PUBLICATIONS
Here we share seminal publications on Habsburg women and their families, commencing with the scholarly vanguard of Habsburg women researchers who took it upon themselves to explore the lives of these women as early as the nineteenth century.
Mary of Hungary: Reconstructing a Queen, Rethinking Her Legacy
New Research on Art, Power, Patronage, and the Habsburg Netherlands
ARS: Journal of the Institute of Art History of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, vol. 59, no. 1 (2026)
A queen without a kingdom. A governor without a crown. A woman who helped shape the visual identity of the Habsburg Empire.
Five hundred years after the Battle of Mohács (1526), which claimed the life of her husband, King Louis II of Hungary and Bohemia, Mary of Hungary (1505–1558) is receiving renewed scholarly attention. Widowed at twenty-one, she went on to become one of the most influential female rulers, art patrons, and collectors of Renaissance Europe.
As governor of the Habsburg Netherlands from 1531 to 1555, Mary exercised considerable political authority on behalf of her brother, Emperor Charles V. She commissioned portraits, tapestries, sculptures, and architectural projects, assembled extraordinary collections, and transformed her residences into stages for the representation of dynastic power.
Yet much about her cultural ambitions, collecting practices, and political agency remains to be explored.
This special issue of ARS, published by the Institute of Art History of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava, brings together an international group of historians and art historians to reconsider Mary's achievements. Appearing in the quincentenary year of Mohács, it offers new perspectives on a remarkable Habsburg woman whose influence extended from Central Europe to Brussels, Madrid, and Lisbon.
Art, Portraiture, and the Politics of Display
Introduced by Larry Silver, whose essay Mary of Hungary: Patron of Distinction establishes the extraordinary scope of her artistic patronage, the volume explores how Mary employed works of art not simply as objects of beauty or personal pleasure, but as instruments of political communication and dynastic representation.
Charles Hope revisits Mary's relationship with Titian, while Walter Cupperi examines the complex history of her small portraits and medals, questioning conventional assumptions about female patronage, authorship, and the circulation of royal likenesses.
In Annemarie Jordan Gschwend's contribution, Empire in Portrait: Mary of Hungary's "Grande Galerie" and the Transimperial Crafting of Habsburg Identity, the great ceremonial gallery at the Coudenberg Palace in Brussels emerges as one of the most sophisticated spaces of dynastic representation in sixteenth-century Europe.
Far more than a collection of family portraits, the gallery functioned as a ceremonial setting, a political statement, and a visual genealogy of Habsburg sovereignty. The study also traces important connections with the portrait gallery assembled by Mary's sister, Catherine of Austria, queen of Portugal, at the royal palace in Lisbon. Together, these spaces reveal how Habsburg women developed and exchanged visual strategies for asserting dynastic identity across distant courts.
Ingrid Ciulisová turns to Mary's palace at Binche, examining her strategic acquisition and display of paintings and precious objects, including Rogier van der Weyden's celebrated Descent from the Cross. Her contribution illuminates the political significance of collecting and Mary's role in shaping the artistic inheritance of the Habsburg dynasty.
Books, Diplomacy, and Female Agency
This volume also ventures beyond painting and collecting.
José Luis Gonzalo Sánchez-Molero reconstructs Mary's remarkable interest in military affairs, fortifications, and architecture through the books in her library. His study reveals a ruler deeply engaged with the practical and intellectual demands of governing a strategically vulnerable territory.
Maxim Hoffman examines gift-giving as an instrument of diplomacy, focusing particularly on Mary's exchanges with her sister Eleanor of Austria, queen of France. Gifts, far from being merely affectionate gestures, could convey political messages, sustain family alliances, and facilitate negotiations across hostile borders.
The issue concludes its Mary of Hungary dossier with Hoffman's publication of Mary's testament and codicil of 1555, presented for the first time with an English translation. These documents offer an unusually intimate perspective on the queen's household, personal relationships, and final wishes.
Reconsidering a Habsburg Woman of Power
What unites these studies is a fundamental reassessment of Mary's historical significance.
She was neither simply the sister of Charles V nor merely a wealthy collector with exceptional taste. She actively helped construct Habsburg authority, using art, architecture, books, ceremonial display, and personal networks to govern and communicate power.
Her career also challenges familiar distinctions between public and private spheres, political action and artistic patronage, masculine sovereignty and female authority.
