Philip IV was in trouble. Spain’s far-flung empire, arguably the world’s most powerful, had seriously wobbled in the 1640s — and so had the king’s family life. When the bloody Thirty Years ...

Diego Velázquez’s “Queen Mariana of Austria” (1652-53), a monumental portrait of the daughter of the Hapsburg Emperor Ferdinand III, is at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Calif., ...

(In recent months, New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art generated headlines when it reattributed a portrait of Spain’s King Philip IV to Velázquez after having demoted it, in effect ...

When Pope Innocent X first saw Velázquez’s portrait of him in 1650, he is said to have remarked, simply, “Troppo vero” (“Too true”). “Part of the magic in looking at Velázquez—and ...

Works by Velázquez, Titian and Picasso were offered at the fair, as well as a sculpture thought to be modelled by Michelangelo.