Den has already reported that the Potocki Palace displayed The Portrait of Johann IV von Anhalt-Zerbst by Lucas Cranach the Elder, a Renaissance-era German painter and graphic artist, a master of portraits, genre and biblical compositions, from the Lutsk Local History Museum in December 2016 and Shevchenko’s famous canvas Kateryna from the Kyiv National Taras Shevchenko Museum in March this year. Now Leopolitans are being shown Infanta Margarita by Diego Velasquez, representative of the Spanish Golden Age Madrid school of paining, the leading artist in the court of King Philip IV, from the collections of the Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko Art Museum.
Oksana Kozynkevych, curator of the one-picture exhibit at the Lviv National Gallery of Arts, says that the canvas was bought in 1912 at a Berlin auction sale of Hamburg-based Weber’s collection. The picture was auctioned off after being kept in private collections for a long time. The first documented evidence of the picture appeared in 1827, when it belonged to Spanish artist Vicente Lopez y Portana.
The picture had long been considered to be the portrait of another princess, infanta Mariana Teresa (1638-83), the elder daughter of Philip IV from the first marriage. She later became the queen consort of France, the wife of Louis XIV. It was established as late as in the prewar years that the portrayed girl is the king’s younger daughter, the child of his second wife Mariana of Austria.
“The portrait of the infanta is of a great museum and historical value and proves a high artistic level of the Spanish Golden Age of painting. It is ascribed to Diego Velazquez, although there are some other assumptions,” Kozynkevych says.
The picture will remain on display until December 27.