By bringing together new archival evidence, close examination of objects, and fresh interpretations of familiar masterpieces, this issue of ARS contributes to a broader understanding of the cultural and political achievements of women in Renaissance Europe.
Mary of Hungary was not simply a witness to Habsburg history. She helped create its image.
Read the complete special issue (PDF).
From Kongo to Prague: Emperor Rudolf II and an Ivory of Empire
From the heart of Africa to the courts of Renaissance Europe, a royal ivory horn tells a tale of kings, explorers, and collectors. From Africa to Europe traces the odyssey of a Kongolese oliphant whose beauty bridged worlds and centuries.
From Africa to Europe: The Journey of a Royal 15th-Century Oliphant
Annemarie Jordan Gschwend
From Africa to Europe: The Journey of a Royal 15th-Century Oliphant is a captivating study tracing the extraordinary voyage of a royal Kongolese oliphant, a carved ivory trumpet that journeyed from the Kingdom of Kongo in Central Africa to Emperor Rudolf II’s imperial Kunstkammer in Prague. Through this single masterpiece, Gschwend reconstructs a story of diplomacy, art, and cross-cultural exchange that defined the early modern world.
The oliphant’s journey begins in the late 15th century, when Portuguese explorer Diogo Cão first reached the Congo River in 1482. His encounter with King João I Nzinga a Nkuwu marked the start of sustained contact between Kongo and Portugal. As diplomatic ties deepened, the Kongo court sent lavish gifts to Lisbon—ivory tusks, carved oliphants, and raffia textiles—that revealed a sophisticated royal culture and artistic mastery. These ceremonial horns, known as mpungi, were instruments of prestige, used in royal rituals, military ceremonies, and ancestral worship. Their geometric motifs and abstract designs, drawn from Kongo textiles and basketry, carried deep spiritual symbolism and reflected the kingdom’s cosmological beliefs about life, death, and continuity.
In Portugal, these exquisite ivories became coveted diplomatic gifts and prized curiosities in royal treasuries. Yet by the mid-16th century, as new Asian ivories from Ceylon and India entered Europe, the earlier West African works faded from prominence. Many were traded or gifted to other European courts. Through meticulous research, Gschwend follows how these pieces traveled through Florence, Innsbruck, and Prague, carried by networks of Habsburg and Medici collectors whose passion for the exotic shaped the emerging culture of Renaissance collecting.
The featured oliphant, once part of the Le Grelle family collection, was likely presented by Archduke Albrecht of Austria, Viceroy of Portugal, to his brother Emperor Rudolf II around 1583. Later recorded in Rudolf’s 1607 Kunstkammer inventory, it was looted by Swedish forces in 1648 during the Thirty Years’ War and repurposed in Sweden as an ornate drinking vessel—its silver mounts inscribed with verses celebrating Nimrod, the biblical hunter.
Today, this oliphant stands as a witness to over five centuries of cultural movement, adaptation, and reinterpretation. Gschwend’s scholarship reveals not only the object’s intricate artistry but also its symbolic journey through the intertwined histories of Africa and Europe. In following its path—from royal African workshop to European cabinet of wonders—From Africa to Europe illuminates the global exchanges that shaped the Renaissance and offers a profound meditation on the circulation of beauty, power, and meaning across continents and time.
The Queen’s Gambit: Infanta Maria of Portugal, the Duchess of Viseu, the Court Painter Anthonis Mor, and Fake News at the Lisbon Court
Annemarie Jordan Gschwend
Infanta Maria of Portugal (1521–1577), Duchess of Viseu, was one of the most learned, wealthy, and independent women of the sixteenth century. A devoted patron of the arts and a key figure in Habsburg-Portuguese diplomacy, she became celebrated as the “Sempre Noiva” — the “Ever-Bride” — whose image and intellect shaped her legend long after her death.
The Queen’s Gambit offers a vivid reconstruction of the intertwined worlds of dynastic politics, portraiture, and rumor at the sixteenth-century Habsburg and Portuguese courts. Through newly unearthed archival correspondence in Lisbon, Madrid, and Vienna, Jordan Gschwend re-examines the episode surrounding Infanta Maria of Portugal (1521–1577) — the wealthy, intellectual Duchess of Viseu whose destiny seemed bound for the Habsburg throne — and the Flemish portraitist Anthonis Mor, whose diplomatic artistry helped to fashion her public image as the “quintessential Habsburg bride.”
