Portrait of Ambrogio Spinola, Michiel Jansz van Mierevelt, 1609 – (Michiel Jansz Van Mierevelt) ◄ Previous Next ►

Artist: Michiel Jansz Van Mierevelt

Date: 1609

Size: 119 x 88 cm

Technique: Oil On Canvas

Ambrogio Spinola was a scion of a noble family of bankers in Genoa. In 1602, he placed himself and his army of 6,000 men at the disposal of the Spanish in their fight against the Dutch rebels. In 1606, Spinola became commander-in-chief of all the Spanish forces in the southern Netherlands and thereby Prince Maurits’s greatest military opponent. Spinola must have sat for Van Mierevelt in February 1608, during his visit to The Hague for the peace negotiations that led to the Twelve Years’ Truce.2 The composition, showing Spinola diagonally in the picture space with his plumed helmet on a table beside him, was first employed by Van Mierevelt for his 1607 Portrait of Maurits,3 and was the Delft artist’s standard composition for military figures. Spinola wears the badge of the Order of the Golden Fleece he had been awarded in 1605 by Philip III of Spain for his capture of Ostend. Heinen has suggested that the armour worn by Spinola was probably the product of Van Mierevelt’s imagination; the short skirt of lames is Italian while the breastplate is of the flat, northern Netherlandish kind.4 The decoration of the breastplate, on the other hand, is Italianate (rather than Italian) in character. The presence of a copy of Van Mierevelt’s portrait in the Leeuwarden Series (SK-A-554), has led Heinen to conclude that the present picture was probably commissioned by Prince Maurits for a gallery of officers’ portraits.5 Heinen, moreover, suggests that by showing Spinola wearing decorative armour and a large ruff, Van Mierevelt set out to paint the Spanish forces in a negative light by contrasting them with the more soberly clad officers who fought for the United Provinces.6 Although portraits of Spinola are listed in the 1632 inventory of the Stadholders’ Quarter in the Binnenhof,7 and Maurits might, therefore, have owned a version or versions of Van Mierevelt’s portrait of the Genovese officer, there is no evidence to support Heinen’s conclusion that the present picture was painted for a gallery of officers’ portraits. Indeed, Van Mierevelt’s Italianate (again, rather than Italian) signature on the painting, suggests that it was commissioned by and for Spinola himself. The fact that Johan Ernst I, Count of Nassau-Siegen wears a suit of armour very similar to Spinola’s in the Leeuwarden Series (SK-A-531) belies Heinen’s hypothesis that Van Mierevelt’s rendering of Spinola’s costume in the present painting had a political motivation. Spinola, moreover, wears the same large ruff in a print showing the participants of the 1608 conference. Jonathan Bikker, 2007 See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 183.