An Artillery General (Diego de Quiroga Fajardo?)

For more than a century this portrait hung in the Prado under the name of Francisco Rizi, on the word of Pedro de Madrazo, the museum's 19th-century cataloguer. In 2023 the technical department went over it again. Infrared showed the same dragged strokes in the landscape as in a documented Herrera altarpiece, ultraviolet showed the impasto of the face matching his, and the canvas turned out to have been cut from the same bolt as a Saint Peter Herrera painted for the Augustinian Recollects in Madrid. The museum now gives the picture to Francisco Herrera the Younger alone. The sitter is a looser matter. He wears the badge of the Order of Calatrava on his baldric and leans against a gun carriage with two cannonballs beside it, and the museum thinks he is probably Diego de Quiroga Fajardo, general of artillery in the kingdom of Naples, though the question mark stays in the title. The date is about 1665. In red paint at the lower right there is still an old inventory number, 514.