TREASURES OF AL ANDALUS, OLD MASTERS, FINE ART AND ANTIQUES
Lot 79:
Oil on canvas, canvas measurements: 151 x 111. Full-length portrait of King Carlos II “The Bewitched”, several versions of this composition are known, among which a similar full-length portrait, preserved in the Prado and from from the Royal Collection (inventory number P000642). Juan Carreño de Miranda (Avilés, March 25, 1614-Madrid, October 3, 1685), called by Miguel de Unamuno as the painter of the “Austrian decadence of Spain”, from 1671 he was court painter to Carlos II. Between 1658 and 1671, in close collaboration with Francisco Rizi, he painted large altar cloths in oil and, in fresco or tempera, the ceilings of some halls of the old Alcázar of Madrid, those of the dressing room of the Virgen del Sagrario of the cathedral of Toledo and those of several Madrid churches, of which only survive, partially, the works carried out in the Toledo cathedral and the paintings of the elliptical dome of the church of San Antonio de los Alemanes. As a court portraitist, he continued the type of Velazquez portrait, with the same sobriety and lack of artifice but using a looser and more pasty brushstroke technique than that used by the Sevillian master, without missing, especially in male portraits, the influences of Anton van Dyck, as befits a later date. To this final stage of his career belong the portraits of Charles II and his mother, the widowed queen Mariana of Austria, of the Russian ambassador, Piotr Ivanovich Potemkin, of Eugenia Martínez Vallejo, dressed and nude, and of the buffoon Francisco de Bazán (Museum del Prado),
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