Portrait of Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia (Anguissola)
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Portrait of Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia is a 1599 oil-on-canvas painting of Isabella Clara Eugenia by the Italian painter Sofonisba Anguissola, identified in 1992 by Maria Kusche.[1] Owned by the Museo del Prado, it currently hangs in the Spanish Embassy in Paris.
In 1609 Pedro Paolo De Ribera referred to Anguissola producing a portrait of infanta Isabella during her stop in Genoa en route to Brussels in June 1599[2] He states that infanta "daily spent long hours chatting [with the artist], remembering things which had had happened to her in her tender years". Anguissola was a portraitist for the Spanish court and also produced a portrait of Isabella's mother Elisabeth of Valois.
Isabella is shown wearing a sumptuous court dress, a large pleated ruff, a pearl necklace, a gold chain with a figure of Francis of Assisi or Anthony of Padua and a girdle studded with pearls, rubies and diamonds, resting her right hand on the back of a chair and her left hand holding a lace-edged handkerchief. Profoundly religious, she spent her last years in the "Descalzas Reales" monastery and in the habit of a nun, as shown in her later portrait by Rubens.[3]
Isabella only stopped in Genoa a few days, not long enough to complete the portrait, and so Isabella requested that she would "sent it to her en route [once it was complete], as she did".[4] However, in the end, it seems the work was not sent directly to Isabella in Vienna or Brussels but to Madrid as a gift from Isabella to her step-brother, the future Philip III of Spain. The work is mentioned in an inventory of works at the Royal Alcázar of Madrid compiled after Philip II's death, though without an attribution.[5]
