Category: Mannerism

Bartholomaeus Spranger (1546–1611), Allegory of the Triumph of the Habsburg Empire over the Turks, Oil on panel, 165 x 104 cm, Schwarzenberg Palace, Prague 

In the summer of 1600, Bartholomaeus Spranger buried his wife Christina Müller, daughter of a prosperous Prague jeweller he had married in 1582. All their children had died before her. Aegidius Sadeler’s (c. 1570–1629) engraved Allegorical Double Portrait of Bartholomaeus Spranger and His Wife, produced that same year, records the loss with an almost unbearable directness. Within a few years, Spranger would begin withdrawing from the court on grounds of ill health. And it was in this diminished state, widowed, ageing, increasingly frail, that he painted his only direct reference to the Habsburg imperial house: a large allegorical panel celebrating a victory whose terms were already unravelling even as the paint dried.To understand this painting, one must read it as a document of anxiety, glory, and loss.

Spranger had been born in Antwerp in 1546, the third son of a trader named Ioachim Spranger. He trained under Jan Mandijn (d. 1560), Frans Mostaert (d. c. 1560), and Cornelis van Dalem (c. 1530–1573), all of them principally landscape painters, supplementing this grounding by copying prints after Frans Floris (c. 1517–1570) and Parmigianino (1503–1540). He left for France in March 1565 and then spent a decade in Italy, working in Milan, Parma (as an assistant to Bernardino Gatti (c. 1495–1576) on the dome of Santa Maria della Steccata), and Rome, where he became a protégé of the miniaturist Giulio Clovio (1498–1578) and where Pope Pius V (1504–1572) appointed him a court painter in 1570. It was in Rome, too, that he met Karel van Mander (1548–1606), who would later record his career in the Schilder-boeck of 1604. After five years in Vienna under Maximilian II (1527–1576), Spranger settled permanently in Prague when Rudolf II (1552–1612) appointed him court painter and valet de chambre in 1581. He took a house just outside the castle walls. Rudolf, who visited Spranger’s studio regularly, granted him the coat of arms of a liegeman in 1588 and a hereditary title in 1595. For three decades, the two men spent long days together in conversation, a closeness shared with the Flemish gemologist Anselmus Boëtius de Boodt (1550–1632), another of the emperor’s confidants. Spranger supplied Rudolf with a continuous stream of mythological subjects, sensuous nudes drawn from life, and allegorical propaganda pieces, often combining eroticism and statecraft in the same canvas, as in the Allegory of the Virtues of Rudolf II (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), where Bellona sits enthroned on a globe surrounded by Venus, Amor, Athena, and Bacchus alongside emblems of Hungary and the Croatian river Sava. As Eliška Fučíková has observed, the Allegory of the Triumph stands apart in this oeuvre: it is the first and only time Spranger addresses the imperial political situation without mythological disguise (Fučíková, 1988) .

The subject is the Peace of Zsitvatorok, signed on 11 November 1606 in a tent encampment at the mouth of the Žitava River in Royal Hungary (now Slovakia), which concluded the Long Turkish War (1593–1606). Thirteen years of intermittent siege warfare had exhausted both sides. Ottoman losses exceeded 100,000 troops; Habsburg expenditures surpassed 100 million florins. The treaty produced almost no territorial change. The Ottomans kept Eger and Kanizsa; the Habsburgs kept Vác. But the diplomatic implications ran deeper than the map suggested. For the first time, the Ottoman sultan conceded the Holy Roman Emperor the title Padishah, his own honorific, acknowledging parity of status between the two rulers. The Habsburgs, in return, paid a final lump sum of 200,000 gold ducats, ending the annual tribute they had rendered to the Porte since 1547. The peace was set to hold for twenty years and, in practice, stabilised the frontier for nearly half a century. But who, precisely, had won? The question hung over the treaty even at the time of its signing, and it hangs over this painting too.

At the painting’s centre is a monumental female personification of Victory, her luminous flesh emerging from darkness, elongated and sculptural in the manner Spranger had refined across decades of Mannerist practice. She plants one foot on a fallen Ottoman soldier who still raises his sword. He is down, but he is not disarmed, and the tension of that detail matters. Victory holds a laurel wreath and a palm branch, the standard attributes of conquest and peace, while above her Fama blows a trumpet adorned with banners in Habsburg colours. The modelling of the Victory figure, with its glowing surfaces breaking through shadow, invites comparison with the bronzes of Adriaen de Vries (c. 1556–1626), who had arrived in Prague as Kammerbildhauer in 1601 and whose Empire Triumphant over Avarice (1610, National Gallery of Art, Washington) works a closely related allegorical seam. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann has explored these connections: both Spranger’s panel and de Vries’s bronze stage Habsburg power as something in need of continuous reassertion, an idea that must be performed precisely because it can no longer be taken as fact.