The essay opens with Queen Leonor of Austria, Maria’s mother and Dowager Queen of Portugal and France, whose upbringing at Margaret of Austria’s court in Mechelen instilled a belief in portraiture as an instrument of dynastic display. Following this model, Leonor and her sister Mary of Hungary employed painters as cultural emissaries to advance family strategy. In 1542 Leonor first dispatched the Burgundian artist Antoine Trouvéon to Lisbon to sketch her daughter, producing the earliest known likeness of Infanta Maria. A decade later, she and Mary chose the rising Netherlandish master Anthonis Mor — already favored at the imperial court in Brussels — to travel to Portugal and paint the Infanta from life.
Mor’s 1552 portrait of Maria, executed at the royal palace of Almeirim, is interpreted as a masterpiece of political iconography. He portrayed the princess seated regally, richly attired, and holding a Japanese folding fan — a striking allusion to Portugal’s global empire. This imagery presented Maria as both the embodiment of dynastic virtue and the visual equal of a Habsburg empress. Copies of the painting circulated swiftly among European courts, supporting marriage negotiations with Philip of Spain.
Yet the political chessboard shifted. In 1553, Emperor Charles V abruptly broke the Portuguese engagement to secure his son Philip’s marriage to the new English queen, Mary Tudor. The decision shocked Lisbon. Letters from the Spanish envoy Juan Hurtado de Mendoza describe court turmoil — and a curious subplot: a drunken astrologer, Domingo Peres, spreading false prophecies that Maria would still become queen of Spain. Jordan Gschwend dubs this the first episode of “fake news” at the Lisbon court.
Mor’s subsequent portrait of Mary Tudor, painted in 1554, cemented his fame as Europe’s leading court artist. Still, it also eclipsed the image of Infanta Maria — the “Sempre Noiva,” or “Ever-Bride.” Jordan Gschwend’s essay thus reveals how art, politics, and rumour converged to define — and ultimately derail — the destiny of one of Portugal’s most fascinating Habsburg women.
Louise Roblot-Delondre and Habsburg Women
Portraiture & Imaging
Louise Roblot-Delondre was an erudite woman and amateur historian. In 1913 she wrote a ground-breaking monograph on Renaissance Habsburg queens, regents and princesses with the objective of cataloguing their portraits, portrait engravings, and drawings, a number of them located in the Receuil d’Arras, dating between 1500 and 1600.
Roblot-Delondre focused on powerful women of the family who had long been overshadowed by their male relatives and husbands. The catalogue or étude iconographique she compiled of Habsburg women, enhanced with detailed genealogies, encompassed as well, queens and princesses of the Spanish and Portuguese royal houses who had married into or were related to the Habsburgs in the sixteenth century, such as Juana I of Castile (1479-1555), her daughter Catarina of Austria, Queen of Portugal, King Manuel I of Portugal’s daughters, Infanta Maria of Portugal, Duchess of Viseu (1521-1577), Empress Isabella of Portugal (1503-1539), and Infanta Beatriz of Savoy (1504-1538). Her study is the first to delineate what precisely constituted a court portrait of a Habsburg queen or princess in the sixteenth century - that is the essential components which characterized their portrayals, such as medium, format, size, composition and pose.
Roblot-Delondre’s premise was to ascertain with archival documents, royal inventories and bibliographic sources the portrait commissions these women undertook, and to underscore their patronage of distinguished sixteenth-century painters. An appendix provides a list of these artists with short biographies. She brought into the limelight specific Habsburg women, localized their portraits in public and private collections, and updated erroneous attributions.
We consider this seminal publication an important reference and handbook which all students and scholars interested in Habsburg Women should consult.
Louise Roblot-Delondre
Portraits d'infantes: XVIe siècle. Étude iconographique
(Paris-Brussels: Van Oest & Co., 1913)
Lisbon: Between Spices and Diamonds, 1500 to 1755
The Age of Discoveries completely transformed one Renaissance court - Lisbon. When Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1498, his voyage didn’t just open a new sea route to India — it set in motion the rise of a far-reaching Portuguese maritime empire, stretching from Brazil to Africa, India, and the Far East.
Practically overnight, Lisbon became a world capital — a bustling crossroads of merchants, diplomats, explorers, and artists. Gold, spices, and silks flowed into its harbours, while new ideas and influences reshaped every corner of its culture.
