Gonzaga Cycle: The Entry of the Infante Philip of Spain into Mantua

On 13 January 1549 Prince Philip of Spain, the 21-year-old heir of the emperor Charles V, rode into Mantua. He was travelling from Spain to the Netherlands to be presented to the lands he would one day rule, and a member of his entourage, Juan Calvete de Estrella, described every reception along the way in a book printed in 1552. This canvas closely matches his account of the Mantua entry. Philip rides under a canopy, and the young duke Francesco III Gonzaga comes to receive him. Francesco was 15 and had been duke since the age of seven, and the museum notes that this visit remained the great event of his reign. That October he married a niece of the emperor. Four months later he was dead, after falling into one of Mantua's lakes during a hunt. The museum gives this final canvas of the cycle to Tintoretto's son Domenico, who conceived it as well as painted it, and made it answer the cycle's first scene, the imperial visit that had raised the Gonzagas to marquises.