The Victory of Fleurus

The room this was painted for took its name from its ceiling, where 24 shields stood for the kingdoms Philip IV ruled. That was the Salón de Reinos, the throne room of the king's new palace on the edge of Madrid, the Buen Retiro, fitted out in 1634 and 1635. Along the long walls hung 12 battle canvases, Velázquez's Surrender of Breda among them. Five equestrian portraits of the royal family, also by Velázquez, held the short walls, and ten scenes of Hercules by Zurbarán ran above the windows. Carducho, painter to the king and by then close to 60, delivered three of the 12, more than anyone else in the cycle.

His subject is the fighting near Fleurus, in the Spanish Netherlands, on 29 August 1622, where an army under Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba broke the mercenary force of Ernst von Mansfeld and Christian of Brunswick. The Latin painted across the lower middle of the canvas says exactly that, and adds that he made the picture in the twelfth year of the war then running. Two more numbers sit in the lower left corner, a white 522 and a red 262, the entries this canvas was given in the Buen Retiro inventory of 1794 and in the royal museum's of 1857.