Don Juan de Austria: as painted by Velázquez when re-enacted by a Court Clown (dated 1635-45).
The Velázquez painting of Mars in the Prado shows a disarmed, pensive warrior, lacking confidence: scattered armor suggests the loss of drive and assurance. It suggests the limitations of military might, not its authority, by a vision matching the ruinous fate of Antony (or Othello and other Shakespearean generals). This sense of the futility of military honor links the painting with the other Velázquez study of the warlike temperament: the strange painting of "Il buffone don Juan de Austria"(above).
Velázquez's martial figures appear just as strangely among the Prado's more courtly paintings as that of the Bastard Don John in Shakespeare's Much Ado. For such a Spanish general of Anglophobic temperament to appear in an English Renaissance comedy is like Field Marshal Herman Göring joining the midnight party of George and Martha in Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
Yet both artists use such a bizarre figure to similar ends. The Spanish court was obsessed by a need to balance pride by confronting its negative potentialities. That the clown's choice of the Don Juan role was favored by King Philip III shows his accurate sense that the tortured life of the illegitimate Don Juan warns more orthodox royalty to avoid the pathological personality which Shakespeare evoked in another royal family: Richard of Gloucester, later Richard III. Courtesy of Museo Nacional Del Prado, Madrid: for educational use only.
