Portrait of Philip IV of Spain on Horseback

In 1635 the Florentine sculptor Pietro Tacca was at work on a bronze horseman of Philip IV of Spain, a king he had never seen, for a monument commissioned from Madrid. The Spanish court solved that by sending pictures, and the Count-Duke of Olivares, the king's chief minister, shipped this canvas to Florence that year together with a bust-length portrait. Baldinucci, who wrote up the lives of the Florentine artists a few decades later, records that both stayed with the Tacca family. The composition is the one Velazquez painted large between 1635 and 1637 for the Hall of Realms at the Buen Retiro palace, now in the Prado, and here it is about half that size. Who put the paint on this one is left open. The museum's sheet calls it attributed to Velazquez and lists the alternatives, a workshop copy or a canvas by his son-in-law Juan Bautista Martinez del Mazo, while other scholars have read it as Velazquez's own sketch for the Madrid picture. Tacca's bronze was finished in 1640 and stands in the Plaza de Oriente in Madrid.