The Art of Power: Royal Armor and Portraits from Imperial Spain, which can only be seen at the National Gallery of Art, offers an excellent sequel to a series of recent exhibitions on Spanish themes, including the wonderful El Greco to Velázquez: Art during the Reign of Philip III, which was on view last year at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Nasher Museum at Duke University (click here for review). But whereas that exhibition attempted to provide a comprehensive overview of Spanish artistic accomplishments during the early seventeenth century, The Art of Power is broadly chronological, ranging from the late fifteenth to the late eighteenth century. It is also monographic in that its primary concern is to demonstrate the wealth of symbolic meanings—heroism, leadership, military prowess, etc.—that armor conveyed.

Organized by Álvaro Soler del Campo, director of the Spanish Royal Armory in Madrid and principal author of the handsome accompanying catalogue, The Art of Power features armor from this collection, the armería real, together with tapestries from Spain’s Patrimonio Nacional and portraits from a number of European museums. In some respects the show is reminiscent of the magnificent armor and tapestry exhibitions on view at the Metropolitan Museum in recent years. However, it differs to the extent that it matches suits of armor with those that are represented pictorially in cloth and in paint. Visitors are invited to make visual comparisons and connections between these objects, ideally to determine the manner in which artists tinkered with armorial designs for pictorial ends. Neither the wall texts nor the catalogue comment extensively about this paragone, which pitted artists against armorers, but the exhibition reveals the extent to which artists liberally interpreted the objects they encountered in the armería real.

The collection of Madrid’s Royal Armory began in 1560 when Philip II purchased the armor that had belonged to his father, Emperor Charles V. The idea behind the Washington exhibition is that over the centuries this collection served as a visual archive for portraitists and other artists seeking models of armorial display. The show’s most striking example of this kind of “creative re-use” occurs with reference to the magnificent “flower-pattern” armor crafted by Desiderius Helmschmid for Philip II in 1550. Titian subsequently incorporated this suit of armor in the famous portrait of Philip presented to Mary Tudor prior to their marriage in 1554. Unfortunately, this portrait, now in the Prado, is not on view, but the armor in question reappears in a copy by Rubens of Titian’s (now lost) equestrian portrait of Philip II, as well as in the portrait of the count-duke of Benavante by Velázquez, admittedly a questionable attribution.

But attributions are not what this exhibition is about. Nor is it about painting per se. Rather, it aims at demonstrating the diversity, importance, and brilliant artistry of the armor associated with Spain’s royal house. The exhibition sets the mood with a large photo-mural reproducing Fabricio Casteló’s sixteenth-century fresco that depicts Juan II of Castile’s 1431 victory over the Muslim forces at the Battle of Higueruela in the Escorial (curiously, neither the artist nor the painting are identified), along with a trompe d’oeil mock-up of one of the Escorial’s granite doorways. The show’s small first gallery, which includes photos of the real armería, centers on one of its masterpieces: the “anthromorphoric” parade helmet crafted by Filippo Negroli for Charles V in 1533. Also included in this gallery is a glittering nineteenth-century Spanish example of the Golden Fleece, emblem of the military order whose members pledged to defend the Catholic religion. This emblem—visible in most of the portraits in the show—constitutes the exhibition’s leitmotif to the extent that it symbolized the unswerving commitment of Spain’s monarchy to the Roman Catholic faith.

The next gallery, “Spain and Al-Andalus,” is somewhat at cross-purposes. On the one hand, it seeks to introduce the viewer to the strength of the crusading ideal in Spain as exemplified in the Reconquest, the centuries-old effort to rid the peninsula of Muslim rule. On the other, it (rightly) wants to credit the Habsburgs, especially Philip I, consort of Queen Joanna of Castile, for having brought to Spain the kind of elaborate (but essentially militarily useless) parade and tournament armor the exhibition features. Here it might be noted that the Spanish nobility had previously favored lighter, considerably less cumbersome, and more practical armor of Muslim design and would continue to do so in the peculiarly Spanish tournament known as the juego de cañas in which “Moors” fought Christians, but this issue is one that neither the catalogue nor the exhibit address. It follows that this gallery gives prominence to the equestrian armor of Philip’s father, Maximilian I, and the spectacular but difficult to decipher eleven-foot-high woodcut of a triumphal arch that Dürer designed to honor Maximilian in 1515. As for the Reconquest, it is somewhat meekly represented by a pair of kettle helmets (one inscribed with pseudo-Arabic inscriptions) and the sword and scabbard that supposedly belonged to Boabdil, the last Muslim ruler of Granada. Also on view is a fascinating helmet—topped with a pomegranate, symbol of Granada—that was made for Philip I and an excellent late fifteenth-century panel portrait (from the Las Huelgas monastery in Burgos) featuring the armor-less family of Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, gathered under the protective and richly brocaded cloak of the Virgin Mary.

