Audience Figure

An Audience Figure is a realistic effigy of himself which Philipp II may have used in order to relieve himself of unwanted audiences and which also may have been used in his funerary ceremonies.

Philipp II (1527-1598) was a bureaucratic King, who occupied himself with much written work and held his subjects at a distance. The low esteem with which Phillip held them showed itself, among other things, in that his subjects sometimes were not received by the flesh and blood Phillip but instead by a naturalistic counterfeit.

Such Audience Figures, which consisted of a painted bust and a suit of armor, were used by Philipp as a Doppelgänger. They allowed him to keep an appropriate distance from his subjects and also from foreign emissaries whom he considered unworthy an actual audience. Some Audience Figures were mobile and could turn, nod, and make other similar gestures. These figures of the King are mechanical; indeed Philipps public never suspected that they had been received by an automaton.

The Audience Figure to the left is currently in the Vienna Hofburg. The Madrid sculptor Pompeo Leoni (ca. 1533-1610), son of the Italian Goldsmith Leone Leoni (1509-1590), created the head, which with the details of the curly beard and swarthy skin are tigthly coupled to the armor to give a realistic portrait of the King. The latter is a masterwork of German gunsmithing from Augsburg, which was specially ordered for Philipp's father Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. The engraved gold bands on the breastplate of the armor mark it as a decorative piece used for symbolic purposes rather than a working suit of armour.

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