Niccolò dell’Abbate painted around 1545 to 1550 an extensive composition entitled The Meeting of Charles V and the Bey of Tunis, a work preserved today in the Courtauld Gallery of London, on a canvas measuring 176 by 211 centimetres. Born in Modena in 1509 and having died in Fontainebleau in 1571, the Italian painter captured here a historical episode of the sixteenth century, the military campaign of Charles V against Tunis in 1535, when the Habsburg emperor clashed with Barbarossa for the control of the North African coast.
The campaign, victorious for the imperial arms, fed the European visual imagination for entire decades, from the tapestries designed by Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen to the canvases of painters who worked geographically far from the field of battle.
The art around Charles V and Tunis
In the centre of the composition rises a tent in shades of pink, with red curtains tied in tassels that reveal the interior of a banquet, where men sit around a table laid with a white cloth and servants bring plates in slow, ritual motion. On the left, soldiers with helmets converse next to an all-white horse, while their group remains smaller in scale and less illuminated than the central scene.
On the right gallop equestrian warriors upon white and chestnut horses, with armours that gleam beneath banners where a double-headed eagle is discerned amidst crescents, a reminder of the confrontation that decided the fate of Tunis. In the background ruins of a fortress stand upon a hill, the gulf fills with sailing ships up to the horizon, and the sky, heavy with clouds in ochre and grey, does not allow one to distinguish where the light of the day stops and where the dust of the camp begins.
(Translated from Greek by K. Pappas.)
