Maria Anna, Queen of Spain

When this canvas was painted, in 1652 or 1653, the young queen in it was a link between two courts. Maria Anna was the daughter of Emperor Ferdinand III and the sister of the future Emperor Leopold I, and in Madrid she had just given the king a daughter, the Infanta Margarita, born in 1651. Portraits travelled between the Spanish and the Austrian Habsburgs as a kind of family correspondence, and full-length images of the queen were wanted in Vienna. This one, a little over two metres high, belonged to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, the emperor's brother and one of the great collectors of his time. The Kunsthistorisches Museum credits it to Velázquez and his workshop, the master's design with assistants' hands in the painting, and it does not say where one ends and the other begins. After centuries in Vienna, including a spell at Schönbrunn Palace, the canvas now hangs at Ambras Castle in Innsbruck, still owned by the museum.