Charles the Bold

Charles the Bold had been dead for 140 years when Rubens painted him, so there was no sitter, only older likenesses and a reputation. Charles was the last Duke of Burgundy, and he spent his reign trying to turn his lands, Burgundy together with the Netherlands, into a kingdom of their own. The Swiss and the Duke of Lorraine stopped him. On 5 January 1477 he was killed in battle outside Nancy, and his body was found two days later in a frozen pond, so badly disfigured that it could only be identified by old scars. Everything he had gathered then passed through his daughter Mary to her husband, Maximilian of Habsburg. That is why a painter in Habsburg-ruled Antwerp had reason to portray him at all. Rubens made an idealised image, a ruler whose whole bearing states his claim to power. The oak panel was painted before 1618 and probably stayed in Rubens's own estate.