The Infante Don Baltasar Carlos

The Infante Don Baltasar Carlos, painted by Alonso Cano around 1633 and held at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, depicts the Spanish heir apparent who died in 1646 at the age of seventeen, before he could inherit the throne his death left to his father Philip IV without a male heir — a dynastic catastrophe that would eventually lead to the end of the Spanish Habsburg line. Baltasar Carlos was one of the most painted children in seventeenth-century Europe; Velázquez immortalized him in a series of equestrian and hunting portraits, and numerous court painters produced supplementary images for diplomatic circulation. Cano's version — produced when the prince was a toddler of approximately two or three — belongs to early childhood portraiture, a genre with its own conventions. The Budapest canvas testifies to the widespread diplomatic demand for royal child portraits that circulated throughout Habsburg Europe as proof of dynastic continuity.

Child portraiture required different conventions from adult royal images — the formal stiffness of adult court painting would be visually absurd on a two-year-old, and Cano allows a degree of physical softness and natural proportion that adult royal portraits would not permit. The costume, however, is as elaborately formal as any adult court dress.