Allegory of the Abdication of Emperor Charles V

Entry

The support of this painting consists of six oak planks with the grain running horizontally; they measure in width from the top approx. 22.5, 22, 20.8, 22.6, 21.5, and 23.2 cm. The wood originates from the Baltic/Polish regions; the support would have been ready for use from 1613. The reverse is coated with a white-coloured ground and a grey imprimatura layer, the top and right (from the back) sides are bevelled. There are some traces of underdrawing in graphite and with a brush. For the most part painted with reserves, some notable exceptions being Philip II’s ermine-lined cloak, the charters on the dais, the veil of the personification of Asia bottom right, and the wings of the nereid bottom left. Many of the reserves are exceeded at their margins. The reins held by Neptune are partially rendered in sgraffito, the incisions being submerged by the paint on the horses’ necks. The edge of the dais is also thus defined. Some powdered gold was applied to the conch shell and the wings of the nereid nearby holding the lobster. Painted with varying degrees of finish; for instance, the courtiers at the rear of Ferdinand’s retinue are barely worked up, nor is the female personification holding the standard at the far right.

There are several notable pentiments. The alignment of the dais and of the canopy and the surround of the tester were initially different. The left arm of Philip II was first shown akimbo. The disposition and number of coats of arms on the left and central standards were altered; the first proposal is difficult to make out, but it seems that only six coats of arms were aligned horizontally at the left, which were perhaps those, from left to right, of: Artois, (?) Flanders, Limbourg, Zeeland, Friesland, Overijssel or Utrecht; on the central standard was perhaps first intended the coat of arms of the Holy Roman Emperor. The inscription is written over another in black paint, whose content was much the same as the upper layer: S[ANCTI];R[OMANI] IMPERII SPONTANEA RESIGNATIO/A.CAROLO V. IMP[ERATORE] FERD[INANDUM];I.FR[ATREM]; / REGNORUM Q[UE]. HÆRED[ITATIS] IN PHL[IPPU]M II/ HISPANIAE REGEM FIL[IUM] FACTA A[NNO].1555/EX INVEN[TIONE]. PETER.

There is no reason to doubt that this painting is by Frans Francken II. The inscription and the signature⁸ are accepted here as autograph, with the qualification that a confident touch seems here to be lacking. But at all events this does not mean that its lengthy content should be in doubt. Francken may have turned to a journeyman or assistant to execute the coats of arms on the standards, which in the final, overpainted versions do not follow the folds in the fabric.

Härting has dated this painting to the third decade of the seventeenth century; McGrath believes that it was executed a bit earlier, at about the same time as the compositionally related Homage to Apollo in the Landesmuseum, Oldenburg, of 1629.⁹ In support of a dating to the second half of the 1630s is the motif of Neptune riding his sea chariot in the left foreground and the general configuration of the hippocampi, which may well have been inspired by Peter Paul Rubens’s (1577-1640) The Voyage of the Prince from Barcelona to Genoa made for the Archduke Ferdinand’s Pompa Introitus into Antwerp of 1635.¹⁰

A rapid sketch on paper in black chalk by Francken,¹¹ made in preparation for this group around Neptune including the personification of America to the right and with an indication of Ferdinand above, suggests that the present composition is indeed an elaboration of the Oldenburg Homage to Apollo. In the drawing Francken sketched what was to fill the left-hand foreground of this latter composition. The recto shows a fully wrought pen and ink rendering of an artist in his studio, which Filipczak considers was made late in Francken’s career.¹²

The inscription on the Rijksmuseum painting states that the iconography of this allegorical depiction of the surrender by the Emperor Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire to his brother Ferdinand and of his dominions held as king of Spain to his son Philip, which had taken place in Brussels in 1555, was devised by Pieter Hannicart (or Hanicaert/Hannekart). Not much is published or known about Hannicart. He was a brother-in-law of Rubens through the artist’s second marriage, and an executor of Rubens’s will; in 1643 and 1648 he was an alderman of the city of Antwerp and died in 1655 at the age of 55. We know also that in 1631 he was master of the Antwerp Confraternity of the Holy Sacrament.¹³

Why Hannicart should have devised such an allegory is unclear. But in general terms the celebration of a highly significant, last public act of the greatest member of the house of Habsburg at the time of recent Flemish disquiet at Spanish intransigence over the conduct of the war against the United Provinces was most likely an expression of Hannicart’s loyalty and commitment to the status quo.

