Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand of Austria

In April 1635 Antwerp welcomed a new governor, and the city built temporary triumphal arches of wood and painted canvas along his route. This portrait of him, more than two and a half metres tall and barely more than one wide, was made to fit one of them, the Arch of Ferdinand. The sitter was the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand, younger brother of King Philip IV of Spain. He had been made a cardinal in 1619, when he was about ten, and was archbishop of Toledo, but he never became a priest. His real gift was for war. Seven months before he rode into Antwerp he had won the battle of Nördlingen in Bavaria, one of the great Catholic victories of the Thirty Years' War, and the arch was built to celebrate it. The canvas outlived the wooden structure it was made for and is recorded in the imperial gallery in Vienna from 1733.