The Funeral Apparatus of John IV (November 1656)

Abstract

John IV died on 6 November 1656. A funeral apparatus was planned in the Church of São Vicente de Fora. The planned iconographical program attempted a balance between traditional iconographies and innovative pictorial ideas. One of the paintings described in the source is iconographically unique and deserves an in-depth analysis: it plays on the idea of the headless body of state that John IV had revived, at a time when one of Portugal’s most important allies, Charles I of England, had in fact lost his head. This chapter explores the extent to which the beheading of the English king and the images disseminated in its aftermath, the widespread European metaphor of the “body of state,” and the planned painting on the Lisbon castrum doloris may be connected.