Amid this golden age stood Catherine of Austria, a Habsburg Infanta who reigned as Queen of Portugal from 1525 to 1578. Her fifty-year rule spanned one of the most dynamic periods in Portuguese history, linking the royal courts of Iberia and Central Europe and leaving a lasting imprint on the kingdom’s political and artistic life.
Annemarie Jordan Gschwend (1998). "VIII. Lisbon: Between Spices and Diamonds", 1500 to 1755, The Court Historian, 3:1, 16-23, DOI: 10.1179/cou.1998.3.1.003
THE "PANGOLIN FAN"
AN IMPERIAL IVORY FAN FROM CEYLON
Hugo Miguel Crespo & Annemarie Jordan Gschwend
A definitive, well-illustrated book published in 2022 on nine carved ivory fans produced in the royal workshop of a lost kingdom in Ceylon for the Lisbon court in the mid-sixteenth century.
An outstanding carved ivory fan is the focus of this singular book by two renowned authors and specialists in the field. This unique fan, nicknamed the “Pangolin Fan”, because
of the unusual representation of an Indian pangolin on its upper handle, belongs to a small group of exclusive ivory fans carved in Renaissance Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka).
The Portuguese royal family received these fans, alongside other imperial ivories, as diplomatic gifts from the King of Kōṭṭē, Bhuvanekabāhu VII. The delegation he sent in 1542 from Ceylon to Portugal was the first Asian embassy to visit Europe. His ambassador and Brahmin chaplain, Śrī Rāmaraksa Pandita, brought in his baggage a large group of imperial ivories that fired the imaginations of the Portuguese royals who received them.
The Portuguese Queen, Catherine of Austria (r. 1525-1578), was most fascinated by these spectacular ivories, and she quickly began to disperse them amongst her family and favourite relatives. Bhuvanekabāhu’s rare and exceptional ivory fans represent globalisation and cross-cultural transfers between Asia and Europe after 1542.
These ivories bridged Ceylon and Portugal in a unique way, illustrating the extraordinary diversity, ingenuity, and quality of Sinhalese craftsmanship. As exotic showcase pieces, these fans came to represent the extent and power of the Lisbon court in the mid-sixteenth century and qualify as some of the most important Kunstkammer pieces ever collected by the Avis, Habsburg, and Farnese courts in the Renaissance.
The “Pangolin Fan” is the only one of nine imperial fans to remain in a private collection. The others, originating from distinguished princely collections, are proudly exhibited in museums in Munich, Naples, Vienna, and Braunschweig, while one, previously unknown to scholarship, was stolen in 1920.
LINK TO READ THIS BOOK ONLINE:
https://jaimeeguiguren.com/usr/library/documents/main/livro-the-pangolin-fan-web.pdf
Renaissance Children
Art and Education at the Habsburg Court (1480-1530)
Exhibition Review
Oud Holland
Review of: ‘Renaissance children’ (2021)
November 2022
The Art of Collecting among Habsburg Women
Catherine and Juana of Austria and their Pursuit of Luxury
The Art of Gift Giving
Catherine of Austria (1507-1578), Queen of Portugal, adored her Spanish nieces, Maria and Juana, daughters of her elder brother Emperor Charles V (r. 1500-1558). Juana of Austria was her favourite, as Catherine had chosen her as her son's future wife, Prince John, heir to the Portuguese throne. As these princesses grew up in Spain, having lost their mother, Empress Isabella of Portugal, at a young age in 1539, Catherine became an exceptionally devoted aunt and surrogate mother to them, sending couriers and courtiers from the Lisbon court to call on Maria and Juana at regular intervals. These diplomatic visits inevitably included personal letters, court portraits, jewellery and rich textiles. Among the packed boxes, baskets, and crates sent from the Lisbon court were select exotic objects from Portuguese Asia, domestic and sometimes wild animals from West Africa or Brazil. These “encounters” allowed a distant Catherine to cultivate a close friendship with these infantas, especially as the years passed and the Portuguese queen tragically witnessed the deaths of her own children.
Pietas Austriaca at the Lisbon Court
The Monumental Chapel and Funerary Tombs built by Catherine of Austria in the San Jerónimos Monastic Complex in Belém (Lisbon)
Annemarie Jordan Gschwend