The historical backdrop sharpens all of this, though it is less straightforward than it might appear. Rudolf’s mental state had deteriorated visibly after 1598, and by April 1606 the archdukes had formally declared him incapable and recognised his brother Matthias (1557–1619) as head of the family. But how much of that declaration was diagnosis and how much was dynastic manoeuvre? Kaufmann has argued persuasively that the traditional image of Rudolf as a mad recluse, retreating from governance into alchemy and art, is largely a ‘black legend’ constructed by his political enemies and hardened by later historians. Rudolf’s collecting, his patronage, his investment in spectacle were not symptoms of withdrawal but instruments of rule, continuous with the practices of Renaissance kingship across Europe. The difficulty is that even if this is true, and the evidence is strong, it did not save him. It was Matthias, pointedly, who had brokered the Peace of Zsitvatorok; Rudolf refused to accept the terms. After Matthias marched on Prague in 1608, Rudolf was forced to cede Hungary, Austria, and Moravia, keeping only Bohemia and an increasingly hollow authority. In May 1611, Matthias’s army held Rudolf prisoner in his own castle and had himself elected King of Bohemia. Rudolf died on 20 January 1612, nine months after he had been stripped of everything except the empty title of Holy Roman Emperor. Spranger had died six months earlier, on 27 June 1611, in the same city and the same atmosphere of collapse. Whether Rudolf was genuinely incapacitated or simply outplayed, the practical result was the same: the painting was made by a grieving old man for a patron who was losing his grip on power and his empire, whether through illness, political failure, or some corrosive combination of both. The image it projects is imposing but isolated, and it is difficult not to read it as a performance of confidence rather than the thing itself. Was Spranger persuaded by his own allegory? Or is the real subject the need for such allegories, the gap between what power claims and what it can actually hold?

The painting’s afterlife carries its own pointed irony. Almost certainly part of Rudolf’s collection at Prague Castle, it was there on the night of 25 July 1648 when a Swedish force of some 3,000 men under General Hans Christoff von Königsmarck (1600–1663) stormed Malá Strana and the Hradčany. This was the final act of the Thirty Years’ War, and the looting was methodical. Paintings, manuscripts (among them the Codex Gigas, the largest surviving medieval manuscript), sculptures, and thousands of books were packed into crates and sent down the Elbe on barges to Sweden, where they entered the collection of Queen Christina (1626–1689). Peace negotiations at Westphalia were already all but concluded; the plunder of Rudolf’s collections was very likely the principal reason for the assault in the first place. A painting made to celebrate Habsburg Catholic triumph was carried off by Protestant soldiers and absorbed into the collections of the north. For centuries it passed through private hands in Sweden and Germany, its imperial programme muted, half-forgotten, illegible to anyone who did not know what it had once been for. It appeared at Christie’s, London, on 17 July 1981, and was acquired by a private German collector. By 2007, it had reached Prague, where it is now displayed in the Schwarzenberg Palace as part of the National Gallery’s Old Masters collection.The painting hangs, today, within sight of the castle where it was made. Whether that counts as restitution, or simply as one more turn in the long path of an object that has outlived every power it was meant to serve, is an interesting question.

References

DaCosta Kaufmann, T. (2025) Rudolf II: The Life and Legend of the Mad Emperor. London: Reaktion Books.

DaCosta Kaufmann, T. (1988) The School of Prague: Painting at the Court of Rudolf II. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Fučíková, E. (1988) ‘Cat. no. 163’, in Prag um 1600: Kunst und Kultur am Hofe Rudolfs II., exhibition catalogue. 2 vols. Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum, vol. I, p. 283

Liptakova, N. (2021) The Looting of Prague 1648: The History of the Looting of the Paintings from Prague. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/46508634/The_Looting_of_Prague_1648_The_History_of_the_Looting_of_the_Paintings_from_Prague_Nikola_Liptakova ( Accessed 24 June 2025)

Metzler, S. (2014) Bartholomeus Spranger: Splendor and Eroticism in Imperial Prague. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art / Yale University Press

Hans von Aachen (1551/52 – 1615), Portrait of Maria Maxmiliana, the Painter’s daughter, 1611, Oil on canvas, 51,3 x 38 cm, Prague Castle Picture Gallery

