The Menil Collection The Menil Collection

This miniature equestrian portrait of Henri II (1519–1559) shows the future king (dauphin) of France as a young man in his early 20s, with a slight beard and moustache and a pensive expression befitting a royal portrait. He wears ceremonial armor elaborately inlaid with scrolling gold foliage made by the Milanese master armorer Giovan Paolo Negroli. The painting itself is attributed to François Clouet, the official portraitist of the French royal family. Clouet inherited this role from his father, Jean Clouet, upon his death in 1540. The work is likely a counterpart to a painting of Henri’s father, Portrait of François I, King of France, ca. 1541, in the collection of the Louvre, Paris (inv. M1 1092). Nearly identical in size, both works picture the subject mounted on horseback against a flat, blue background framed by an architectural element, and the two figures hold identical scepters. Early examples of French equestrian portraiture, both paintings were modeled after the Imperial Roman equestrian sculpture of Marcus Aurelius. By portraying himself after the famously wise and benevolent emperor and Stoic philosopher, Henri II expressed the burgeoning Renaissance admiration for antiquity, and the humanist aspirations he held for his own future rule. Henri II’s reign was cut tragically short when he was fatally wounded in a jousting tournament in 1559.