Portrait of Queen Mariana

Mariana of Austria reached Madrid as a girl of fourteen to marry Philip IV, who was both her uncle and a widower more than thirty years her senior. By the mid-1650s, when this portrait was made, she was queen of a Spain sliding out of its great century, and the court held her to a rigid, almost architectural fashion. The tight black bodice and the vast dressed hair were the uniform of a Habsburg queen, a statement of rank before anything personal. Velázquez and his workshop turned out more than 20 images of her for embassies and relatives across Europe. This bust-length one keeps the pale, guarded face he gave her, set against the plain dark ground he favoured in his later years.