Retrato de Carlos V

This seated portrait was made in 1548 at Augsburg, where Charles V had summoned Titian to his court after a hard-won victory over the Protestant princes of Germany. Charles ruled an empire so vast it was said the sun never set on it, yet he is shown not in armour but sunk quietly into a chair, in black, an ageing man more tired than triumphant. The design came from Titian's own hand, but much of the actual painting, and especially the loose landscape sketched into the right half, is credited to his gifted Netherlandish assistant Lambert Sustris, who had travelled north with the workshop. Within a few years Charles would do the almost unheard-of thing for a monarch and abdicate, handing his crowns to his son and brother and retiring to a monastery. The weariness already sits in his face here.