Golden Fleece

Golden Fleece is a subject in art. The gallery holds 83 works in this subject in art, including works by Titian, David Teniers the Younger and Peter Paul Rubens.

In art the Golden Fleece carries two intertwined meanings. The first is mythological: in Greek legend the fleece is the hide of a golden, flying ram, hung in a sacred grove at Colchis and guarded by a sleepless dragon-serpent, the prize Jason and the Argonauts sailed east to win. Among the oldest of Greek myths, it appears in Archaic and Classical art on painted pottery—Jason seizing the fleece from its tree while Athena looks on—and was revived by later painters, who more often dwelt on the doomed love of Jason and Medea than on the heroic quest, as in Gustave Moreau's Symbolist Jason (1865, Musée d'Orsay).

The second meaning, the one this catalogue's holdings chiefly record, is dynastic. In 1430 Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, founded the chivalric Order of the Golden Fleece at Bruges to mark his marriage to Isabella of Portugal. Dedicated to the Virgin and Saint Andrew, it bound an exclusive brotherhood of knights—first twenty-four, later expanded to thirty-one and then fifty-one—to the Catholic faith and the Burgundian crown. Its insignia, the golden pelt of a ram, hung from a collar of linked firesteels and flints striking sparks, or more simply from a red ribbon worn daily.

Through the 1477 marriage of Mary of Burgundy to Maximilian of Habsburg the grand mastership passed to the House of Habsburg, and the jewel became the supreme badge of Habsburg and, later, Spanish royalty. This is why the emblem saturates court portraiture. Titian's Equestrian Portrait of Charles V (1548, Prado) shows the emperor in gleaming armour as a knight of the Order; Lucas Cranach the Elder's two hunt panels honour the same Charles V and his brother Ferdinand I at the Castle of Torgau. Goya's Charles IV of Spain and His Family (1800–01) and Vicente López's portrait of the Duke of Infantado carry the same insignia forward into the modern era, while genre painters such as David Teniers the Younger documented the wider Habsburg court world.

The Order survives today, split since the eighteenth century into rival Spanish and Austrian branches. As a visual sign the fleece became a shorthand for Catholic dynastic legitimacy, taking its place beside the Garter and the Order of the Holy Spirit in the iconography of European court portraiture.