Charles II in armour
1681.Room 019
Charles II was born in 1661, the only son of Philip IV and his second wife (and niece), Mariana of Austria, to survive to adulthood. Charles succeeded his father in 1665 and died without an heir in 1700 at the age of 39, thus bringing to an end the Spanish Habsburg dynasty. According to the date on this portrait, the king would have been 20 years old at the time. His long hair is worn in a similar style to his earlier portraits, although here, for the first time, he is depicted in military dress with armour and riding boots, a sword, sceptre and a red sash. This iconographic formula was already well established in the Habsburg portrait tradition: the helmet and gauntlet resting on the table recall Titian´s Philip II in armour (P411) 1551. Charles II´s armour -decorated with the alternating motifs of the X-shaped Cross of Burgundy and a radiant sun- was symbolically loaded, for it was originally created for his ancestor Philip II and worn during the Battle of Saint-Quentin in 1557, in which Spain was victorious against the French. Known as the labor de aspas armour (referring to the damascene crosses, or aspas), it was made by the German armourer Wolfgang Grosschedel (1517–62) for Philip II when he was still the crown prince and is now housed in the Royal Armoury in Madrid. Thus, this portrait of Charles II makes an explicit iconographic connection to the glorious monarch Philip II. Behind the king is one of the tables supported by bronze lions that decorated the Hall of Mirrors in the Alcázar in Madrid. In the background, beyond a marble balustrade, we can see two warships firing their cannons, adding to the martial quality of the portrait and inferring the ongoing wars with France.The closest precedent to this painting in terms of date and style is the portrait by Velázquez and his workshop Philip IV in armour, a lion at his feet c.1652 (P1219). The paintings have almost the same dimensions and were both displayed in a reception hall in the royal residence at El Escorial. Juan Carreño de Miranda was charged with the redecoration of this hall in 1681, at one end of which hung Velázquez´s portrait of Philip IV and its pendant, a portrait of Mariana of Austria (P1191). At the other end was this portrait by Carreño of Philip´s son Charles, together with a portrait of Charles´s wife, Marie Louise of Orléans, that is now lost.It has been supposed that this painting is a repetition of the portrait that Carreño painted in 1679 to mark the negotiations of the king´s marriage to Marie Louise, the niece of Louis XIV. In letters to his mother written in May and June of that year, the young Charles expressed his frustration with the painter´s dilatoriness. However, he must have been satisfied with the end result, for the painting was sent to his betrothed in Paris in July 1679 in the care of the Duke of Pastrana, and was recorded as the jewel painted by Carreño.An X-ray analysis of Charles II in armour at the Prado revealed that, beneath the visible paint, there is another portrait that corresponds quite closely to the prototype created by Carreño in 1671 when the king was ten years old, a painting now in the Museum of Fine Arts of Asturias (Museo de Bellas Artes de Asturias), Oviedo. As a result of this portrait, Carreño was appointed pintor de camára (court painter). He repeated this image of the king several times with minimal alterations. In those portraits, Charles appears with his long hair worn loose, dressed in black, sporting the badge of the Order of the Golden Fleece and standing in the Hall of Mirrors. Carreño probably used what had become an obsolete portrait of the child king to paint on top of it a new portrait that updated his image as an adult, showing his taller stature. He then added a strip of canvas to the top in order to augment the height of the painting, and he trimmed the sides slightly so that it would correspond to the format of the painting of Philip IV.It was surely no small task to paint Charles, who was weak, sickly and physically rather unappealing. Carreño painted him with great sensitivity and competence, blending a high degree of idealisation with the need to not completely conceal the monarch´s features, which reflected the Habsburg dynasty´s physical decline after generations of inbreeding. An intelligent and perceptive heir to the tradition of Velázquez, Carreño was renowned for the degree to which his portraits accurately represented his sitters (Finaldi, G.: Portrait of Spain. Masterpieces from the Prado, Queensland Art Gallery-Art Exhibitions Australia, 2012, p. 88).
