The Emperor Charles V at Mühlberg (Equestrian Portrait of Charles V)

Titian

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Keywords: EmperorCharlesMühlbergEquestrianPortraitCharles

Work Overview

The Emperor Charles V at Mühlberg (Equestrian Portrait of Charles V)
Artist Titian
Year 1548
Medium Oil on canvas
Dimensions 335 cm × 283 cm (132 in × 111 in)
Location Museo del Prado, Madrid


Equestrian Portrait of Charles V (also Emperor Charles V on Horseback or Charles V at Mühlberg) is an oil-on-canvas painting by the Italian Renaissance artist Titian. Created between April and September 1548 while Titian was at the imperial court of Augsburg, it is a tribute to Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, following his victory in the April 1547 Battle of Mühlberg against the Protestant armies.


The portrait in part gains its impact by its directness and sense of contained power: the horse's strength seems just in check, and Charles' brilliantly shining armour and the painting's deep reds are reminders of battle and heroism. Titian recorded all of the foreground elements—the horse, its caparison, and the rider's armour—from those used in the actual battle. Both the armour and harness survive, and are kept at the Royal Armoury in Madrid.[1]


It was acquired by the Museo del Prado in 1827.


The portrait was commissioned by Mary of Austria, Queen of Hungary, with Charles specifying how he wished to be presented.[2] The emperor was very aware of the importance of portraiture in determining how he was seen by others, and appreciated not only Titian's mastery as a painter, but also the artist's manner of presenting him as a ruler.[3]


Titian came to know Charles V personally, and had painted a number of portraits of him by this time. A highly intelligent man, Titian was quick witted, humorous and easy company. He had developed such a strong friendship with Charles by the time of this portrait that the emperor's courtiers were uneasy at the extent that a lowly painter was allowed into his confidence.[4] While in Augsburg, Titian was given an apartment close to Charles' own, and allowed easy access and frequent meetings with the emperor.


The painting contains a mix of styles; passages such as the armor and harness display the realism of Titian's early work, while the trees, landscape and sky are built from the broad stretches of colour and strong brushstrokes associated with his work from the 1540s on.[6] It contains surprisingly few iconographic elements.[7] Pietro Aretino, a contemporary writer whom Titian painted, suggested that he incorporate conventional references to religion and fame. Symbolism and iconography are not absent; the lance alludes to Saint George, the exemplar of the "traditional image of a military knight-saint". The red around Charles' helmet, his sash and on the horse's trim, represents the Catholic faith in the wars of the 16th century.[2][8] Titian was so keen to capture such vivid reds that he requested a half pound of red lake be brought from Venice to Augsburg. His instruction reveals that he regarded that pigment "so burning and so splendid...that in comparison the crimson on velvet and silk will become less beautiful".[9]


Drawing on sources such as Roman military art (the statue of Marcus Aurelius on horseback), Renaissance equestrian imagery such as the engravings of Hans Burgkmair, and possibly Dürer's 1513 engraving Knight, Death and the Devil, Titian departs from the traditional rendering of rider on horse, in which one of the horse's front legs is raised (as seen in the gallery of Roman and Renaissance works below). Instead, the horse rears slightly, or may be striking off into a canter, with only its hind legs touching the ground, while Charles still holds the reins lightly, upright but at ease, implying his advanced horsemanship. The influence of the Dürer engraving is subtle. Dürer's knight rides through dark woods, passing figures representing evil and mortality, including a pig-snouted devil and death riding a pale horse. In contrast Charles emerges from a dark wood into an open, though brooding landscape.[10]


Titian creates a tension between the emperor's age and physical frailty, and his reputation as a forceful and determined, dynamic leader. This is most apparent in the fact that Titian portrays Charles heroically, but places him in a calm dawn setting in which there are no signs of battle. Charles' frailty is underlined by the dark overhead clouds, his weary facial expression and weak jaw (his lower jaw protrudes beyond the line of the upper part), though this is subverted so that it instead conveys his resolve. Charles further suffered from gout, and in reality was carried to the battle in a litter. In the portrait, Titian achieves a feeling of steadiness and control through passages such as the darkly painted wood behind the rider, the evenly clouded sky, and Charles' detached, yet steely, gaze into the distance.[10] The sense of forward motion is suggested by the angle of the spear and charging horse as Charles and mount arrive into the open landscape.[6] The sky also resonates with Charles' victory, but as with the landscape, it also contains dark undertones. The skyscape is considered Titian's best, and has been described as "flaming and shadowed, with gold light fighting with blue, deathly clouds set against a landscape [which] suggests the immensities of space that Charles dominates and the brooding, inner landscape of the soul."


