Emperor Charles V at the Battle of Mühlberg
Titian (about 1488 to 1576) · 1548
The Holy Roman Emperor rides out of a wood at dawn in full armour, a lance in his hand, alone against a wide sky. His horse, a black Spanish stallion in crimson trappings, steps forward with one hoof raised. The emperor's face under the raised visor is thin and tired, with the famous jutting jaw of the Habsburgs, and he looks straight ahead. There is no battle, no army, no enemy, only a river gleaming in the distance. This is Charles the Fifth on the morning of the twenty fourth of April 1547, when his army crushed the Protestant princes of Germany at Mühlberg on the Elbe, painted by Titian a year later at the imperial court in Augsburg.
Titian invented here the type of the equestrian state portrait, the model for Rubens, Van Dyck and Velázquez. Look at how he plays the man's stillness against the horse's motion, and the cool morning light against the glow of the red plume, the red sash and the horse's cloth. The armour is the emperor's own, and it survives in the Royal Armoury in Madrid; Titian paints its steel with quick strokes of grey and white. The landscape is loose and atmospheric, and the trees on the left are painted so freely that they seem to move. Charles wanted no allegory, no trampled foe, just the Christian knight at the moment of victory.
Charles carried the painting with him and left it to his son Philip the Second. It was damaged by fire in the Alcázar of Madrid in 1734 and restored, and the lower edge was added later. Velázquez knew it well and answered it with his own portraits of Philip the Fourth on horseback, which hang nearby. Notice the emperor's gout-swollen hands in their gauntlets; he was forty seven and would abdicate within a decade.
Did You Know? The painting was rescued from the fire that destroyed the old royal palace of Madrid in 1734, and the burnt lower strip was replaced.
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