This portrait demonstrates the masterly realism that is so characteristic of the virtuoso Fleming, Frans Pourbus II. The artist, who was arguably the most sought-after court portrait painter throughout western Europe during the first decades of the seventeenth century, here depicts his greatest patron, Vincenzo Gonzaga, the Duke of Mantua, in an imperial manner appropriate for a revered European prince. That the work is signed – indeed, it is the only known portrait of the sitter to have been signed by Pourbus - which would indicate that it was likely the ad vivum prototype for all subsequent variants, and a prime example of the artist’s oeuvre during his Mantuan period.[1]

The inscribed date of 1602 and that of the duke’s age allow for a precise date of execution between January and September 1602 (the duke’s birthday being the 21 September). It depicts Vincenzo at the height of his power and maturity, with thinning hair but lively, focussed eyes. The reddish, lively flesh tones, the bumpy skull and an astonishing attention to detail, especially apparent in the rendering of each individual hair of the beard, compound to generate a majestic portrait with vibrant presence. The precision and almost hyper naturalism that Pourbus was able to achieve, born out of the great Netherlandish tradition that he inherited, clearly accounted for his success and pre-eminence as the court painter of choice.

Presented in radiant, ceremonial armour, abundantly decorated with golden grotesques, weapons, and an eagle, the Duke proudly wears the prestigious Order of the Golden Fleece, which was conferred to him by Philip II of Spain in 1589. The medal is consciously placed in the centre of the composition by Pourbus and serves to highlight the esteemed status of the duchy of Mantua, which became one of the most culturally influential and vibrant regions in Europe. Indeed, between 1600 and 1609, Pourbus was joined in Mantua by another Flemish artist, the then ‘lesser-known’ Peter Paul Rubens, who would work intermittently for the Duke of Mantua until 1608.

Vincenzo was the only son of Guglielmo Gonzaga and, thus, his successor as governor of the state of Mantua, inheriting the dukedom in 1587. He was an immensely influential patron and collector who, keen to cultivate a more visible role for his duchy on the larger European stage, fostered a culturally sophisticated and luxurious court by securing the services of internationally famous artists. He was a major patron of the arts and sciences and turned Mantua into a vibrant cultural centre. Having annulled his first, childless marriage to Margherita Farnese, he married Eleonora de’ Medici in 1584, with whom he shared a maternal grandfather, Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor. Eleanor bore six children, the youngest of whom married the next Emperor, Ferdinand II. Vincenzo travelled to the archducal court in Brussels in 1599 to secure the services of two prodigious Flemish artists: Pourbus and Rubens.

Vincenzo had already tried different Italian artists as potential court painters, including Domenico Tintoretto, Federico Zuccari and Ottavio Leoni. Now he wanted to secure the service of an accomplished artist to help spread the image of the Ducal Family to the other courts of Europe as means of his dynastic iconography, and also needed to hire a man able to work and present himself in the distinguished environment of the Mantuan court. When Rubens and Pourbus arrived in 1600, the Mantuan court was amongst the most sophisticated of Europe. Pourbus had become accustomed to the elaborate Spanish protocol at the archducal court in Brussels, where he had been employed as court portraitist to the Archdukes Albert and Isabella, and appears to have acclimatised to Mantua and the new position with ease. Federico Zuccari described Pourbus as an elegantly dressed courtier after having met him in Mantua that autumn, and as having been granted many favours by the duke, being able to move freely in Vincenzo’s apartments. This relationship of trust seems to have deepened over the years, as all members of the ducal family regularly corresponded directly with the painter; the Duchess even at one point, expressing sorrows about Pourbus health, when the artist had travelled to Naples, in 1607 to advise the Duke to purchase Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes (Palazzo Barberini, Rome) and the Madonna of the Rosary (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna).

Whilst employed by the Gonzaga, Pourbus consistently produced his finest works; the portraits from this period have a distinct and deep richness of palette and are imbued with an element of dark drama that gives them an intensity that seems to only be present in his Mantuan period. While Pourbus was employed primarily to produce portraits of the Duke and his family, Rubens was mainly commissioned to paint religious and mythological works, and his small corpus of portraiture from the earliest years of the seventeenth century owed a debt to Pourbus, who clearly had a formative influence over his Antwerp compatriot. Pourbus continued working for the Gonzaga family in different guises until 1610, when he became court painter to the French royal family, having previously been to Paris on assignment for Maria de’ Medici, sister of the Duchess Eleonora.

