Portrait of Margaret of Austria (1480-1530)

Bernard van Orley's Portrait of Margaret of Austria at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, painted around 1524, depicts the Habsburg regent at the height of her authority during her second regency of the Netherlands, which she exercised from 1519 until her death in 1530. Margaret was one of the most powerful women in Europe — governing the wealthy Flemish provinces on behalf of her nephew Charles V, managing Habsburg diplomatic strategy through marriage alliances, and maintaining one of the most sophisticated cultural courts in the north at Mechelen. Van Orley was her court painter and personal portraitist, and his series of her portraits documents her appearance through the decades of her regency. The Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels hold the most comprehensive collection of Flemish painting in Belgium, and this Van Orley portrait of Margaret is among the institution's most historically significant works — a document of the most important female patron in the history of early Netherlandish painting and the woman responsible for the cultural flourishing of the Brussels court.

The portrait follows established conventions of the period, with attention to physiognomic features and costume details that convey social identity and status.