Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia

In July 1577 Ana de Dietrichstein, a lady at the Spanish court and the daughter of the emperor's ambassador in Madrid, wrote about a consignment of portraits leaving the city. The Prado uses that letter, together with the signature Sánchez Coello left in the window recess above the chair, to date this canvas to 1577 instead of 1579, where it sat in the catalogue for years. What was going abroad is a girl of about 11 in white and gold, pearls and a small feathered ornament in her hair, a handkerchief in her left hand and her right resting on a crimson armchair, a mark of rank in a Spanish court portrait. A marriage between Isabel Clara Eugenia and her cousin Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor, was under discussion at that moment. It came to nothing. She stayed in Madrid as the person Philip II trusted with his papers, and married Archduke Albert only in her thirties, after which the two governed the Low Countries together from Brussels.