Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640),Portrait of Ana Dorotea (1612–1694), an Illegitimate Daughter of Emperor Rudolf II as a Nun at the Convent of the Descalzas Reales, Madrid, c. 1628, Oil on canvas, 73 x 65.4 cm, The Wellington Collection, Apsley House, London, on loan from The English Heritage
In the winter of 1623 an eleven-year-old Habsburg girl made a hard crossing to Spain. The ship carrying Ana Dorotea (1612–1694) was caught in a violent storm and then attacked by Barbary corsairs, and only after surviving both did she reach Barcelona and, in January 1624, enter Madrid in a formal procession that the King himself, Philip IV (1605–1665), his queen, Isabel of Bourbon (1602–1644), and the all-powerful Count-Duke of Olivares (1587–1645) came out to watch (de Cruz Medina, 2013). The girl at the centre of it was the natural daughter of a dead emperor, on her way into the most exclusive convent in the Spanish world, and the ceremony made plain that an illegitimate birth was no bar to a Habsburg welcome.
She belonged to a category the dynasty had learned to manage with some astonishing care. Ana Dorotea was one of the children born to Rudolf II (1552–1612) and his mistress Katharina Strada (1579–1629), a granddaughter of the imperial antiquary Jacopo Strada (1507–1588), so that the emperor’s private life reached, like his collecting, into the learned Italian circle around his court (Evans, 1973). Rudolf never married and never legitimised these children, and their fortunes ran in opposite directions, the most notorious of them, Don Julius Caesar d’Austria (1585–1609), sinking into violence and dying a prisoner after killing a young woman, while others were folded discreetly into the family’s service. Ana Dorotea took the gentler road. After her father’s death in 1612 she was raised by her uncle, the Emperor Matthias (1557–1619), and his wife, Anna of Tyrol (1585–1618), who gave her the title of Marquise of Austria, and when the couple fell ill in 1618 she was placed first in an Augustinian convent in Vienna and then, at the request of an aunt in Spain, sent on to Madrid (de Cruz Medina, 2013).
The convent that received her was less a retreat from the dynasty than an extension of it. The Descalzas Reales [the Royal Discalced Nuns], founded in 1559 by Joanna of Austria (1535–1573), had become across two generations a Habsburg house in all but name, home to a line of imperial and royal women who had chosen the veil over the marriages the family would otherwise have arranged for them. The aunt who summoned Ana Dorotea was the outstanding case, Archduchess Margaret of Austria (1567–1633), a sister of Rudolf II, who as a girl had been meant for her own uncle Philip II (1527–1598) and had refused him for the cloister, taking vows as Sor Margarita de la Cruz [Sister Margaret of the Cross] and becoming, from behind the enclosure, one of the most influential figures at the Spanish court. For a Habsburg daughter, legitimate or not, the Descalzas offered what a dynastic marriage seldom did, security, standing, an education and a measure of independent power, and its nuns ran a household of their own, corresponded with ministers and assembled one of the great private art collections in Europe (de Cruz Medina, 2013). Ana Dorotea, who took her solemn vows of poverty, chastity and obedience in 1628 at sixteen and would remain there until her death in 1694, grew into exactly that kind of figure, a patron and a political correspondent as much as a contemplative.
This portrait belongs to Rubens’s Spanish year. He reached Madrid in 1628 on a diplomatic errand and, between negotiations, painted a series of the royal family, of which Ana Dorotea’s likeness is one (Vergara, 1999). The commission came from the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia (1566–1633), daughter of Philip II, governor of the Spanish Netherlands and Rubens’s own patroness, and it carried a personal charge, since Isabella had herself put on the Poor Clare habit in 1621 after her husband’s death and had Rubens paint her in it, so that in ordering this image of a young kinswoman she set her own widowed devotion beside a fresh instance of it (Thøfner, 2019). Painter, patron and convent were already bound together, because it was Isabella who gave the Descalzas the great tapestry cycle of the Triumph of the Eucharist that Rubens had designed for her (Thøfner, 2019). How much of the picture is Rubens’s own hand remains uncertain, since the Madrid portraits often began as head studies he took from life and were finished, habit and setting and all, by assistants back in Antwerp, which is why the work is commonly given to Rubens and his workshop.
The image Rubens made of her is a guarded one. Ana Dorotea meets the viewer’s eye, yet her body has closed in on itself, wrapped in the heavy Franciscan habit so that only the face and the drawn-in hands emerge, and the book and rosary held against her all but hide her from the waist, in what one recent reading calls a protective, almost apotropaic gesture, a turning inward that seems to ward something off. The shorn head beneath the veil and the pale, smooth, youthful skin give the painter little of the individual detail he lavished on the lined faces of his male sitters, so that the likeness hovers between a particular girl and the type of the cloistered virgin, rescued from anonymity mainly by the large, faintly protuberant eyes. It says something about how far such an image could drift from its subject that the Apsley House sitter went unnamed for years, identified as Ana Dorotea only when a scholar noticed a version at the Descalzas that carried her name (Thøfner, 2019). By then the picture had come a long way from the convent, carried out of the Spanish royal collection in the baggage of Joseph Bonaparte (1768–1844), taken by British troops after the Battle of Vitoria in 1813 and handed with the rest of that windfall to the Duke of Wellington (1769–1852), in whose London house the emperor’s cloistered daughter now keeps her guarded composure among the spoils of another war.
References
de Cruz Medina, V. (2013) [chapter on Sor Ana Dorotea], in Cruz, A. J. and Galli Stampino, M. (eds.) Early Modern Habsburg Women: Transnational Contexts, Cultural Conflicts, Dynastic Continuities. Farnham: Ashgate
Evans, R. J. W. (1973) Rudolf II and His World: A Study in Intellectual History 1576–1612. Oxford: Clarendon Press
Kauffmann, C. M. (1982) Catalogue of Paintings in the Wellington Museum, Apsley House. London: Victoria and Albert Museum
Sánchez, M. S. (1998) The Empress, the Queen, and the Nun: Women and Power at the Court of Philip III of Spain. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press
Thøfner, M. (2019) ‘The Absent Made Present: Portraying Nuns in the Early Modern Low Countries’, in Moran, S. J. and Pipkin, A. (eds.) Women and Gender in the Early Modern Low Countries, 1500–1750. Leiden: Brill, pp. 128–166.
Vergara, A. (1999) Rubens and His Spanish Patrons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Vlieghe, H. (1987) Rubens Portraits of Identified Sitters Painted in Antwerp (Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, XIX). London: Harvey Miller