Portrait équestre de Philippe IV

Around 1634 Madrid was finishing a brand-new pleasure palace on the edge of the city, the Buen Retiro, and its grandest room was designed to sell one idea, that the Spanish crown was invincible. Velázquez, the king's own court painter, filled the walls of that Hall of Realms with battle scenes and with a family of riders on horseback. This is the centrepiece, Philip IV himself, holding a rearing horse with an easy hand while gripping a commander's baton. The reality outside the frame was harder. Spain was locked in the long, draining wars that would eat its treasure for decades, and Philip left much of the governing to his powerful minister Olivares, the man who had built the palace. On the canvas none of that shows, only the calm horseman and the wide Guadarrama mountains behind him.