A King in Hand

Rethinking the Bayonne Portrait and Subversive Female Networks

Last week I gave a talk on the relationship between Elisabeth de Valois, Queen of Spain, and her mother, Catherine de’ Medici, Queen Mother of France. As I was writing the talk, I started to have some new thoughts about what might be going on in the famous painting known as the “Bayonne Portrait”, which was made in Spain sometime around 1565. The portrait was painted by Sofonisba Anguissola, court painter and lady-in-waiting to the young queen of Spain. (As an aside, Anguissola was probably Elisabeth’s favorite lady-in-waiting. She painted dozens of portraits during her years at the Spanish court, some of which you likely recognize. However, the Spanish looked down at the idea of a lady-in-waiting signing her paintings like any common artist, and so Anguissola left her signature off most of the work she created during that time. In the centuries that followed, much of it was attributed to Spanish male artists like Coello. Scholars are only now righting that wrong. But back to the Bayonne Portrait.)

Elisabeth is about twenty years old in the painting and has come a long way from the naïve and awkward teenager she was when she first arrived in Spain, not quite fourteen years old. And to all appearances, she has made it. Everything about the painting screams “Spanish queen!”, and a fashionable one at that, from the long pendulous sleeves, to the buckled puntas traveling her gown from neck to hemline, to the extra-wide, bejeweled girdle at her hips. Most important of all is the accessory she holds in her right hand, as if to drive the point home: a miniature (newly fashionable) of her husband, King Philip II.

Philip as accessory. It’s almost tongue-in-cheek. Your average sixteenth-century person probably would have seen that miniature as a play on what the painting is really saying: that it is Elisabeth who is, of course, the king’s asset, his queenly jewel.

But is that what the painting is saying? Even as I was typing out my talk last week, I started to wonder.

Historians believe Elisabeth commissioned this portrait just after receiving word that she would meet her mother, Catherine de’ Medici, for an important diplomatic meeting at Bayonne, right at the border separating the kingdoms of France and Spain. The painting was likely intended as Elisabeth’s gift for Catherine, perhaps a way to show her mother how far she’d come. Such an image might have intimidated Catherine as much as it pleased her — after all, Spain was more foe than friend, and the painting suggests that Elisabeth was King Philip’s loyal and faithful wife — a true Spanish queen.

Then again, no one had worked harder behind the scenes than Catherine to get Elisabeth into those Spanish shoes. Through diplomats, messengers, and thousands of letters, Catherine had pulled and pushed her adolescent daughter into Philip’s bed, into his good graces, and as close as possible to the Spanish king’s council chamber. From afar, Catherine had made sure Elisabeth dressed to enthrall. She had shepherded her daughter through chronic illness and the woes of puberty and menstruation so she could succeed as queen. She had stressed over and over again how important it was for Elisabeth to please Philip. And why? Catherine was trying to make Elisabeth her own agent in Spain. She needed Elisabeth to advocate for France, for Catherine’s policies and ambitions. She needed Elisabeth to work more for France, the land of her birth, than for Spain, the land in which she reigned.

Catherine saw Elisabeth as an extension of herself. And she knew the only way Philip would listen to his young queen was if Elisabeth walked the Spanish walk and dressed the Spanish part.

So when Elisabeth commissioned a portrait of herself, festooned in Spanish finery and holding Philip’s portrait, was she signaling to Catherine that she was now entirely Philip’s queen?

Or, instead, had she found a way to say: “Look, Mom, I did it!” Or maybe: “Don’t worry, Mom. I have the Spanish king in the palm of my hand!”

We can never be sure. The more we learn about women of all ranks during this period, though, the more it is clear that they worked in back-channel, collaborative, and often subversive ways. And given that the clever Catherine was Elisabeth’s mother, it wouldn’t be surprising if Elisabeth engaged in her own wily and quiet messaging. Look at the portrait again — it’s almost like a smug smile is dancing about Elisabeth’s lips. As if she knows more than we do. As if she knows she’s learned from the best.

Read With Me: Have you read David Grann’s The Wager? It made such a splash when it came out a few months ago, with Leonardo DiCaprio optioning it practically the day it launched, that I’m always surprised if someone hasn’t read it. But if you haven’t, you should. Such vivid, narrative writing, the most novelistic of histories. And nary a woman in it! Which is not surprising (perhaps) given that it’s about the British navy and an 18th-century shipwreck — and what the curious incident of the mutiny on the ship known as The Wager can tell us about the relentless pursuit of empire.

What really gets me are Grann’s descriptions of scurvy. I have often thought that maybe I should be writing about the history of medicine because I frequently find myself going down the rabbit hole of diseases and other physical maladies, the plight of bodies and what their suffering says about the larger social order. Maybe I will write about medicine one day. In the meantime, Grann does an excellent job of showing how scurvy determined the fate of fleets and conquests and how so many trials and tribulations might have been remedied by a crate of lemons.

Queen of the Week: Last week on Instagram, I featured the three, female Nobel prize winners (in Medicine, Physics, and the Peace Prize) as a trio. Let me dwell a tad longer here on Katalin Karikó, who won the prize in Medicine for her groundbreaking work that led to the development of the mRNA Covid vaccines. Obviously, we owe her a lot. Thanks to my friend and fellow historian Surekha Davies, who sent me this lovely article from Wired UK, I learned that the universe seemed to be fighting Karikó almost every step of the way on her path to scientific success.

With a PhD in hand, and her husband and two-year old daughter in tow, Karikó left Hungary for Temple University in 1985, with £900 to her name. After her boss threatened to deport her, she moved to UPenn. Breakthroughs on her research proved elusive, as did funding for her projects. In 1995, her department at UPenn told her either to set aside her work on mRNA or lose her position, and with it a chunk of her salary. That same week, she was diagnosed with cancer. All the while her husband was back in Hungary where he’d been delayed after trying to obtain his green card.

Karikó decided to stay. She took the pay cut; she suffered the demotion. She fought her way through two surgeries for her cancer, then returned to her department at UPenn. There, jockeying for time at the photocopier (it was the ‘90s), she met the immunologist Drew Weissman, who’d recently joined the university. They got to talking. And the rest is history.

Sort of. Of course, it unfolds so easily in the telling once you look backward. But you know what made the mRNA vaccines that have saved millions of lives? Katalin Karikó’s keeping on when everything and everyone was telling her to stop.

I, for one, will take a lesson from that.

(NB: The Queen of the Week can be any person, of any gender, who calls something out in the name of social justice or works for the betterment of humanity — or just does something really awesome. If you have someone you’d like me to feature, please nominate them through the “Queen Queue” on my website).