Pearls in a Portrait:

François Clouet’s 1571 Depiction of the Archduchess Elizabeth of Habsburg

Joseph F. Patrouch

Florida International University

My presentation this morning will be based on an analysis of a painting by the painter François Clouet (circa 1515–1572), one of the court painters of the Queen Dowager of France, Catherine de Medici (1519–1589). Catherine was fascinated by the genre of portraiture.[1] By her death in 1589 she had assembled a collection of hundreds of such works, and the one which I will discuss this morning was painted in oil on wood around 1571. It is approximately 43.5 by 30 cm and is known from the original in the Louvre as well as numerous copies, including one at the Trianon, another at the Musée Condé, and a third at the French embassy in DC.

This portrait depicts Queen Elizabeth of France at the age of approximately 17 years. She reigned from 1571–1574 and was a Habsburg archduchess who was born in Vienna in 1554 and would die there in 1592. Her uncle and brother-in-law was King Phillip II of Spain. (Her sister was Phillip’s wife Anna and Anna and Elizabeth’s mother was the Holy Roman Empress María, Phillip’s sister.)[2] Elizabeth’s father was a Habsburg archduke who became Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II (1527–1576) (He also ruled as King of Bohemia and King of Hungary, among many other titles.)

This morning I would like to concentrate not so much on the person being portrayed, Elizabeth of Habsburg, but on the dress and jewelry in which she is shown and what these can show about the mental worlds of early modern Europe as well as the international scene of the early 1570s, particularly in relation to the Atlantic, and even Florida, and (to some extent) the Jacksonville area.

In his analysis of this portrait, Etienne Jollet has pointed out how a theme of Clouet’s work, the conflict between animate and inanimate, is resolved in this piece in favor of the inanimate: the dress and jewelry overwhelm the teenage queen. Jollet goes so far as to parallel the handling of the face in this and in his chalk sketch version with Clouet’s depictions of the pearls on Queen Elizabeth’s dress.[3]

Jollet’s insight provides my jumping-off point to a discussion of the pearls so prevalent in this portrait, as well as the puffy material cutouts in her dress. Here we see the material of the second layer billowing out in exotic shapes like clouds or, as I will suggest, seashells, an object of fascination among some European elites in this period.

On Columbus’ third voyage of 1498 he came into contact with the Venezualan coast and its native inhabitants. The Paria, the name of the people who lived on this coast, wore pearl necklaces and spoke of great pearlbeds in the area.[4] This news excited Europeans, who established some of the first European settlements on continental South America as bases from which to extract pearls. By the early 1500s, the pearl islands which the Europeans knew as Cubagua, Coche, and Margarita were being exploited. Some settlers set up a town they called Neuva Cádiz on Cabagua Island and began shipping massive quantities of pearls to Europe, pearls harvested with coerced native labor at tremendous human cost.

Often, the influx of gold and its effects on the European economy of this period is discussed. I believe that one also needs to recall the effects of the pearls on the representational economy, the pearls’ effects on the amount of symbolic capital available.

Spanish jewelry designers, inspired apparently by Mexican animal pendants, incorporated pearls into their designs, and, as revealed in this portrait, the French (and later the English) were attracted to this lucrative trade.[5] As Elizabeth Rodini wrote in reference to pearls in Baroque jewelry, “In the sixteenth century … an influx of pearls prompted by European access to rich sources off the American coasts stimulated a new interest in this material.”[6] The English, too, were affected by this new source of representational capital. No longer was the European supply limited to the expensive eastern pearls from the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean, from the famous pearlbeds off Sri Lanka, Bahrain or Ormuz.[7]

At the time of the Clouet portrait, 1571, French trade with the Caribbean was skyrocketing. Since the 1560s, Rouennais merchants had been gaining a foothold in the Caribbean and Venezuelan trade, supplying the locals with fancy cloth in exchange for American products.[8]

The French had tried to establish a foothold here in Florida during that decade and, I submit, this portrait of the French queen Elizabeth with its pearls and seashells from the Americas, reflects claims and assertions over power in the Americas, power which the French crown under Queen Elizabeth’s husband King Charles IX and his trusted naval advisor Admiral Coligny wished to pursue aggressively.

Of course, reading this portrait and its pearls with the Venezuelan pearldivers and Caribbean colonial rivalries in mind is only one way to give the portrait meaning.

