Copy of Titian (ca. 1489 – 1576)

This portrait, unpublished until 1979, is painted on an oak board and is probably a Flemish or German copy from the second half of the 16th century of the original by Titian, the master par excellence of Venetian painting.

In 1548, Titian, who had arrived in Augsburg at the beginning of that year in the company of his son Orazio and Lamberto Sustris, undertook a number of portraits of the main players in Europe’s historical events in those years. Charles V had called for the celebration of an assembly in the Swabian city to hold a meeting with the princes who had embraced the Lutheran Reformation at a moment particularly favourable for the Catholic cause after having defeated the forces of the Protestant League on 18^th January 1547 in Muhlberg, on the banks of the river Elbe.

Titian spent the year of 1548 painting the emperor’s equestrian portrait kept at the Museo del Prado and another where he represented the monarch in a portrait slightly over half-body, “armed with an unsheathed sword in one hand and to his left a feathered helmet on a crimson desk, with a baton in his other hand, made by Titian” as may be read in number 804 of the inventory “of the paintings and other things belonging to His Majesty Philip IV in this Alcázar of Madrid. Year of 1636”. The latter of the two paintings was burnt in the 1734 fire of the Alcázar in Madrid. However, several copies exist in which the gesture and posture coincide albeit with a different armour.

It has been conjectured that there might have existed another portrait of the emperor, made shortly before, and depicted with another coat of armour. This would have been the painting lost at the fire in the Pardo Palace in 1604 and known through the copies at Escorial, by Pantoja de la Cruz, and at the National Museum in Krakow, attributed to Antonis Mor.

In this bust portrait, the emperor is wearing the same armour as the equestrian portrait. Presumably this would be the impressive suit of armour he wore at the Battle of Mülhberg in 1547, made in 1544 in Germany by Desiderius Helmschmid and kept at Armería Real, in Madrid. He is also wearing a red sash, which does not appear in any of the known versions of the standing portrait but is depicted in the equestrian one, and around his neck, the chain of the

 Order of the Golden Fleece 

a chivalric order founded in 1429 in Burgundy by Phillip the Good (1396-1467) following the model of the Order of the Garter founded in 1348 by Edward III. Based on a defence of chivalry and Christian values, but also political ones, it was a dynastic order that established ties of brotherhood. Conferral was seen as a reward or recognition of excellence. Its insignia consists of a chain decorated with blue and red enamelled stones, from which hangs the figure of an enamelled gold fleece. The chain is no longer hereditary, its numbers are limited and it must be returned to the Royal House on the death of its holder.

, a symbol of the protectors of religion. This last-named attribute reminds us that the emperor was the champion of the Counter-Reformation which started with the Council of Trent (1545-1563).