Carlo II in armatura

By 1681 the Spanish crown was running on ceremony more than power. Charles II, the last Habsburg king of Spain, was chronically ill and childless, and within twenty years his death would pull half of Europe into a war over his throne. Juan Carreño de Miranda, his court painter, shows none of that. He puts the young king in burnished armour, one hand resting on a table held up by the bronze lions of the Alcázar palace, and sets two warships firing their cannons out beyond the balustrade, a nod to the ongoing fight with France. It is the image of a warrior monarch. Underneath the paint, X-rays have found an earlier portrait of Charles as a boy in fine court clothes, painted on the same canvas before Carreño reworked it into this one.