King Ludwig II of Hungary as a boy

Bernhard Strigel's portrait of King Ludwig II of Hungary as a boy at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, painted around 1515, depicts the young prince who would inherit the kingdoms of Hungary and Bohemia at age ten and die at the Battle of Mohács in 1526 at age twenty — drowned in the retreat after his forces were annihilated by the Ottoman army of Suleiman the Magnificent. Ludwig II was already a figure of dynastic importance in Habsburg succession planning when Strigel painted him, a potential husband for the Habsburg princesses in the marriage strategies that Charles V was deploying to build his European alliance system. Strigel served as court painter to Emperor Maximilian I and was the primary portraitist of the Habsburg world in southern Germany, and his portrait of the young Hungarian king belongs to the series of dynastic portraits that documented the Habsburg family circle. The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna holds the Habsburg imperial collection, and this portrait of a king who would die young preserves one of the most poignant images of the dynastic casualties of the age of Ottoman expansion.

The child portrait demonstrates Strigel's careful Swabian technique applied to a young sitter, capturing the boy's features with the documentary precision expected of dynastic court portraiture.