A Child in Ecclesiastical Dress

This was painted in 1666, a strange moment at the Spanish court. Philip IV had died the year before, and the throne now belonged to his son Charles II, a sickly boy of four, with the real power held by a regency around him. Into that world steps this child, dressed head to foot in the scarlet of a cardinal. No boy was ever raised to cardinal in these years, so scholars suspect he is not a churchman at all but one of the court's entertainers, dressed up in the costume for the picture. The painter, Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo, knew that court from the inside. He had studied under Velázquez, married his daughter, and taken over as chief court painter when Velázquez died in 1660. He placed the boy in one of the royal palace rooms in Madrid, the same halls his father-in-law had filled with jesters and dwarfs a generation earlier.