Workshop of Joos van Cleve
Habsburg Netherlands · Northern Renaissance
The story
Emperor Maximilian I had been dead for about ten years when this portrait was painted in Antwerp around 1530. He wears a gown of gold brocade lined with fur and the chain of the Golden Fleece, the Burgundian order of knights he had received in 1478, and he holds carnations. His grandson Charles V was emperor by then and ruled the Netherlands, where the picture was made.
The Rijksmuseum labels it workshop of Joos van Cleve because it repeats a composition known in several versions. The museum takes an undated panel in Vienna as Van Cleve's own and treats its version and one in Paris as copies by his assistants. The versions differ in what the emperor holds, carnations, a scroll or a ring. When the panel was sold at Christie's in London in 1868 it went as a Holbein.
The same label covers another picture in the catalogue, a Virgin nursing the Child at Wawel Castle in Kraków. The castle's catalogue dates it to the second decade of the 16th century and gives it to the workshop as well.
