look closer

The emperor looks past the painter with his jaw set under the crimson plumes. Titian had half a pound of red lake carted over the Alps from Venice to get that colour.

At dawn on 24 April 1547, in river fog on the Elbe, Spanish veterans waded and swam the current with their swords in their teeth to take the boats of the Protestant shore guard. The army of Charles V came across at Mühlberg onto an enemy still forming up. The Schmalkaldic League, the alliance of Lutheran princes that had defied the emperor for 16 years, was broken by supper. Its commander, the Elector John Frederick of Saxony, was run down in the rout, slashed across the face, and brought to Charles still bleeding. The emperor sentenced him to death, then changed the sentence to captivity and kept him around the court like a filed document. Charles, whose gout had carried him through parts of the campaign in a litter, rode the field that day. Afterward he set the victory in a phrase built from Caesar's: I came, I saw, and God conquered. The next winter, at the imperial diet in Augsburg, Titian was summoned over the Alps to make the picture of it. Aretino, never short of program, wrote helpfully from Venice proposing allegories: Religion and Fame at the emperor's side, the beaten trampled under the hooves. Titian threw all of it away. He painted a tired 48-year-old man in the actual armor of that morning, alone on a dark horse at the edge of a wood, lance level, riding into an evening sky. There is no battle and no enemy anywhere on the canvas. The armor still exists in Madrid and matches piece for piece. The studios kept a story from those sittings: that the emperor stooped to pick up a brush Titian had dropped, saying that Titian deserved to be served by Caesar. Told or invented, it was the century's exchange rate between the two kinds of power stated exactly. The picture invented the royal equestrian portrait as Europe would repeat it for 300 years. Rubens copied it and Velázquez answered it. Every king who ever sat a horse in front of a painter afterward was asking, more or less, for this. The man in the saddle went on to lose the larger war anyway. The Lutherans he beat at Mühlberg got their legal peace 8 years later. A month after that Charles, worn through at 55, abdicated everything he had and split the world's largest inheritance in two. He retired to a monastery in Extremadura, where he lined his rooms with clocks and tried, the monks said, to make them strike together. The portrait hangs in the Prado, where the sky behind him is still deciding between storm and gold.