Cordula van Wyhe

DEATH AND IMMORTALITY IN RUBENS’ ILDEFONSO ALTARPIECE1

Summary

Around 1629, the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia, widowed governess of the Spanish Netherlands, followed the suggestion of the primer majordomo of her household and head of the Ildefonso brotherhood, Ferdinand d’Andelot, and commissioned from Rubens a triptych dedicated to the memory of her husband, the Archduke Albert of Austria, who had died seven years earlier. It will be shown that the Ildefonso altarpiece collapses mortality and immortality by promoting the continuity of the body politic beyond Archduke Albert’s death. This supra-temporal quality is based on the idea of the perpetual, spiritual rejuvination and salvation of the body politic as the corpus mysticum of Christ. Furthermore, this essay will not only situate this iconographic programme of the Ildefonso altarpiece within the larger context of specifically Burgundian and Habsburg traditions of sacral kingship, but will also examine how the triptych furthered in particular the interests of the Burgundian faction as spearheaded by Ferdinand d’Andelot and the larger community of palace servants at the Brussels court, during the difficult period of transition of power after the Infanta’s death on 1 December 1633, when the reins of power were taken up by her successor, the Cardinal Infante Ferdinand.

At fifteen minutes past noon on 13 July 1621 Archduke Albert of Austria (born 1559) died in Brussels after several years of agonising illness. His death marked the end of his co-sovereignty over the Habsburg Netherlands to which he had acceded with his wife, the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia, twenty-two years earlier. The Infanta oversaw personally the preparations of his funeral, the laudatory poems, orations and the cenotaph. Owing to the complexity and

1 I thank Krista de Jonge, Margit Thøfner and Miri Rubin for their help during various stages of researching this article. Particular thanks is due to Ulrich Heinen from whom I received valuable clues regarding the altarpiece’s iconography and Birgit Houben, who generously shared her research on Ferdinand d’Andelot with me. The last section of this article profited enor- mously from her excellent work on the Burgundians at the archducal court. This article is dedicated to my beloved mother Hildegard Schumann (23 September 1940 – 31 May 1999), Joh 13,34–35.

Daphnis 38 2009 218 Cordula van Wyhe length of the preparations, the final interment took place eight months later on 12 March 1622. Albert’s funeral, as Margit Thøfner has recently pointed out, was “one of the costliest urban ceremonies ever performed in the Habsburg Low Countries.”2 The purpose of this ‘theatrum ceremoniale’ was to demonstrate that the body politic of Albert was immutable despite the mutability of his body natural. The Archduke’s body politic signified the perpetuity of his immortal office, his royal dignity and Christian virtue. This “indissoluble continuum” (Eire) between the temporality of his mortal body and the eternity of sovereignty offered stability despite political change, presence despite absence.3 The authors of the numerous funeral panegyrics for Albert, for example, repeatedly invoke the living presence of the deceased Archduke by directly addressing him as an interlocutor and he, in turn, occasionally even talks to his subjects by commanding them to stop mourning, to exercise loyalty to the Spanish crown and to attend to pressing political matters.4 In this way, the funeral orations fulfil a dual function: they invoke the past by reconfirming the oath of allegiance the Archdukes and their subjects swore during the inaugural rites in the year of their assump- tion of power in 1599 and they invoke trust in the future by eulogiz- ing Albert’s widow and successor, the Infanta Isabella.5 To this effect, the inscription on Albert’s funeral catafalque in the cathedral of St Michael and St Gudule in Brussels written by the celebrated Latinist Erycius Puteanus read: “[…] Although we may not be with Albert, we may forever delight in Isabella.”6 Hence, the corporate body ceases to be finite, incomplete or dysfunctional, because its past and future existence, its predecessors and successors are ident- ical.7

2 Margit Thøfner: A Common Art. Urban Ceremonial in Antwerp and Brussels during and after the Dutch Revolt. Zwolle 2007, p. 299. 3 Carlos Eire: From Madrid to purgatory. The art and craft of dying in sixteenth- century Spain. Cambridge 1995, p. 341. 4 Jan Papy/Toon Van Hout: The Image of Archduke Albert in Seventeenth- Century Funeral Literature. In: Albert and Isabella. Essays. Exhibition Catalo- gue. Ed. by Luc Duerloo/Werner Thomas. Brussels 1998, p. 324. 5 Papy/Van Hout (fn. 4), p. 324. 6 “Et cum Alberto non possimus, aeternum Elisabeta fruimur”; Thøfner (fn. 2), p. 305. I cite here Margit Thøfner’s translation from the Latin text. 7 Alfred Kantorowicz: The king’s two bodies. A study in mediaeval political theology. Princeton 1957, pp. 314–317.

Daphnis 38 2009