Don Gabriel de la Cueva (died 1571), Duke of Alburquerque, Spanish governor of Milan

After apprenticeship years with Moretto in Brescia, Moroni worked in his hometown Bergamo from 1554 until his death. After Titian and Lorenzo Lotto, he was probably the most important and idiosyncratic 16th-century portrait painter in Northern Italy. While Tintoretto, for example, in his numerous official portraits maintained Titian’s distanced, objectifying conception of portrayal, Moroni developed a portrait style of penetrating realism, which strove for the lifelike, naturalistic depiction of the individual’s personality – in this regard, following the model of Lorenzo Lotto, also active in Bergamo, albeit without the latter’s brooding, pessimistic undertone.
Politically, Bergamo belonged to the Republic of Venice, and was a threatened and hence fortified post in immediate proximity to Milan which ultimately fell under Spanish rule in 1559 (the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis). Culturally, however, Bergamo was closer to Lombardy.
The most explicit manifestation in Moroni’s portraiture of the Spanish presence in Bergamo is the portrait of the Spaniard Don Gabriel de la Cueva y Girón (1525–71), who became the 5th Duke of Alburquerque in 1563 following the death of his elder brother (the 4th Duke), and in 1564, the Governor and Supreme Commander of Milan, a position he held until his early death (by poison?) in 1571 at the age of 46. In Milan, he advocated the royal civil jurisdiction above the municipal administration (the Senate) and the Curia, with whose new, powerful Archbishop Carlo Borromeo (appointed by the Curia in 1565) he had a tense relationship, perceiving the primacy of civil authority being undermined by the church.
Moroni’s portrait of the governor is dated 1560, one year after the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis. At that time, Don Gabriel de la Cueva, Conde de Ledesma y de Huelma, 1st Marqués de Cuellar, and a Spanish Grandee first-class, was 35 years old and had just become, like his father before him, Viceroy, Governor, and Capitán General of the Kingdom of Navarra. Aside from full-length portraits of Lodovico and Gian Federico Madruzzo, the nephews of the Prince Bishop of Trento, the Duke was by far the highest-ranking personality Moroni had depicted up to that point. In this strictly formal image, he not only emulates the poses and costumes of portraits from the court of Philip II (Titian, Anthonis Mor), but also the expression of “sosiego”, the motionless calm and cool composure of the Spanish courtier. The figure is fixed in place, so to speak, within the grid of horizontals and verticals that structure the seemingly abstract background, against whose cool, pale grey the deep black, luminous pale red, and white of the sitter’s costume are set off in strong contrast. As in many other portraits, Moroni uses the tall base on which the Duke supports his hand in order to introduce the sitter’s motto: “Here I stand without fear; not even death can frighten me.” The defiance of death expressed here seems to coalesce with the reserved, even distrustful remoteness expressed by the Duke’s face, and with the icy cold of the pale blue eyes, their gaze gliding past the beholder. Erich Schleier | 200 Masterpieces of European Painting - Gemäldegalerie Berlin, 2019