The Victory at Fleurus

1634. Oil on canvas Not on display

This painting depicts the battle of Fleurus, near Brussels, which pitted troops from the Catholic League commanded by General Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba against Protestant Union soldiers led by Count Ernst von Mansfeld and Prince Christian of Brunswick. The Catholic League’s victory on August 29, 1622 freed Brussels—governed at that time by Isabel Clara Eugenia—from the threat posed by Protestant troops that had entered the Netherlands through Hainaut. That day, a Protestant cavalry of six-thousand men, accompanied by seven-thousand infantrymen, was vanquished by a Catholic force of two thousand riders and eight thousand foot soldiers, with a loss of one thousand two hundred Protestant soldiers, along with their flags and their scant artillery. Catholic losses amounted to barely two hundred dead and four hundred wounded. News of the victory, whose scope was reduced by the fact that the retreating Protestants joined with Dutch troops soon thereafter, reached Madrid on September 19 and was immortalized by Lope de Vega in his comedy La mayor Victoria de Alemania or La nueva victoria de don Gonzálo de Córdoba. And Quevedo offered an exhaustive description of the battle in his Mundo caduco y desvarios de la edad. Born in Cabra (Córdoba) in 1586, Gonzalo de Córdoba was the son of the IV Duke of Sessa and brother of the fifth. He died in Montalbán (Teruel) in 1635. At the age of eighteen he fought in the galleys of the II Marquis of Santa Cruz, and later proved an outstanding general in Flanders, the Palatinate and Italy. Following his victory at Fleurus, he was appointed Prince of Martea by Philip IV in 1624. By the time the present work was painted for the Hall of Realms, however, his reputation had been ruined by a failed attempt to take Casale. The Cabinet of Drawings and Prints at the Uffizi has a drawing with two riders from the Santarelli Collection, which Santarelli and later historians attributed to Antonio Tempesta. However, as Pérez Sánchez observed, it is actually a preparatory drawing for the group in the foreground of the present work. Pérez Sánchez also recalled that Carducho had various volumes of Tempesta’s engravings at the time of his death. It seems logical to deduce that similar battle scenes painted by Carducho, Cajés, Castelo and Leonardo were all influenced mainly by Tempesta’s engravings, although other possible sources have been proposed, including engravings by Maarten van Heemskerck of Charles V’s victories, or those of the Medici’s victories engraved by Giovanni Stradano. Among engravings by Tempesta that may have inspired the paintings in the Hall of Realms, Leticia Ruiz has pointed out two series from 1612—Guerras de los romanos contra los bátavos and Historia de los siete infantes de Lara—and two others from 1613: Vida de Alejandro Magno and Batallas bíblicas.