Many later equestrian portraits of monarchs and rulers display a debt to Titian's depiction of Charles. More obvious and well known works include Anthony van Dyck's 1620 Portrait of Charles I on Horseback which incorporates many of Titian's ideals. Goya's 1810s Equestrian Portrait of the 1st Duke of Wellington expands further, removing the sense of heroism, and presenting a diminished, isolated figure, undersized compared to his mount, almost overwhelmed by the landscape around him, and charging towards a dark skyscape.


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This portrait commemorates Charles V’s victory over the Schmalkaldic League at Mühlberg on 24 April 1547. The Emperor is equipped in the manner of the light cavalry with a half pike and wheel-lock pistol. His suit of armour was made around 1545 by Desiderius Helmschmid and has an image of the Virgin and Child on the breastplate, as was customary with Charles’ armour from 1531. Panofsky pointed to the combination of two non-exclusive concepts to be found in this image, which depicts Charles as the heir to the Roman tradition and also as the incarnation of the miles christianus, as he was described by Erasmus in the Enchiridion (1503). The significance of the lance connects with both interpretations, referring to both Longinus and Saint George (the Christian knight par excellence) but also functioning as a symbol of the supreme power of the Roman emperors. However, the circumstances and period at which the portrait was painted mean that the religious connotations of this work are not as significant as the political ones. Imperial propaganda presented the campaign against the Schmalkaldic League as a political rather than a religious conflict, intended to punish those who had risen up against their legitimate ruler. In fact, leading Lutheran nobles such as Maurice of Saxony supported Charles, whose army was primarily made up of Protestants. In addition, while Titian was painting the portrait in Augsburg, Charles was giving his support to the Interim, which concluded on 12 March 1548, in a last attempt to bring Catholics and Protestants together. In such a context the Court did not wish to project an image of Charles as the champion of Catholicism or the arrogant victor over his own subjects, but rather as an emperor capable of ruling over a heterogeneous group of states and religions. Hence the lack of any references in the painting to the battle and the rejection of the ideas proposed by Pietro Aretino, who suggested that Titian depict the defeated trampled under the hoofs of the horse. We should also bear in mind that the portrait was owned by Mary of Hungary, in whose posthumous inventory of 1558 the painting is described in political rather than religious terms, stating that Charles is shown in the manner in which he went against the rebels.


The Emperor Charles V at Mühlberg lacks precedents in Italian art and scholars have thus generally made reference to classical and Renaissance sculpture, such as Marcus Aurelius on Horseback and Verrocchio’s Colleoni, as well as to German art, particularly Dürer’s Knight, Death and Devil of 1513-4. Above all it has been associated with Hans Burgkmair the Elder, who in 1508 produced a woodcut of Maximilian I on Horseback, and in 1509-10 a Project for an Equestrian Sculpture of Maximilian I (Vienna, Graphische Sammlung Albertina). The reference to Maximilian is particularly apt as it points to a tradition of equestrian portraits of the head of the Holy Roman Empire with which Charles V had previously been associated at Mühlberg. Images of Charles of this type included the reliefs of 1522 by Hans Daucher and the coloured engravings produced by Hans Liefrinck the Elder in Antwerp in 1542-4. It can be assumed that Charles must have intentionally sought out these affinities. Immediately after the battle of Mühlberg he commissioned an equestrian sculpture from Leone Leoni which, although ultimately unexecuted, recalls the project for the sculpture of Maximilian referred to above and which, along with the present work by Titian, was intended to reinforce the image of Charles as Emperor in a way appropriate to the particular political situation of Germany in 1547-8. Titian translated into painting and monumentalised these formal and ideological precedents, which were easily identifiable by anyone looking at this painting in Augsburg, the same city in which Burgkmair had worked for Maximilian some decades before, in close collaboration with the Helmschmid family, the imperial armourers. Despite its seminal nature, this truly exceptional work did not find immediate echoes in art, and the equestrian portrait had to wait until the early decades of the 17th century and the hand of Rubens before it came to occupy a place of honour in court art (Text drawn from Falomir, M.: El retrato del Renacimiento, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2008, pp. 507-508).