Highborn Prince and Lord, Lord Albert, Archduke of Austria, Duke of Burgundy, Lothier, Brabant, Styria, Carinthia, Limburg, Luxembourg, Guelders and Württemberg …’.⁸ He was appointed captain general of the army of Flanders in 1595 (on his prior appointment as governor general) and appointed as a knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece in 1599.

The archduke, brought up at the court of King Philip II (1527-1598), had early been destined for the church. He resigned his archiepiscopal see of Toledo and returned his cardinal’s hat after having been chosen to marry Philip II’s daughter, Isabella Clara Eugenia; the marriage took place by procuration in Ferrara in 1598 and in fact in Valencia on 18 April 1599. The union proved sterile; as a result, at the archduke’s death in 1621 sovereignty over the Netherlands reverted to the king of Spain.

Albeit that the most significant act of his reign was the signing of the Twelve Years Truce with the United Provinces in 1609, the archduke had been moderately successful as captain general; he saw active engagement and was successful in the tilting yard.⁹ But his military capacities came to be questioned during the long siege of Ostend (1601-04), the direction of which he passed to Ambrogio Spinola (1569-1630), who was given control of the army of Flanders after he had brought the siege to a triumphant conclusion.¹⁰ It is perhaps noteworthy that in the full-length portrait in Madrid by Pourbus, the archduke is depicted as an active commander, while in the present picture his military status is less conspicuous.

Gregory Martin, 2022