In his portraits, especially those of the members of the royal family, Carreño shows himself to have absorbed no little of the influence of Velasquez. These portraits of Charles II and his mother, Queen Mariana, vary in quality; for he was called upon to repeat them, and the replicas display a lack of interest and falling off in technical distinction. Perhaps the handsomest portrait of the King, painted when he was still a lad of twelve, is the one in the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum, Berlin. The boy, as usual in a black velvet suit, with long blond cavalier locks descending over his shoulders, stands resting his left hand on a marble-topped table, which is supported on a lion and ball pedestal. His face has not yet acquired the expression of settled melancholy and is gracious and lovable. The coloring is rich and luminous, and the concavity behind the figure, full of atmospheric suggestion. The replica of this in the Prado is tighter and drier in treatment, lacking in quality of tone and lighting. Another portrait of this period, showing the figure at half length is owned by Señor Beruete. Judged by the photograph of it, reproduced in his “School of Madrid,” it is a very superior canvas, distinguished by graciousness and dignity. It is a terrible contrast to turn from the weak yet winning beauty of the boy to the portrait in which Carreño has depicted the man (p. 132). In all the range of portrait-painting can we find a face so degenerate as this? The face droops to an inordinate length, as if the vacuous brain could no longer hold it in position; the mental distortion is reflected in the grotesquely exaggerated features; the expression of the pallid mask is one in which hope and joy of life are extinguished and reasonless fear is habitually present. Such was the last of the proud Hapsburg line of Spanish Sovereigns. Carreño’s most important work, however, is the _Portrait of Queen Mariana of Austria_, in the Munich Old Pinakothek, of which there is an unsatisfactory replica in the Prado. But the Munich portrait, once seen, impresses itself indelibly on the memory. It is a cold, implacable indictment. The surly sadness of the girl-wife, painted by Velasquez (p. 119), who had our sympathy for the cruel grossness of her lot, has hardened into callous obstinacy and weak self-indulgence. Her widowhood has brought authority without a sense of responsibility, she has betrayed her maternal trust in order that through her child’s feebleness she may hold on to power; she has dallied between her lover and confessor, and is now _devote_. Clothed in black and white weeds that resemble a nun’s garb, she sits squarely at a table, a loveless, forbidding woman. Yet strangely haunting because of Carreño’s analysis and fearless exposition. CHAPTER IX RIBERA (LO SPAGNOLETTO)