Porträt von Diego Ortiz de Zúñiga

For years this Sevillian gentleman hung in Penrhyn Castle in north Wales, catalogued as a mere copy after Murillo rather than the real thing. A Baron Penrhyn had bought it in the 1870s to furnish his new mock-medieval castle, and there it stayed, half-forgotten. In 2017 the scholar Benito Navarrete Prieto looked at it afresh and argued it is an autograph Murillo after all, painted around 1653. The sitter left a clear trace in the record. He is Diego Ortiz de Zuniga, a Seville nobleman who spent years writing the annals of his own city, from the Middle Ages down to his own lifetime. The portrait is listed among his belongings when he died in 1680.