In the succeeding galleries, focused on Charles V, the exhibition hits its stride. A ruler who took pride in his military accomplishments and who also relished pomp and chivalric display, Charles probably commissioned more in the way of parade armor than any other European ruler in history. He also unleashed an international competition among various German and Italian armorers, each of whom attempted to out do the other by creating helmets, breastplates, and horse armor festooned with ever more elaborate damascened designs and featuring all manner of references to Samson, Hercules, and other classical heroes, excellent examples of which are gathered here. Also in these galleries are several magnificent tapestries associated with the emperor, notably The Muster at Barcelona, from the Siege of Tunis (by Willem Pannemaker, after designs by Cornelius Vermeyen) and Fame (by Pieter Van Aelst, after designs by Bernard Van Orley). Notably absent is Titian’s famous equestrian portrait of the armor-clad emperor at the Battle of Mühlberg. Admittedly this masterpiece probably should never leave its home in the Prado, but it is poorly represented here in the guise of a small photo as opposed to the full-scale photo-mural it deserves. Fortunately, the actual Mühlberg armor is in the exhibition, paired with a posthumous portrait that depicts the emperor wearing this particular outfit. The work of Alonso Sánchez Coello, this picture is the first indication in the show that court artists had access to the royal armory for inspiration.

Featured next are various suits of armor crafted for Philip II, Charles’s son and heir. Philip was not the fighter of the same caliber as his father, but Charles made certain that the young prince had armor befitting a ruler about to inherit an empire that was truly global in scope. One piece is the spectacular “Burgundy cross” armor, crafted by Wolfgang Grosschedel ca. 1551; it was worn by Philip (and his horse) at the Battle of St. Quentin in 1557, and subsequently incorporated into one of the finest portraits in the exhibition: Anthonis Mor’s Philip II (1560), a picture last seen in the United States in Spain in the Age of Exploration at the Seattle Art Museum (2005) but worth seeing again (click here for review).

At this juncture, the exhibition, replete with magnificent suits of armor juxtaposed with a series of stock portraits featuring various armor-clad members of Spain’s royal house, becomes somewhat repetitive. Still, there is much to see: the dazzling damascened “Diet of Augsburg” armor made for Philip II around 1560 and which should have been coupled with Sánchez Coello’s portrayal of Philip in Glasgow’s Pollack House, a picture which is reproduced in the exhibition catalogue (249) but is not on view; Joris van der Straten’s portrait of a youthful Juan of Austria wearing the darker, patinated armor that was the rage during the second half of the sixteenth century; and Rubens’s Philip II (early seventeenth century), a portrait that is far from the artist’s best. The exhibition continues with a curiously half-empty side gallery dedicated to Philip III (r. 1598–1621), a.k.a. “the Pious.” As this acronym suggests, Philip III made peace, not war. However, Philip II made sure that his one surviving son would be educated in accordance with the Habsburgs’ crusading ideals. On display here are two sets of children’s armor—one blackened, the other embossed—that the young prince wore on different ceremonial occasions. The first set appears in two adjacent portraits of Philip by Pantoja de la Cruz; the other, in Justus Tiel’s interesting Allegory of the Education of Philip III (ca. 1590), another work last on view on this side of the Atlantic in Seattle.

The exhibition’s final gallery is entitled “The Last Phase” of royal armor. In the seventeenth century armed tournaments that called for parade armor had practically disappeared—remember that King Henry II of France died in 1559 as a result of a wound suffered in one fateful joist. Armor, however, remained valuable for propagandistic purposes, and this explains why artists continued to represent princes dressed as if they were ready to enter the lists. Highlighting this twilight era of armorial display is Gaspar de Crayer’s little-known (and rarely seen) portrait of Philip IV (r. 1621–1665) regally clad in embossed armor of black and gold; an almost equally elaborate suit of armor made for Emmanuel Philibert of Savoy replicated in an adjacent portrait of this same personage by Van Dyck; and finally in Anton Rafael Mengs’s portrait of Charles III (r. 1759–1788), the only one of Spain’s Bourbon rulers represented in the show. He appears dressed in armor, holding the general’s baton, and wearing the collar of the Golden Fleece among other emblems signaling his commitment to the Roman Catholic faith. What is different is his demeanor. Compared to the gravitas of the Spanish Habsburgs, Charles sports a smile, an indication, perhaps, that his self-image was notably different from that of the other monarchs whose portraits are gathered here.

This detail goes unremarked, both in the catalogue and the otherwise helpful wall texts, but it is important because it suggests that Spain’s monarchy was changing in ways that the objects presented in the exhibition do not readily propose. The exhibition in fact offers the image of a monarchy frozen in time and seemingly reluctant to abandon the crusading ideals inherited from the era of the Reconquest. But Spain of the Bourbons was a far cry from that of the Habsburgs. Charles III, for example, was far more interested in the Enlightenment and governmental reform than religious war, and this helps to explain why Goya and other artists of this era customarily portrayed Charles together with other members of his family in more informal dress. Despite this lacuna, The Art and Power offers a splendid overview of armor, chivalric display, and the magnificence of Spain’s Catholic Monarchy.