This is a rare and moving work, produced at a decisive and deeply transitional moment in both the artist’s career and the fate of the court he served. By 1592, von Aachen had become Kammermaler to Emperor Rudolf II Habsburg, a patron with whom he enjoyed a friendship that contemporaries likened to that of Apelles and Alexander the Great. For nearly two decades he had served as trusted artist, art agent, and occasional diplomatic envoy, operating at the heart of what had become one of the most intellectually and artistically ambitious courts in Europe. It was in Prague that, for some twenty years, the Rudolfine court flourished intellectually and became one of the liveliest and most avant-garde courts of the age. Yet the very year this portrait was painted marked the final collapse of that world. In May 1611, Rudolf was forced to abdicate.The Bohemian Protestants had appealed to Matthias for help, whose army then held Rudolf prisoner in his castle in Prague, until 1611, when Rudolf was forced to cede the crown of Bohemia to his brother. Rudolf died in 1612, nine months after he had been stripped of all effective power.The imperial court began to unravel. Grand commissions became rare. The lavish Mannerist allegories, mythologies, and eroticised courtly tableaux that had once filled the imperial galleries gave way to smaller, more private works — like this one.

The identity of the sitter has been the subject of careful scholarly attention. As early as 1970, Rüdiger an der Heiden proposed that the Prague portrait depicts the artist’s daughter— a reading later developed and consolidated by Eliška Fučíková, the foremost authority on von Aachen and the art of the Rudolfine court, whose decades of archival research in Prague, Cologne, and across European collections have established the foundations of the modern literature on the artist. Fučíková identifies the sitter as Maria Maximiliana, von Aachen’s daughter, and has described the portrait as among the most compelling likenesses of its time. In this family portrait, von Aachen depicts her with a quiet realism rarely granted to women or children in portraiture of the period. Her expression is pensive, her gaze direct yet softened, and the treatment of her features suggests paternal affection. She is not adorned with courtly extravagance, but presented simply and earnestly — a reflection of the inward turn that had begun to shape the artist’s final works.

What von Aachen has left us here is something the grand allegorical programme of the Rudolfine court never required of him: a face without armour. His daughter looks out from the picture without ceremony, without the mediating language of mythology or dynastic pride, and the effect is striking precisely because the painter knew every register of those languages intimately. The world that had sustained his career for nearly two decades was dissolving around him when he made this portrait — Rudolf confined to his own castle, the collections soon to be dispersed, the court itself a fading institution. Against that dissolution, von Aachen set down something stubbornly particular: the features of a child who belonged to no allegory, served no political purpose, and required nothing of the viewer except attention. That, in the end, may be the most telling thing about this work — that a painter of such calculated splendour chose, at the last, to be simply truthful.

References

Fučíková, E., Konečný, L. and Hausenblasová, J. (eds.) (1997) Rudolf II and Prague: The Court and the City. New York: Thames and Hudson

Fusenig, T. (ed.) (2010) Hans von Aachen 1552–1615: Court Artist in Europe. Berlin/Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag

Kaufmann, T. DaCosta (1988) The School of Prague: Painting at the Court of Rudolf II. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Bernaert de Rijckere (active c. 1535–1590), Diana Surprised by Actaeon, c. 1580s–1590s, Oil on panel, Prague Castle Picture Gallery

The masterpiece  captures the charged instant when myth turns on the man who dares to look. Actaeon, mid-step and mid-curse, already wears the antlers of his fate—a hunter becoming the hunted. This isn’t a moment of warning; the punishment has begun. Diana, cold and distant, stands among her nymphs like a vision carved from ivory, unbothered by his horror. Painted in the late 16th century, the scene reflects the high-flown elegance of Northern Mannerism: bodies stretched like music, gestures tangled like vines, beauty laced with danger. It suited Habsburg taste perfectly—where art was meant to astonish, instruct, and delight in equal measure.

Although Rijckere was based in Ghent and is not documented as a court painter in Prague, his painting entered the collection of Emperor Rudolf II (1552–1612), likely through the extensive art networks and diplomatic channels maintained by the Habsburg court. Rudolph II collected one of the most ambitious collections of mythological and allegorical paintings in Europe, favouring works that merged classical subject matter with erotic intensity and intellectual symbolism.

The painting’s close stylistic resemblance to the work of Bartholomeus Spranger (1546–1611) and Hans von Aachen (1552–1615), both leading court painters in Rudolf’s service, is striking. Like Rijckere, these artists synthesised Italian Mannerist influence (especially from Parmigianino and Giulio Romano) with Northern refined details  and a heightened emotional register. Their art, often erotic and elaborately allegorical, fulfilled Rudolf’s desire to stage imperial power as a theatre of learning, beauty, and esoteric wisdom.