Cloaked in might: ‘The Art of Power’

Remember when President Bush famously donned a flight suit and caught a jet to the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln to declare “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq? He was hardly the first ruler to adopt the wardrobe of warfare for a symbolic purpose. The Spanish monarchs Charles V and his son, Philip II, sought to aggrandize perception of their strength, and that of the empire they ruled, by dressing in ornate suits of custom-made armor 350 years ago.

For the most part, these elaborate, wildly expensive-even-in-their-own time costumes were, like the men who wore them, too precious to be risked in combat. They were props of political theatre, albeit of superb manufacture.

“The Art of Power: Armor and Portraits from Imperial Spain,” on view in the National Gallery’s West Building through October, offers a unique look behind the curtain of regal image-making of the 15th through 18th centuries. The show features the armor of kings along with portraits and tapestries of them caparisoned thusly.

Though the armor comes from Patrimonio Nacional — the Spanish Royal Armory in Madrid — the NGA is the only venue for this exhibit, which takes on a special resonance for being staged in America’s most-visited art museum. As Patrimonio Nacional Director Alvaro Solder del Campo pointed out at the show’s opening, it covers Spain’s propaganda efforts nearly as far back the era of the Catholic rulers who supported Christopher Columbus’s voyage to the New World, up through the reign of Charles III, who sat on the throne when the USA-to-be declared its independence from England nearly three centuries years later.

The exhibit begins with a parade helmet made for Charles V by Filippo Negroli in 1533. It’s a marriage of fashion and function stranger than anything else we see; more or a less a faceless bust of the king and Holy Roman Emperor, giving him long blond curls and placing the symbol of the Golden Fleece at his neck.

The reference to Greek mythology would become de rigueur in the decoration or armor. The insignia of the Order of the Golden Fleece, from Jason and the Argonauts, a story already at least 700 years old during Charles’s reign, turns up again in the full suit of armor Desiderius Helmschmid created for him in 1544. That armor is displayed in front of Juan Pantoja de la Cruz’s 1602 portrait of the Holy Roman Emperor wearing it.

In Charles’s time, the notion of anyone but the monarch himself donning the royal armor would have been unthinkable. But the in the 17th century, as the increasing prevalence of gunpowder rendered this armor obsolete as an implement of warmaking, its symbolic significance waned in turn. No longer closely associated with the rulers for whom they were designed, suits of armor in the 17th century remained useful for artists seeking reference material. Painting an Old Testament scene in 1630, Pedro Nunez del Valle used as models two of suits featured: one made for Charles V by Helmschmid, and a Roman-style suit made by Bartolomeo Campi for Guidobaldo della Rovere, the Duke of Urbino, who in turn gave it to Philip II as a present.

Wealthy noblemen happily paid for portraits of themselves wearing royal armor, too. Human nature, sadly, does not evolve at the same rapid rate as human weaponry.