The triple portrait may have commanded the young Prince Charles’s attention because of his royal precursor’s lurid fate: Charles I had the distinction of being the only British king to be tried for treason and executed. Among other extravagant commissions, he asked Rubens to decorate the ceiling of the grand Banqueting House, in London’s Palace of Whitehall, with canvases illustrating heavenly approval of James I, his father. Charles I-who was devout, reserved, and convinced of his right to absolute power as the head of the Stuart dynasty-was a great patron of the arts. The painting was made about a decade after Charles’s accession, in 1625, and was used as a blueprint for a marble bust by Bernini. With his long, flowing hair cut fashionably shorter on one side, he is depicted wearing three distinct robes and three ornate lace collars, and he is accessorized with the blue sash of the Order of the Garter, Britain’s oldest chivalric order. Titled “ Charles I in Three Positions,” and painted in the sixteen-thirties by Van Dyck, the work offers three representations of the elegant monarch: in profile, facing forward, and in three-quarter view. “King Charles lived for me in that room in the castle,” he later said. The sensitive and reflective prince, who was born in 1948 and who by the age of seven was being tutored by a governess in the history of the nation-and of his historic family-was fascinated by the painting. His attention was arrested, however, by one unusual portrait: of King Charles I, displayed in the Queen’s Ballroom. “It’s just a background,” Charles later recalled. Pedalling furiously, he hardly registered the spectacular works from the Royal Collection on the walls. When King Charles III was a young prince, in the early nineteen-fifties, he sometimes propelled a ride-on toy around Windsor Castle, one of several royal residences where he spent his childhood.
0 kommentar(er)