That this is likely to have been the case is suggested by the dedications of Schelte Adamsz Bolswert’s (1584/1588-1659) prints of The Four Evangelists, The Destruction of Idolatry and The Triumph of the Eucharist, and Nicolas Lauwers’s print of The Triumph of the New Law, all after designs from Rubens’s Triumph of the Eucharist, the last three being dedicated by Hannicart to the Archduke Leopold Wilhelm (1614-1662), governor of the Spanish Netherlands from 1647 to 1656. The first was in fact dedicated to Hannicart himself as: ‘Reipub. Antwerp. Senatori, reru[m] artificiosu[[u]arum] admiratori …’ [senator of the Antwerp republic and admirer of artistic things].¹⁴ The inscription on the Amsterdam allegory implies also that the painting was not executed for Hannicart’s personal gratification but rather that it was intended for a public official, perhaps a representative or an officer of King Philip IV’s in the Netherlands.

In the centre sits the Emperor Charles V (1500-1558), son of Philip of Burgundy and Joanna, daughter of King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castille. In 1506 he succeeded to this father’s Burgundian inheritance. Declared of age in 1515, he became King of Spain jointly with his mother, and following the death of Maximilian, his grandfather, he came into his Habsburg inheritance. He was elected emperor in 1519. The most powerful man in the world, he was described in 1516 as ‘… King of Castille, Léon, Aragon; of the two Sicilies, of Jerusalem, Navarra, Granada, Mallorca, Seville, Carthago, Corsica, Murcia, Jaén, the Algarves, Gibraltar, Canary Isles, the isles of the west Indies and the Terra Firma of the Océan sea, count of Barcelona, lord of Vizcaya, Molina, duke of Athens and Neopatrias, count of Roussillon and of Cerdãna, marquis of Ovistán and of Gociano’.¹⁵ Then followed his Austrian and Burgundian titles.¹⁶ In his resignation speech he stated that during the course of his reign he had made nine journeys to Germany, six to Spain, seven to Italy, ten to the Netherlands, two to England, and two to Africa.¹⁷

To the right of Charles (i.e. at his left hand) stands his eldest son, Philip (1527-1598) whose mother was Isabella of Portugal. He was brought up in Spain; but in 1554 he was summoned for the second time by his father to the Netherlands and in that year he married Mary Tudor (1516-1558), Queen of England and Ireland. He stayed for a year in England and made a brief return two years later, before departing for Spain in 1559 following his victory over the French at the battle of St Quentin. Thenceforth he ruled his vast inheritance from that country. His reign was dominated by the outbreak of the Eighty Years War in 1568 and the revolt of the Netherlands.

In the place of honour on the emperor’s right side is his younger brother Ferdinand (1503-1564). From 1521 he governed the Habsburg’s patrimonial estates and in 1531 he was elected King of the Romans. Four years previously he had claimed through his wife, Anne (1503-1547), the crowns of Bohemia and Hungary. He gained the former, but eventually obtained only a small part of Hungary. The late, short-lived Imperial proposal that his nephew Philip should succeed him as emperor caused tension between the two brothers. Ferdinand was elected emperor in 1558 and his son, Maximilian, became King of the Romans.

The depiction of the abdication as devised by Hannicart bears little relation to accounts of the emotionally charged ceremony itself, which took place in the Hall of the Golden Fleece in the Coudenberg Palace at Brussels on 25 October 1555 before the Estates General. On this occasion the emperor assigned his sovereign powers over the ‘Seventeen’ Provinces of the Netherlands to his son Philip with the words: ‘My son, I give, yield and make over to you my countries here, even as I possess them …’.¹⁸ Early in the following year he made over his Spanish and Sicilian kingdoms, then the duchy and county of Burgundy. His brother, Ferdinand, was not present at the 1555 ceremony. He was to be invested with the authority of emperor, but Charles’s imperial resignation was recognized by the Electors only in 1558.

