Most people have seen her face. Almost nobody knows what the dynasty spent it on.
Margarita Teresa of Spain is the small blonde girl at the centre of Las Meninas. She was five when Velázquez painted her — and already a catalogue shipped to Vienna. Her parents were uncle and niece. At fifteen she married her mother’s brother, Emperor Leopold I. In six years and three months she was pregnant seven times. Four live births. Three small coffins. One surviving daughter. She died in the Hofburg on 12 March 1673, aged twenty-one, of a chest illness the court had treated as ordinary. That same afternoon physicians opened her body and found a well-formed son, four months along, already dead. The claim all of it was meant to keep never stayed in the family.
This is the real story of the child in the painting — and of a body used as a treaty until it failed.
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