The presence of portraits of children in the painting collections of the Spanish Austrians can be found all throughout the sixteenth century. In the 1570s this sub-genre became more highly developed at the hands of Alonso Sánchez Coello, who painted the daughters of Philip III on several occasions, creating images which, while they reflected the girls’ growth, observed all the formal stereotypes of rigid court-portraits. Even when elements of childhood were incorporated, they actually only served to announce the future roles of the girls within the dynasty.

During the reign of Philip III, the production of this type of works increased considerably. Numerous portraits of the large family of the monarch and his wife, Queen Margaret of Austria, were done almost as a matter of course. The fact that children often died quite young explains Margaret’s interest in having portraits done of her children even at such young ages.

In this example, one of the king’s last children, the Infanta Margarita Francisca, who would die at the age of seven (1610-1617), is portrayed at about the age of one, her hair pulled up into a topknot with a fetching curl and sitting on two scarlet cushions. The dark background, lacking any spatial elements that might distract the viewer, highlights the child’s bright face and clothing and, on it, all manner of amulets and charms. These last constitute an armory of defense against the ills and illnesses that beset young children of the time, not least the evil eye and evil spirits. It was, in fact, evil spirits, and ear infections, that the little bell hanging from a long chain was supposed to ward off; the same effect was hoped from the elaborate gold rattle she holds in her right hand. The other amulets and charms are a badger claw set in silver, a chestnut, a sphere or orb, a reliquary medallion, and a thick circle or ring with silver findings. These last three charms are of jet, a material which had been believed since antiquity to have magico-medicinal properties. It was used especially in Spain during the Middle Ages, when the jet-workers of Santiago fabricated amulets for pilgrims, and for centuries thereafter. In later times, it was used for children and women along with coral, the other protective element par excellence.

It was no doubt due to the influence of the queen that these portraits of a superstitious nature were so frequent during the reign of Philip III, a concession to popular beliefs that remained in the culture for centuries, as shown by the extraordinary Portrait of Prince Philip Prospero by Velázquez (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemäldegaleries) and one of Goya’s Caprichos, El de la Rollona, or The Nanny.

It was Pedro Beroqui who identified the sitter for this portrait as the Infanta Margarita Francisca when he compared this painting with a group of four children’s portraits considered to be by Pantoja de la Cruz that were found in 1636 in a chamber within the vaults of the Real Alcázar: her ladyship the Infanta Doña Margarita, seated on two scarlet cushions with a rattle in her hand. Pantoja was dead by the time this canvas was painted, which is why Allene-Salazar and Sánchez Cantón suggest Bartolomé González as its author, a hypothesis taken to be correct in the Prado catalogues though recently questioned by Lucía Valera, who found in the Palace Archives (Cuentas particulares, leg. 5.264) an account presented by Santiago Morán in 1613 and indicating a payment of 770 reales for a portrait of her ladyship Ynfanta doña Margarita with many amulets and charms and a bib and dressed in white silk seated upon scarlet cushions. This is especially interesting given that there are but few documentary references to this painter, and no portrait that can be conclusively attributed to him. In any case, the sequence of painters we have mentioned (Pantoja, González, and Morán) simply reflects the persistence of formulaic court-portraits, even in the case of the most private family pictures (Ruiz, L.: El Greco to Goya. Masterpieces from the Prado Museum, Museo de Arte de Ponce, 2012, pp. 122-123).