The horse-drawn litter decorated with the imperial eagle in the left background alludes to the emperor’s departure for Spain and the Hieronymite monastery of Yuste, Extremadura;¹⁹ Charles did not leave the Spanish Netherlands until 13 September 1556. On the dais before the emperor are spoiled charters with their seals still attached; these are presumably the official documents of Charles’s entitlements. Such a charter may indeed have been torn up at the abdication ceremony. A print by Frans Hoogenberg (possibly published in 1570) depicting Charles leaving the hall shows an official rending apart a charter in the central aisle.²⁰

As implied above, Hannicart may well have referred back to Francken’s Homage to Apollo of 1629 when he devised the allegory, perhaps in conjunction with the artist. In the Apollo painting Neptune offers the fruits of the sea, and the personifications of Europe, America, Asia and Africa proffer respectively artefacts, gold and jewels in a casket, incense and coral. There Asia and Africa are given subsidiary roles while the pose and position of America was to be repeated. The depiction of the Continents may have been of particular interest to Hannicart as the title page of the Golden Book of the Confraternity of the Holy Sacrament, produced at his expense in 1631, shows the Four Continents adoring the Lamb of God.²¹

In the Rijksmuseum painting Neptune, now prominently placed, offers the fruits of the sea as tribute, but more significantly he carries in his train the pillars of Hercules, now displayed as the emperor’s impresa by virtue of the imperial crowns decorating them and the emperor’s motto entwined around them.²² This signifies that Neptune is sweeping the pillars onwards from their traditional site at the Straits of Gibraltar – the western end of the Mediterranean – to extend the limits of the known world.²³ Concerning this reference to the discovery of the new world, in particular America, it should be pointed out that the main discoveries both in the west and the east had taken place before Charles V’s reign. However, Ferdinand Magellan’s crossing of the Pacific and annexation of what were to be named the Philippines took place in 1519-21. During Charles’s reign Africa and Asia were chiefly exploited by Portugal; only after Philip II’s annexation of Portugal in 1580 did they come under Spanish control. By the time Francken painted this allegory – probably in the second half of the 1630s – Spain’s hegemony in both South America and the East Indies was being challenged with increasing success by the Dutch East and West India Companies.²⁴

As in the Homage to Apollo, Neptune is identified by his trident; America, in a feathered dress, is identified by among other things, an armadillo; and the black personification of Africa (whose headdress is confusingly an Indian-style turban decorated by an East Indian bird of paradise) by a crocodile. Such animal emblems had already been established in Adriaen Collaert’s (1555/65-1618) engravings of the Continents after Maerten de Vos (1532-1603).²⁵

Standing between the personifications of Africa and Asia and gesturing towards one of them (more probably Africa) is a turbaned moor who looks back to acknowledge the emperor. It has been suggested by Horn,²⁶ McGrath (with some qualification)²⁷ and most recently Belkin²⁸ that this figure should be identified as Mulay Ahmad, Prince of Tunis, whose portrait by Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen (1504-1559) was copied by Rubens (working probably from a lost portrait then in Antwerp). Charles V had considered his defeat of Khair ed-Din in Tunis in 1535 and his re-instalment of Mulay Ahmad’s father as king of Tunis as one of his greatest feats. His conquest of Tunis would be a further reason for the personification of Africa to offer tribute to him.

Unlike in the Homage to Apollo, however, Francken has included no personification of Europe in the Rijksmuseum allegory. Her place may be thought to be occupied by the group in the right middle-ground. Here the two foremost female personifications in front of the standards are identified by McGrath as representing Imperial Power holding the sword and orb, and Imperial Majesty holding the sceptre.²⁹ The same emblems of majesty lie on a cushion before the dais on which Charles is enthroned. The significance of the crowns that they wear has not been elucidated: that worn by the left-hand personification is the same as that worn by the emperor, while the other is similar to that decorating the top of the canopy above him. They may thus be intended as references to the crowns of the Holy Roman Empire and of Austria.