Under Vincenzo’s reign, the ducal household comprised of more than six hundred people and it was famously extravagant, not least for the art collection amassed by the duke and his forebears. Between 1627 and 1630 a part of the collection was sold to King Charles I – much of these purchases remain key pieces from the British Royal Collection - while the rest was to be scattered following the sacking of the ducal palace in 1630 by imperial troops during a dispute over the Gonzaga succession. At one time the collection consisted of well over 2,000 paintings and more than 20,000 works of art, including bronzes, marbles, medals, coins, armour, ceramics, as well as rare manuscripts and books, making the Gonzaga collection one of the greatest ever amassed.

Frans Pourbus II was born in Antwerp and naturalized French in 1617. He was undoubtedly the most influential court painter of the late-sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. He developed an extraordinary canon of royal portraiture, and his success was so prodigious that it was only the new artistic approach of Rubens or Van Dyck that would take portraiture in a different direction. His portraits of the Gonzagas and, later, the French royals in the Bourbon court of Louis XIII served as the prototype for the ultimate princely portrait of his day, and were widely disseminated through foreign courts as an instrument and indication of the sitter’s power. Pourbus had established a style of painting that was recognized throughout the courts of the Hapsburgs, Bourbons or Medici where he worked, and his importance in the French royal court was attested by the honour of taking up residence at the Louvre itself.[2]

Pourbus sought to both faithfully render a likeness, whilst also aspiring to an idealism – the ‘royal dignitas’ which singles out his work. He endeavoured to represent above all the status and character of the sitter through a set of attitudes, gestures, looks and the sumptuous splendour of their costumes, while the plasticity of their flesh, the careful modelling of their faces and hands, evoke the delicacy of French enamels of this period.

Son of Frans Pourbus I and grandson of Pieter Pourbus, Frans the Younger trained in his grandfather’s studio and was accepted as a master in Antwerp in 1591. During his early years in Antwerp, until circa 1590, Pourbus’ style was strongly influenced by the work of his father and grandfather. Although his style was individualised during the course of his artistic development, he always remained faithful to the Flemish tradition and never embraced the baroque movement.

In the 1590s Pourbus worked for the Archdukes Albert and Isabella at their court in Brussels, but departed for Mantua in 1600, where he was appointed court painter to Vincent II Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua until 1609. He received numerous commissions from the ducal family and travelled to Innsbruck in 1603 to depict members of the family, followed by Turin in 1605 – 1606, and Paris in 1613, where he painted the young Louis XIII, then Dauphin, and his mother Marie de’ Medici, the sister of the Duchess of Mantua. Following another trip to Italy in 1607, he returned to Paris where he entered the service of Marie de’ Medici and subsequently that of Louis XIII in 1616, until his death in 1622.

The academic Paolo Bertelli, whose forthcoming article about the present painting has been the basis of this factsheet, proposes that the present portrait could very likely be the one referred to by Annibale Chieppio, one of the duke’s main advisors, in several letters to Aderbale Manerbio, the duke’s secretary, in 1602, as having been commissioned for Maria Manrique de Lara (1538 – 1608), lady-in-waiting to the Empress and wife of Vratislav von Pernstein, an imperial chancellor in Prague. Chieppio writes to Manerbio in Prague from Mantua on 16 May 1602:

‘In the meantime, the portraits of these princes are sent to Signora Donna Maria, which will be noted in the insert sheet, and soon those of the Lord Duke and of the two Serene Madames will also be sent to her. In the meantime, your lordship will excuse the delay because the painter of his highness is very humorous and cannot get away with everything except when he likes to work, pretending now to be ill, now some other impediment, all of which is borne by him for the excellence of his value'[3]

This would explain the inscriptions and the signature, as these could be interpreted to point to a foreign commission, as Bertelli proposes.

According to labels on the back of the painting’s stretcher, it once belonged to Marie Adélaïde Mallet, née Grunelius, and her husband Guillaume Mallet (1859 – 1945), of the French banking dynasty. It was kept at the family’s famous country estate Le Bois des Moutiers in Normandy, built by the then young architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, with the Gardens designs by Gertrude Jekyll. Le Bois des Moutiers is an early and important example of the Arts and Crafts style and remains a Lutyens-Jekyll masterpiece.

[1] Pourbus’s oeuvre consists of around 105 paintings, of which only 20 are signed. This makes the present painting all the rarer and an important rediscovery.

[2] Thieme and Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler, Leipzig 1933, pp. 315-319.

[3] Archivio di Stato di Mantova; Archivio Gonzaga, b. 2688, f. III 2, doc. 113–113bis.