Alonso Sánchez Coello
1588 · Crown of Aragon · Spanish Renaissance
The story
When you picture a Spanish royal portrait, stiff and magnificent, the sitter frozen in black against a plain ground, you are picturing a formula that Alonso Sánchez Coello fixed at the court of Philip II two generations before Velázquez arrived.
He learned the manner in Flanders. Sent north around 1550 to train under Anthonis Mor, the Netherlandish master of sober, exacting likeness, he absorbed that cool precision and warmed it with color he took from Venetian painting. By 1560 he was court painter in Madrid, and Philip II kept him close for the rest of his life, standing godfather to two of his daughters and dropping in at his studio.
His job was to make the Habsburg dynasty visible. He painted the king, the doomed young prince Don Carlos, and the infantas in the guarded, ceremonial style Spain would keep for decades. When he died in 1588, his pupil Juan Pantoja de la Cruz took over the royal likenesses and carried the same formula on into the next reign.
