Portrait of Charles V (1500-58), emperor of the Holy Roman Empire

The support is a round oak panel with a diagonal grain, 0.4-0.5 cm thick. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1508. The panel could have been ready for use by 1519, but a date in or after 1533 is more likely. The white ground extends to the edges of the panel. Infrared reflectography has shown that the portrait was executed in detail in the underdrawing phase in a dry medium, probably black chalk. It consists of a contour line for the shape of the head, and indications for the eyes, nose and mouth. The face was left in reserve. The paint was applied in thin, transparent layers, especially in the flesh areas

Fair. There is raised paint on the left side of the painting. The retouched areas have become matte and the varnish has been partially removed.

…; from a dealer, Dordrecht, fl. 200, with SK-A-980, as school of Hans Holbein, to the Nederlandsch Museum voor Geschiedenis en Kunst, The Hague (inv. no. 6015), 1884;¹¹Inventory NMGK. transferred to the museum, 1885

ObjectNumber: SK-A-979

This small tondo portrait of Charles V shows him late in life, perhaps around 50 years old, as his full grey beard and the wrinkles around his eyes suggest.²²See SK-A-164 for a portrait of a younger Charles. He wears a black cap, a fur-trimmed black gown and a white shirt with a pointed collar. The insignia of the Order of the Golden Fleece hang around his neck on a silk band.³³On the pendant and silk band see the entry on SK-A-164. The cap is very informal, the sort old men wore indoors against the cold.⁴⁴Oral communication Marieke de Winkel, 2007. By 1555 Charles had relinquished control of Spain and the Netherlands to his son Philip II, and had sequestered himself in a Hieronymite monastery in Yuste, Spain, where he died on 21 September 1558.⁵⁵BN III, 1872, pp. 914-54; De Geest 2000.

Although this painting has been connected with Vermeyen in the past, no portraits of Charles V by the artist are documented from this later period. Rather, it was Titian who was most active as the emperor’s portraitist at the close of the 1540s, and whose works from that period seem more likely to have served as the model for this image.

Titian’s 1548 portrait of Charles V bears the closest resemblance to the tondo portrait (fig. a). The details of the costume are almost identical in both paintings, as is the depiction of the face in three-quarter view, with a full, rounded beard. Titian painted the Munich portrait in Augsburg along with several other portraits of the royal family, among them Charles’s sister, Mary of Hungary.⁶⁶Wethey II, 1971, pp. 35-38. A similar but smaller tondo copy was also made after Titian’s 1548 portrait of Mary (SK-A-4463).

Another tondo, a portrait of King Edward VI (SK-A-980), was purchased together with the present portrait of Charles. The painting of Edward has the same dimensions as Charles’s tondo and is probably by the same hand. Together they may have formed part of a larger series of lesser-quality copies after known portrait types.
MBa

Ghent 1955, p. 132, no. 135 (as old copy after Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen); Kerkhoff in Utrecht-’s-Hertogenbosch 1993, p. 217, no. 164

1887, p. 47, no. 375 (as French school, 16th century); 1903, p. 4, no. 30; 1934, p. 3, no. 30; 1976, p. 573, no. A 979 (as manner of Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen)

M. Bass, 2010, 'anonymous, Portrait of Charles V (1500-58), emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Netherlands, c. 1550', in J.P. Filedt Kok (ed.), Early Netherlandish Paintings, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.7089