Three decades have lapsed since the pioneering exhibition about Mary of Hungary, Habsburg regent of the Netherlands (1993).[1] Along with their dominant imperial relatives, Maximilian I and Charles V, subsequent exhibitions and monographs have also been dedicated to their devoted female relatives who served as regents over the Low Countries. In particular, Dagmar Eichberger has elucidated the important role of Margaret of Austria as regent in the region and serious art patron before Mary of Hungary.[2] Yet despite this intensified attention to early modern women rulers in northwest Europe (also including Catherine de’ Medici in France and Elizabeth I in England), Duchess Margaret of Parma (1522-1586) has remained in obscurity, partly because she was viewed as ineffective in forestalling the eventual Dutch Revolt in the Netherlands during the 1560s.
At last Margaret gets her turn in the spotlight thanks to this volume, edited by Katrien Lichtert, a prolific scholar of Netherlandish art history and urbanism and curator at the MOU Museum of Oudenaarde, where this exhibition was held. This book, however, is a companion volume rather than a standard catalogue; it features essays by distinguished scholars in multiple disciplines. Moreover, the volume is handsomely produced with large-scale details and full color by Hannibal Books, publisher of some of the most beautiful catalogues of recent major art exhibitions. Thus, this new publication fills a major gap in various ways.
After a family tree and timeline, Lichtert begins the volume with a life story. Margaret was the illegitimate daughter of Emperor Charles V but was accorded noble status while raised under the guidance (but not at the court, p. 168) of Margaret of Austria. She briefly married Alessandro de’ Medici, then (after the latter’s assassination) Ottavio Farnese, grandson of Pope Paul III. Vasari himself included a fresco of the first ceremony in Palazzo Vecchio, Florence (fig. 5); the Ottavio marriage was also depicted at the Villa Farnese, Caprarola, by Taddeo Zuccaro (fig. 6). In Rome Margaret resided at the Palazzo Madama, named for her, and she represented imperial power in the city. She closely associated there with Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuits.
In 1559 Margaret accepted the post of governor-general of the Netherlands, succeeding her aunt, Mary of Hungary. However, despite a lenient rule and conciliatory politics, she resigned after the outbreak of rebellion in 1567. Her son Alessandro Farnese (portrait by Antonis Mor, 1557, fig. 9) eventually became regional governor and led the forces who recovered Antwerp for the Spanish Netherlandish in 1585.
The biographical introduction also includes an essay on Charles V by Giampiero Brunelli and René Vermeir, who emphasize imperial politics in Italy and their effects on Margaret’s situation. Stijn Lybeert and Martine Vanwelden focus on her family ancestry and ties to Oudenaarde, her birthplace.
Remaining essays cluster into sections. At Part One, Annemarie Jordan Geschwend discusses Habsburg court fashions, visible in state portraits, such as Anthonis Mor’s three-quarter likenesses of Margaret herself (ca. 1559, fig. 34; ca. 1562, fig. 85). She also emphasizes the splendor of luxuries, jewels and dresses, often in precious red dye, for noble women’s wardrobes. Particular focus fixes here on Alessandro’s 1565 wedding in Lisbon to Infant Mary of Portugal. That event is also recorded in one of the highlights of the exhibition, Warsaw University’s Brussels Album (555-56; figs. 37, 40). Such events featured courtly tournaments and masquerades, as Nand Cremers writes. Essays in Part Two consider more courtly pastimes: equestrian ladies’ participation in the hunt. Essays by Lichtert and Cremers point to opulent hunt accessories as well as the record of this activity in Bernard van Orley’s tapestry designs what is now known as The Hunts of Charles V, including Mary of Hungary on a falcon hunt (ca. 1530; figs. 51-52).[3]
The surprise star of the show, the Brussels Album from Warsaw, occupies the central essays in this book, focusing on that 1565 “wedding of the century,” despite intensified local background political turbulence. An initial essay by Lichtert, followed by those of Giuseppe Bertini, Alexandra van Dongen, and Floris de Rycker probe different aspects of the ceremonial setting: the guests, the feasts, and the music, respectively. Taken together, these glimpses of court festivity reveal how much luxury surrounded Margaret of Parma and how important such marital alliances could be for royal families, here linking the Portuguese Avis kings to the Habsburg lineage of Charles V.
