Infante Don Carlos

This canvas travelled to Vienna as part of a marriage negotiation. In 1564 Adam von Dietrichstein, the emperor's envoy in Madrid, sent it to Emperor Maximilian II, because a match was being planned between Philip II's eldest son, Don Carlos, and his cousin Anna, the emperor's daughter. Sánchez Coello signed and dated it at the lower left, A. Sanchez F. 1564, and gave the prince the full height of a canvas nearly two metres tall. Theatre audiences know Carlos as the romantic rebel of Schiller's play and Verdi's opera, in love with his young stepmother. The wedding with Anna never took place. She came to Spain in 1570 as the fourth wife of his father, Philip II, and the same painter's portrait of her as Queen of Spain, dated 1571, is also in the Kunsthistorisches Museum.