The pearls could also be read, for example, as markers of gendered status: the wearing of pearls was often restricted to married women, and these jewelry pieces seem possibly to have belonged to Queen Elizabeth’s mother-in-law Catherine de Medici. This alludes to the relationship between the Italian queen dowager and her Austrian successor on the queen’s throne of France, Elizabeth.

If we move briefly away from the pearls to the seashells, we can read this portrait another way: as the reflection of broader attitudes toward the sea, and the Spanish Atlantic generally.

Queen Elizabeth’s mother-in-law Catherine de Medici (1519–1589. Queen of France 1547–1559) had a room full of natural curiosities in her city palace in Paris: one of the so-called “Wunderkammer” of this period in the early modern German world. A large part of these collections of curiosities was devoted to nautical oddities. The ocean was considered full of the debris from the Flood and a constant reminder of God’s wrath. Alain Corbin calls the ocean therefore a “permanent appeal to repent” for the people of pre-modern Europe.[9]

The contemplation of the irregular, the transforming, the pearl, the billowing cloth, the seashell’s myriad but related forms, the animate’s relation to the inanimate (as Clouet discussed in his paintings) was to lead to a similar contemplation of the self.

I hope that my brief comments about Queen Elizabeth of Habsburg’s 1571 portrait dress will lead to a similar contemplation of pearls and seashells and their relationship to the early modern Spanish Atlantic and Florida.

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[1] For more on the new-found interest in Catherine de Medici’s portrait collection, see the description of the recently-closed exhibition at the Musée de Condé, “Les Clouets de Catherine de Médicis.” (25. Sept. 2002–6. Jan. 2003.) A catalog has been published: Alexandra Zvereva, Les Clouet de la reine Catherine de Médicis au musée Condé de Chantilly (Paris, 2002). Ian Wardropper has pointed out the role portraits such as those collected by Catherine de Medici play in the research on Renaissance jewelry: “Between Art and Nature: Jewelry in the Renaissance,” Museum Studies 25 (2000) 7–15, here 8.

[2] Archduchess Elizabeth is the subject of a long-term research project by this author. For some background, see: Joseph F. Patrouch, “Elisabeth of Habsburg,” Volume V, 129–133. Anne Commire and Deborah Klezmer, editors, Women in World History. (Waterford, CT: Yorkin Publications, 2000); Joseph F. Patrouch, “Ysabell/Elizabeth/Alzbeta: Erzherzogin. Königin. Forschungsgegenwurff.” Frühneuzeit-Info 10 (1999) 257–265; Joseph F. Patrouch, “The Archduchess Elisabeth (1554–1592): Where Spain and Austria Met,” Cameron M.K. Hewitt, Conrad Kent and Thomas Wolber, editors, The Lion and the Eagle: Interdisciplinary Essays on German-Spanish Relations Over the Centuries. (NY: Berghahn Books, 2000) 77–90.

[3] Etienne Jollet, Jean et François Clouet (Paris, 1997), 249.

[4] This brief discussion of the Europeans’ initial contacts with the peoples and pearls of what is now Venezuela is drawn largely from William D. and Mary L. Marsland, Venezuela Through Its History (NY: 1954). See 24, 30, 35–37, 61–62. See also Paul E. Hoffman, The Spanish Crown and the Defense of the Caribbean 1535–1585: Precedent, Patrimonialism, and Royal Parsimony (Baton Rouge, 1980). See 115 and 131 where he discusses the affects of the pearlbeds on French corsairs, the economies of the Main, and the Habsburg defensive strategies.

[5] Elizabeth Rodini, “Baroque Pearls,” Museum Studies 25 (2000) 68–71.

[6] Ibid., 68.

[7] Diana Scarisbrick, Tudor and Jacobean Jewelry (London, 1995). 19, 39. Scarisbrick details how Elizabeth I of England received Mary Stuart’s elaborate pearl collection after Mary had fled to England, and how some of these pearls had been a wedding present to Mary from her mother-in-law Catherine de Medici. Ibid., 17.

[8] In addition to the work by Hoffman mentioned above, see also Kenneth R.C. Andrews, The Spanish Caribbean: Trade and Plunder, 1530–1630 (New Haven, 1978) 181–182.

[9] Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea. The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World, 1750–1840. (Berkeley, 1994.) Jocelyn Phelps, translator. (Original title: “Territoire du vide,” 1988). Page 3.