Portrait of Charles II

Claudio Coello's Portrait of Charles II, dated to around 1680 and held at the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, depicts the last Habsburg king of Spain at roughly nineteen years of age, shortly after he had assumed personal rule. Charles II is among the most pitied figures in Habsburg history — born with severe physical and intellectual disabilities resulting from generations of dynastic inbreeding, he ruled with the aid of powerful ministers from 1665 and died in 1700 without an heir, precipitating the War of the Spanish Succession. Coello's portrait faces the impossible task of projecting royal authority through a sitter incapable of the commanding presence that conventional portraiture required. His solution — careful idealization of the face combined with the formal apparatus of Habsburg portraiture — is characteristic: the dark costume, the controlled pose, the dynastic accessories all work to imply majesty that the sitter himself could not quite supply.

The face is treated with more sympathetic idealization than complete honesty would permit — the Habsburg jaw is present but not exaggerated, the complexion warm rather than sallow. Coello relies heavily on the rhetorical apparatus of formal portraiture to compensate for the sitter's natural limitations.