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©
Colección Thyssen-Bornemisza, on loan at the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC)
Velazquez (Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez)

Portrait of Mariana of Austria, Queen of Spain

1655 - 1657
Oil on canvas.
66 x 56 cm
Colección Thyssen-Bornemisza, on deposit at the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC)
Inv. no.
416
(
1935.15
)
Not on display
  • Level 2 Permanent Collection
  • Level 1 Permanent Collection
  • Level 0 Carmen Thyssen Collection and Temporary exhibition rooms
  • Level -1 Temporary exhibition rooms, Conference room and EducaThyssen workshop
Level 2
Permanent Collection
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 14 13 15 16 17 18 22 19 20 21 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 Recommended start of the visitClassical rooms
1 14th Century. Early Italian Painting 2 15th Century. German and Spanish Painting 3 15th Century. Early Netherlandish Painting 4 15th Century. Italian Painting 5 15th and 16th Centuries. Renaissance Portraiture 6 16th Century. Villahermosa Gallery 7 16th Century. Italian Painting 8 15th and 16th Centuries. German Painting 9 15th and 16th Centuries. German Painting 10 16th Century. Netherlandish Painting 11 Tiziano, Tintoretto, Bassano and  El Greco 12 17th Century. Caravaggio and Baroque Painting 13 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 14 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 15 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 16 18th Century. Italian Painting 17 18th Century. Italian Painting 18 18th Century. Italian Painting 19 Classical rooms 20 Classical rooms 21 Classical rooms 22 18th Century. Italian Painting 23 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 24 18th Century. French and English Painting 25 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Scenes of Daily Life and Interiors 26 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 27 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Portrait 28 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 29 19th Century. European Painting. Goya and Romanticism  
Level 1
Permanent Collection
30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 Postpop rooms Rodin room
30 18th and 19th Centuries. Transatlantic Relations 31 19th Century. American Landscape and Environmental Awareness 32 19th Century. American Landscape and Urban Life 33 Recovering the ligth. Restoration of Waterloo Bridge, by André Derain 34 20th Century. Expressionist Landscapes 35 20th Century. Expressionist Portraits 36 20th Century. The Language of the Body 37 20th Century. Urban unrest 38 20th Century. Flowers 39 20th Century. Pioneers of abstraction 40 20th Century. Popular flavor 41 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition I 42 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition II 43 20th Century. Abstract Utopias 44 20th Century. Dada and Surrealism 45 20th Century. Interwar Realisms 46 20th Century. American Abstraction I 48 20th Century. Post-ward American Art 49 20th Century. Post-ward European Figurative Art 50 20th Century. Informalisms 51 20th Century. Homo Ludens 52 20th Century. Pop Art 53 Postpop rooms 54 Postpop rooms 55 Postpop rooms 56 Postpop rooms Rodin Exhibition room
Level 0
Carmen Thyssen Collection and Temporary exhibition rooms
A B C D E F G H I J Hall Temporary exhibition rooms Access to Permanent Collection Entrance Access to Carmen Thyssen Collection Paseo del Prado Garden
A 17th and 18th Centuries. Old Masters B 19th Century. North American Landscape C 19th Century. French Naturalist Landscape D 19th Century. Impressionism E 19th Century. Monet and North American Impressionism F 19th Century. Gauguin and Postimpressionism G 19th and 20th Centuries. Neo Impressionism and its Wake H 20th Century. Early Avant-gardes I 20th Century. Between the Wars Painting. Cubism, Abstraction and Surrealism J 20th Century. North American Painting and Others • HALL
Level -1
Temporary exhibition rooms, Conference room and EducaThyssen workshop
Temporary exhibition rooms Conference room EducaThyssen Workshop
Mariana of Austria, daughter of the Emperor Ferdinand III and Mary of Hungary, was born in Vienna in 1634. Intended as the wife of her cousin, Prince Baltasar Carlos, who died in 1646, she then married his uncle Philip IV of Spain. The issue of this marriage was the Infanta Margarita, Prince Felipe Próspero and Prince Charles, the future Charles II. Second wife of Philip IV, on his death in 1664 Mariana became Regent until 1675. She died on 16 May 1696.

The present canvas, which was in a private collection in Paris, was first published in the catalogue of an auction held at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris on 20 April 1876. Charles B. Curtis included it in his volume on Velázquez and Murillo published in London in 1883. The canvas then disappeared from the literature until 1935 when August Mayer devoted an article to it in The Burlington Magazine. From then on the painting has been the subject of occasional references in the literature. The Museum’s archive has two reports of April and May 1935 in which Mayer and Juan Allende-Salazar stated their opinions on the painting. Both considered it to be by Velázquez and dated it to around 1656. These reports, along with Mayer’s article in The Burlington, coincided with the acquisition of the painting for the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection in 1935.

The attribution of this canvas has been questioned on a regular basis over the years, although Mayer, Enrique Lafuente Ferrari, Bernardino de Pantorba, José López-Rey and José Camón Aznar all included it without any reservations in their monographs on the artist. Another author to accept the painting was José Manuel Pita Andrade in the catalogue that accompanied the exhibition Velázquez, held at the Palazzo Ruspoli in Rome in 2001. However, Neil Maclaren expressed doubts, considering that it was not an autograph painting.

The still unresolved issue of the nature of Velázquez’s studio in the Alcázar in Madrid and the difficulties of defining the extent of any workshop participation in many of his portraits of the Spanish monarchs (both Mayer and López-Rey record more than twenty portraits of Mariana of Austria) were expressed in relation to the present work by Fernando Marías and Consuelo Luca de Tena.

Dressed in silks and gauzes and with beautiful jewels and a heavy wig, the Queen is depicted with a few, striking colours, applied with a loose brushstroke that suggests the hair ornaments and the embroidery on the dress rather than clearly defining them.

Among the portraits of Mariana of Austria by Velázquez to have survived is the full-length one in the Museo del Prado, Madrid, of which there is a version in the Musée du Louvre, Paris. Among the finest bust-length images are the one in the Meadows Collection, Dallas, and the canvas in the Real Academia de San Fernando, Madrid.

Mar Borobia
17th Centurys. XVII - Pintura españolaPaintingOilcanvas
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Portrait of Mariana of Austria, Queen of Spain. Retrato de doña Mariana de Austria, reina de España, 1655-1657
Portrait of Mariana of Austria, Queen of Spain
Velazquez (Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez)

©

Colección Thyssen-Bornemisza, on loan at the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC)

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Portrait of Mariana of Austria, Queen of Spain. Retrato de doña Mariana de Austria, reina de España, 1655-1657
Portrait of Mariana of Austria, Queen of Spain
Velazquez (Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez)

©

Colección Thyssen-Bornemisza, on loan at the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC)

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