This elegantly dressed young lady is Margaret of Austria, one of the most important female rulers of the Renaissance. The only daughter of Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor and Mary of Burgundy, she was regent of the Netherlands from 1507 to her death in 1530. The half-blank coat of arms at the top of the arch indicates that she is unmarried – the space would be filled by her husband’s arms – so the painting was evidently done before her first marriage to Juan, Prince of Asturias, in November 1495.

Margaret’s early life was largely spent on the European marriage market. She was born on 10 January 1480. Her mother was killed in a riding accident when she was two and she was brought up by her step-grandmother, Margaret of York, sister of Edward IV of England. She was betrothed at the age of three to the infant heir to the French throne, Charles, and was sent to be brought up at the French court.

In 1491 she was rejected by Charles, and she returned to the Netherlands in 1493. This painting must have been done after that date, though perhaps not long after: her clothes are very similar to those she wears in a portrait done when she was still in France (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Although not much more than a child, she is in adult dress, as was traditional for royal children. Her cloth of gold dress has a fashionably square neck, trimmed with white fur, and she wears a black gorget, probably of velvet, underneath it. Her hair is scraped back under a headdress consisting of a layer of red fabric edged with gold, covered with a shoulder-length frontlet edged with gold embroidery.

As part of a double marriage uniting their family, the Hapsburgs, with the Spanish royal family, Margaret married Juan, son of Ferdinand and Isabella, at around the same time that her brother married their daughter Juana. Six months into marriage her husband died, and two months later she gave birth to her only child, a stillborn girl. Margaret’s next husband, the Duke of Savoy, also died young in 1504, after three years of marriage.

A slightly later portrait of Margaret by the same artist (now in the Royal Collection at Windsor) was sent to Henry VII by Philip in around 1505, when Henry was negotiating for her hand in marriage. But Margaret refused to marry again and returned to the Netherlands, becoming a grande dame of European politics. Because of the early death of her brother and the mental illness of her sister-in-law she acted not only as regent of the Netherlands but also as foster mother to their children.

She was an avid collector, owning Portrait of Giovanni(?) Arnolfini and his Wife and paintings from the Passion cycle of Juan de Flandes among many others. She was a patron of art, literature and music, and her palace at Malines was packed with books, illuminated manuscripts, tapestries and even curiosities from the Americas.