Virtual Tour: Fashion in "Queen Mariana of Austria" by Diego Velázquez

As much as Queen Mariana of Austria is a portrait of a person, it's also a portrait of a dress, which the great 17th century Spanish artist Diego Velázquez depicted with great energy and inventiveness. Mariana was just 17 years old when she posed for this work, her first portrait by Velázquez, the queen's court painter. It was a kind of public debut for the new queen consort, and the artist took his job seriously, balancing an appropriately somber facial expression with truly over-the-top fashion that conveys something of Mariana's youthful exuberance and ambition. She wears an extraordinary black dress trimmed with silver braid and twinkling gold jewelry, and her wig echoes the skirt's distinctive bell shape, with red bows and cascading red and white plumes that pick up the color of the curtain, table, and the queen's own rouged cheeks. Mariana's gown owed its dramatic silhouette to the trendy support structure known in Spain as a guarda infante, its name a play on the idea that such an enormous hoop skirt could disguise pregnancy. And it was so vast, perhaps as much as six feet wide in real life, that Velázquez added a strip of canvas along the left-hand side of the painting to accommodate it. Mariana's husband, King Philip IV, actually banned the guarda infante in the 1630s and 40s, believing that such excessive fashion was inappropriate when Spain was at war. So Mariana's choice to don the garment for her official portrait is significant. Partly, it reflects a period of cultural renewal in Spain, ushered in by Mariana's arrival at court, when theaters reopened and restrictive dress laws eased. But it may also reference Mariana's most important job, giving birth to royal children to carry forward the Habsburg dynasty. The queen did not own a dress that matches the description of this one, so the version we see here is evidence of the collaboration between artist and sitter. Riffing on clothes like those Mariana actually wore, Velázquez created a new dress, one that was appropriately luxurious and imposing for a teenage queen with serious responsibilities.