Vincenzo II Gonzaga (fragment)

From 1600 to 1608 Rubens was court painter to Duke Vincenzo I Gonzaga in Mantua, and his biggest task there was an altarpiece for the city's Jesuit church showing the whole ducal family kneeling before the Holy Trinity. The boy in this fragment is the duke's youngest son, Vincenzo, born in 1594 and about ten when Rubens painted him. He is the youngest person in the altarpiece, and the only one who gazes out carelessly, straight at us. Rubens laid him in quickly and broadly, in colour he had learned from the Venetians. In 1801 the altarpiece was cut into several pieces, and this one surfaced at the Dorotheum auction house in Vienna in 1908, where the museum bought it. The boy became Duke Vincenzo II in 1626. He died childless the next year, the last of the main Gonzaga line, and during his short reign the family's celebrated picture collection began to be sold off to King Charles I of England.