Portrait of Infante Don Luis de Borbon
Anton Raphael Mengs (German, 1728–1779)
c. 1776
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Framed: 180.5 x 127 x 8 cm (71 1/16 x 50 x 3 1/8 in.); Unframed: 152.7 x 100 cm (60 1/8 x 39 3/8 in.)
- Culture
- Germany, 18th century
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, European Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
As a younger child of King Philip V of Spain, Don Luis received important religious posts, including Archbishop of Toledo and Seville. However, his philandering led to losing these titles and banishment from the court, while he became a crucial avant-garde art patron, especially of Goya. The encrustations of medals and cacophonous fabrics speak to Mengs's experiments in representing status, privilege, and royal honors in the age of Enlightenment, when rational skepticism began to confront absolutist, hereditary power.
