Portrait of Queen Anne of Austria
Ca. 1573. Oil on canvas.Room 055
Queen Anne of Austria (1549-1580), Philip II’s fourth and last wife, is portrayed in three-quarter view against a neutral background on which the shadow of her silhouette is cast. She wears a black gown and a white headdress, the ends of which hang down over her bodice and are joined by a brooch concealed by her right hand. Peeping out from beneath the round sleeves of her gown are ruched satin or silk undersleeves that illustrate the different textures and tonal variations of the apparently monochrome black of Spanish court costume of the period. The sole exceptions are the lace of her ruff collar and cuffs.
Unlike the solemn and representative contemporary portraits of Anne of Austria painted by Alonso Sánchez Coello (c. 1531-1588) – for example that in the Museo Lázaro Galdiano in Madrid – Sofonisba’s depicts the queen in an outfit like those she wore daily, unadorned by her court jewellery. Around her neck hangs a beaded necklace crafted from calambuco wood or amber – she was very fond of these aromatic exotic substances – and her black belt may have been made of carved jet links like those mentioned in inventories. Her hands are clothed in leather gloves dyed young fustic yellow, perhaps because the weather was still cold. In the portrait of Catalina Micaela (private collection), the infanta also wears a daffodil in her hair, a flower that blooms around March or April. The queen was then pregnant with the Infante Carlos Lorenzo, who was born in August 1573.
This work is paired with the portrait of Anne’s husband (P1036) that was painted around the same time: the queen’s left hand rests on a chair with crimson upholstery forming a symmetrical pattern with Philip II’s right hand, and her necklace echoes the king’s rosary. Recent analyses conducted by the Technical Department of the Museo del Prado reveal that their supports were cut from the same piece of canvas prepared with an identical white ground.
Sofonisba executed the picture before leaving the court in June 1573. However, this was not the first time the queen’s lady-in-waiting had painted Anne of Austria, as Giovanni Battista Venturino de Fabriano, secretary to the legate Alessandrino, tells us that she was working on a portrait of her in November 1571, shortly before the birth of Anne’s first son, Prince Fernando. Here the Italian artist produces an idealised image of the queen, ignoring small flaws such as the wart, which Sánchez Coello – ever faithful to Flemish tradition – depicted at the base of one of her eyebrows, and softening her slight prognathism. The delicacy with which she portrays the royal family is another unmistakeable feature of her style. Around the same time, she painted the two young infantas, also dressed in black (Turin, Galleria Sabauda and private collection), along with the crown prince (San Diego Museum of Art). This group of pictures might be interpreted as her farewell to the Spanish court.
This canvas may have been part of King Philip II’s collection, although the first clear reference to it in the royal inventories describes it as being located in the Alcázar of Madrid in 1636, by then separate from that of Philip II1. It was moved from the Alcázar in the eighteenth century to decorate the Buen Retiro palace, to whose inventory of 1794, compiled after Charles III’s death, the white number on the canvas corresponds.
Pérez de Tudela, Almudena, 'Sofonisba Anguissola. La reina Ana de Austria' En:. Historia de dos pintoras: Sofonisba Anguissola y Lavinia Fontana, Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado,, 2019, p.153 nº 29
