Otto, Count of Nassau and his Wife Adelheid van Vianen

Bernard van Orley · 1530-01-01T00:00:00Z

About 1528-30, Henry III of Nassau, an advisor to Emperor Charles V, commissioned eight tapestry designs from Bernaert van Orley glorifying his ancestors in the house of Orange-Nassau. The tapestries were woven by Willem de Moyen in Brussels, where Raphael's influential tapestry designs for the Acts of the Apostles had been produced in 1516-20. Van Orley's tapestries are lost, probably destroyed in a fire in 1760, and the drawings are the only record of the commission. As can be seen in this large and beautifully colored design, which was virtually unknown until recently, van Orley modified the taste for overall surface design in tapestry by situating the figures in the foreground against a deeply receding space. He also created a new sense of verisimilitude and movement through the accurate details and the poses of the horses. The Nassau Genealogy was one of the first tapestry series to unite the imperial tradition of equestrian portraiture with the more informal practice of group portraiture, an innovation that previously had been peculiar to prints.