John Frederick, Elector of Saxony

In 1547 the Emperor Charles the Fifth crushed the Protestant princes of Germany at the Battle of Mühlberg, and the man who had led them, John Frederick of Saxony, was taken prisoner and sentenced to death, later commuted to captivity. A few years on, at the imperial court in Augsburg, Charles set his favourite painter to work through the room. Titian painted the triumphant emperor, and then he painted this, the defeated enemy. There is no armour and no scar here, no drama of the battlefield. John Frederick sits heavily in a black robe trimmed with dark sable, a huge, tired man in resigned middle age. It is an oddly sympathetic likeness of a defeated man, made for the very court that had beaten him. Titian finished it around the turn of 1550 into 1551, while its sitter was still a prisoner.