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.

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.

PDF

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