The three women holding the standards may be personifications of the regions made up by the subsidiary entities whose the coats of arms are displayed. In the first left-hand banner the order is set by precedence: duchies, counties, lordships in the Netherlands; on the middle standard: kingdoms in imperial Spanish possession, and, on the third: the emperor’s Mediterranean possessions. These are by no means a comprehensive tally of the Spanish king’s European possessions but may be taken to be read as such. This applies as much to the left-hand standard as the others: there seventeen coats of arms are shown. Stein has persuasively elaborated Huizinga’s thesis by arguing that this number should not be taken literally as representing all the Habsburg feudal entities in the Netherlands for those amounted to twenty-one. The number seventeen, eventually used in this context chiefly by the northern rebels against Spanish rule, was rather seen as an indicator of a global figure which also symbolized several concepts, unity being the chief.³⁰ The formula followed here was chiefly that established in the Plantin publication of Lodovico Guicciardini’s Descrittione di Tutti i Paesi Bassi of 1581³¹ (and subsequent editions), although the coat of arms of two fiefs – Hainault and Utrecht – differ. An example of what is presumed to be the coat of arms of the lordship of Utrecht has so far only been found in the frontispiece of Adriaen Valerius’s collection of poems published in Haarlem in 1626³² (and then by an inexact process of elimination). A likely source for the coats of arms on the two other standards might well have been Hieronymus Cock’s La Magnifique, et sumpteuse pompe funebre faite aus obsequies … du … Empereur Charles Cinquième, published by Plantin in 1559.³³ This would also have provided the source for the pillars of Hercules depicted in the left foreground of the painting.

The absence of Europe as a tributary and its substitution by the European fiefdoms of the Spanish monarch as perhaps surrogate beneficiaries would seem to support Balis’s proposal that the allegory should be related to attempts to obtain from the Spanish crown the relaxation of its ordinance restricting trade with Spain’s colonial empire, east and west, to Spanish merchants. In fact the right to participate in this trade was extended to merchants in the Spanish Netherlands in 1640.³⁴ Whether Hannicart had a role in the negotiations is not known; and as the whole – not a part – of the Netherlands is represented, as well as the king’s other possessions, clearly a perspective far greater than that of the Spanish Netherlands is here envisaged. This has to remain hypothetical as documentary evidence has not been traced which would clarify the motives and purpose that prompted Hannicart to devise this ambitious and complex allegory. Evidently it was at the least a commemoration of the statecraft of the Emperor Charles V and a celebration of the extent and wealth of his son’s partly inherited, Spanish empire.

Charles is shown wearing a long gown, the chain and badge of the Order of the Golden Fleece and perhaps his personal imperial crown. For his likeness Francken could have referred to many printed images, but most easily to hand was probably the elder Lucas Vorsterman’s (1595-1675) print, devised by Rubens, after a prototype by Titian (c. 1488-1576).³⁵ Francken correctly showed Philip as a young man; he too wears the chain and badge of the Order of the Golden Fleece. His costume is an amalgam of earlier Spanish styles; the knee-length breeches belong to the early seventeenth century. Engraved portraits of the sitter by Frans Huys (1522-1562) of 1555 and 1559 show him in profile.³⁶ Francken would have had less documentary evidence for Ferdinand’s appearance; he was only three years younger than Charles but unlike Rubens’s depiction of him for the Portico of Austrian Emperors, designed for the Pompa Introitus Ferdinandi of 1635,³⁷ Francken incorrectly shows him as youngish or middle-aged. He wears a long ermine-lined mantle, like that which Rubens had devised for Emperor Frederik,³⁸ and the chain and badge of the Order of the Golden Fleece. Unlike Philip his demeanour is one of deference.

McGrath has speculated as to the identities of members of the retinues.³⁹ It is odd that Philip is shown accompanied only by men; but his then wife, Mary Tudor, Queen of England and Ireland, had remained at home. In contrast, Ferdinand was accompanied by six women. It seems unlikely that any of the attendants was intended as a portrait, apart perhaps from the man beside the left-hand standard whom McGrath singled out. He does not have generalized features; it is possible that Francken has here introduced Hannicart himself as one of Philip’s retinue.

Gregory Martin, 2022