Can You Breathe in There, Your Majesty? (Published 2009)

Clothes make the man. Few have taken this adage more seriously than the Renaissance-era Spanish kings, who on ceremonial occasions favored elaborately decorated suits of armor as a kind of personal propaganda for themselves and their royal family.

The artistic and aesthetic heights that armor reached under the monarchy’s patronage can be seen in “The Art of Power: Royal Armor and Portraits From Imperial Spain” at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The exhibition is drawn from the Royal Armory in Madrid, one of the oldest and greatest repositories of armor in the world, and presents full suits as well as helmets, shields, swords and pieces for horses.

Organized by Alvaro Soler del Campo, director of the Royal Armory, Patrimonio Nacional, the exhibition is beautifully installed and manageably sized. Among the more than 70 objects are official portraits of Spanish kings attired in gold-trimmed suits by Velázquez, Rubens, van Dyck and others. In most cases the armor is next to the painting that depicts it. Also included are three spectacular tapestries illustrating the historic and mythic sources of the Spanish royalty’s self-image.

The exhibition and its catalog explore the bewilderingly complicated genealogy of the Spanish branch of the Hapsburg dynasty, which ruled over much of Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. Descended from the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I of Austria, the Spanish Hapsburg kings were Philip the Handsome, Charles V, three more Philips — II, III, IV — and Charles II, whose death in 1700 ended the line.

The armor on view is not the type worn into battle. Rather it is sumptuous art produced by expert metal workers. A suit of royal armor could take as long as two years to produce, and it would be far more expensive than a painted portrait. Intricate patterns and complex symbolic images were etched, embossed, inlaid, cast and otherwise worked into outfits for both men and horses.

The first piece in the exhibition, displayed in a vitrine like a religious relic in an otherwise nearly empty room, doubles as a helmet for and portrait of Charles V. Made by Filippo Negroli of Milan, the pre-eminent armorer of the 17th century, it has gilded curls and a beard matching the king’s real hair and delicately formed ears and lips of steel. A visor, now missing, might have represented Charles’s eyes and nose, which brings up a significant point: While a full suit of armor hides the identity of its wearer, its exterior tells much about who he was and his place in the world.

Charles V’s helmet, for example, has an embossed victor’s wreath encircling it, suggesting a connection to the emperors of ancient Rome. It also has a neckpiece bearing a low-relief representation of the necklace of the chivalric Order of the Golden Fleece, to which only the most powerful of European rulers belonged. A real Golden Fleece necklace is displayed nearby. Made mostly of gold, it has a small, golden figure of a ram hanging by a rope tied around its middle.

No other helmet or suit in the exhibition is so personal. The symbolism of other outfits alludes to broader concepts or systems like Christianity, chivalry, Roman history, and Greek and Roman mythology. The personal disappears into the universal as the iconography affirms the king’s cosmically sanctioned authority. Like the suit the king is a kind of empty vessel, a temporary vehicle of dynastic power.

Unusually poignant in this regard is a luxurious child-size suit from 1585 attributed to Lucio Marliani of Milan. Made for Philip III at the age of 7, it is covered by embossed, etched, gilded and gold- and silver-damascened imagery, including putti, masks, garlands, fruit and allegorical representations of fortitude, prudence, justice, temperance, fame and victory. It seems quite a load for such a young boy to carry.

“Allegory of the Education of Philip III,” a life-size portrait by Justus Tiel, shows the future king at 12 wearing that very suit. Behind him a woman carries objects representing the cardinal virtues while the figure of Chronos pushes away a naked Cupid, whose erotic mischief might distract the boy from his training.

Though made by some famously adept artists, the portraits in the show are less interesting as paintings than as historic documents. Stiff and impersonal, they represent values soon to succumb to the revolutionary dynamics of modernity.

By the end of the 17th century steel armor was obsolete. Firearms had rendered it useless in battle, and artists began to use it for period costuming, as in Pedro Núñez del Valle’s illustration of the biblical story of Jael and Sisera. In this conceptually convoluted scene the murdered Sisera wears Roman-style armor modeled on a full suit that is also on view in the exhibition. In the painting his suit signifies paganism, while a suit worn by the Israelite leader Barak, copied from one that belonged to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, represents, perhaps counterintuitively, the victory of Catholicism over the heresy of Protestantism.

The final work in the exhibition, a portrait of the Bourbon king Charles III by Anton Raphael Mengs from 1761, is the last painting ever to represent a Spanish king as a knight in shining armor. In the future men of power would dress with deceptive modesty.