Portrait of Emperor Charles V in Armour

From April to September 1548 Titian was in Augsburg with Charles V, who was presiding over the imperial diet a year after beating the Schmalkaldic League at Mühlberg. The portrait of the emperor in armour that this Florentine canvas repeats most likely comes from those months. The original is gone. What is left is the work of a copyist nobody can name, and the museum's two records cannot agree whether he was Venetian or Florentine. Armour was the standard formula for an imperial likeness, and it outlasted the man in it by only a few years. Charles abdicated in 1556 and withdrew to the monastery of Yuste, where he died in 1558. At Pitti the canvas was hung as a pendant to a portrait of his son Philip II, father and son side by side in steel. It is now in storage.