Remaining sections focus more closely on Margaret of Parma in her role as ruler and collector. But only Part Four investigates her as “Governor-General in Times of Turmoil.” The essay by Violet Soen places a positive spin on her agency and positive efforts to find peace, acting as a “dove” to the “hawk,” the Duke of Alba, after 1567. Thus, it offers a valuable revision to the received image of a largely ineffective Margaret. By contrast, Protestant-generated regional turmoil dominates the next, more conventionally political essay by Anne-Laure van Bruaene. But she specifically centers on Oudenaarde as a microcosm, “From a City of Heretics to Geuzenhoekrast.” While initially suggesting that Margaret would have been aware of tensions, such as the ongoing controversy about drama performances by civic rhetoricians (rederijkers), Van Bruaene shows how events quickly went out of local control prior to the city’s recapture by Alessandro’s Catholic forces in 1582, after which most Protestants migrated northward to the emerging Dutch Republic. No easy task to reconcile these two historical essays.
Remaining essays are truly art-centered, beginning with Lichtert’s fine survey of “Margaret’s Fabulous Collection.” Together, they display what Lichtert aptly titles in her final essay, “Education, Taste, and Patronage.” Her love of music, also discussed in De Rycker’s essay, might reinforce her identification with the player in Jan van Hemessen’s Young Woman Playing a Clavichord (ca. 1528-29; fig. 4). And she enjoyed the Medici Collections of her in-laws while adding to the Farnese heritage. Among exotica, she acquired ivory fans from Ceylon, discussed briefly by Jordan Geschwend, a leading authority. Along with numerous state portraits by Mor and another by Frans Floris, she patronized miniaturist Giulio Clovio in Rome. Margaret also commissioned the suite of market still-lifes (1566) by Joachim Beuckelaer, now in Naples with other Farnese treasures. Monumental designs for an unfinished palace in Piacenza, supervised by Vignola (drawings at figs. 113-14), and a much-altered tomb in the local church (fig. 116; drawing at 117-18) are discussed by Cristina Cecchinelli and Alessandra Talignani While Margaret was not the great patron of tapestries like her aunt Mary of Hungary,[4] her contributions to that luxurious and costly medium from her time in the Netherlands, center of production, are surveyed by Cecilia Paredes. Finally, Lichtert documents the regent’s own contribution, the Duchess’s Window by Crabeth (1562), to the massive suite of stained-glass in Gouda, St. John’s church, as further consolidation of her rank and Habsburg status.
While historians have carefully chronicled the events of Margaret’s regency in their annals of the developing Dutch Revolt, that background has relatively little presence in this volume. Instead, the luxury and courtly aspects of her activities and palace life take center stage, perhaps in part the result of this book’s emergence from a museum exhibition, which necessarily presented more than a hundred Margaret-related objects. But the exhibition’s display of fine objects has produced an imbalance in assessing Margaret of Parma within this book. A fuller rehearsal of her own responses in this crucial decade – rather than those of Oudenaarde – to the religious and political tensions during her rule could have been revisited in a book of essays like this one, so that even positive aspects of Margaret’s efforts at compromise and diplomacy remain obscured. Brief mention by Lichtert about her tensions with Cardinal Granvelle (p. 26) and with her son Alessandro prior to his own appointment as sole regent in the 1580s (pp. 27, 151) might have been better elaborated, since that seldom plays a serious part in standard histories.
As a result, Margaret of Parma’s political career and place in history here is overshadowed by her splendor, collecting, and art patronage. Despite the grace note of a brief Epilogue by Dagmar Eichberger, focusing on a 1567 Jacques Jonghelinck medal of Margaret (figs. 130-31), her historical significance in the region remains understated. If this book leaves her glass half-full, its rich content remains sweet liquor – but without much trace of the sour contemporary aftertaste of her Netherlandish Realpolitik.
Larry Silver
University of Pennsylvania, emeritus
[1] Bob van den Boogert and Jacqueline Kerkhoff, eds., Maria van Hongarije: konining tussen keizers en kunstenaars, exh. cat. (Utrecht – ‘s-Hertogenbosch, 1993).
[2] Dagmar Eichberger, Leben mit Kunst, Wirken durch Kunst: Sammelwesen und Hofkunst unter Margarete von Österreich, Regentin der Niederlände (Turnhout, 2002); Eichberger, ed., Dames met klasse: Margareta van Oosenrijk, exh. cat. (Mechelen, 2005).
[3] Véronique Bücken and Ingrid de Meûter, eds., Bernard van Orley (Brussels, 2019), 194-219.
[4] Iaian Buchanan, Habsburg Tapestries (Turnhout, 2015).