Portrait of Philip the Good (1369-1467), Duke of Burgundy

Entry

This portrait tondo and its pendant (SK-A-3836 depict the Burgundian dukes Philip the Good and Charles the Bold in their capacity as the first two sovereigns of the Order of the Golden Fleece. Philip founded the order in January 1430 and served as its sovereign until his death in Bruges on 15 June 1467. Thereafter, his son Charles succeeded him and governed the order until 5 January 1477, when he was killed at the Battle of Nancy in Lorraine.²

Both Philip and Charles are shown at full length, facing to the right and left respectively. They are each situated in the corner of a room with grey walls and a green-and-grey tiled floor. When the portraits are placed side by side, however, the two rooms do not form a single cohesive space. The dukes’ mottoes and coats of arms, each surrounded by the official collar of the order and surmounted by a crown, appear beside their heads on the upper portion of the panels. Both figures appear in the ceremonial dress worn at chapter meetings, a long red robe lined with white fabric and embroidered in gold with the symbols of the Order of the Golden Fleece: the X-shaped cross of St Andrew, patron saint of the order and of the Burgundian house, and the steel, flint and fleece that make up the order’s official collar.³ The sovereigns each wear the collar around their necks and a red chaperon on their heads. Pinned to Philip’s chaperon is a gold hat jewel with a hanging pearl.⁴

The full-length format of these portraits is extremely unusual for 15th-century panel painting. Their most likely models are the full-length illuminated portraits that first appear in manuscripts of the Order of the Golden Fleece in the late 15th century. This connection was first proposed by Van Luttervelt, who also suggested that the tondo format of the portraits was inspired by the mid-15th century manuscript illuminations in ‘Les chroniques de Jérusalem abrégées’ in Vienna.⁵ Yet given the prevalence of the tondo format, particularly for portraits, there is no need to identify such a specific model. A manuscript of the ‘Statuts [...] de l’Ordre de la Toison d’Or’ (Statutes [...] of the Order of the Golden Fleece) preserved in The Hague,⁶ dated c. 1473, is one of the earliest examples to include a series of full-length portraits of the sovereigns and knights of the order dressed in ceremonial robes and standing in an interior with a tiled floor.⁷ The figures in the Rijksmuseum paintings, however, bear the closest resemblance to the portraits in an armorial in the Bibliothèque Royale in Brussels made between 1559 and 1580.⁸ The portrait of Charles the Bold in the latter manuscript (fig. a) is essentially identical in costume, pose and facial features to the panel painting of Charles. The Rijksmuseum portraits and the Brussels illuminations probably derive from a common late 15th-century model.

M. Bass