Portrait of Infante Don Luis de Borbon (c. 1776): Art, History and Details

Portrait of Infante Don Luis de Borbon (c. 1776) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Anton Raphael Mengs (German, 1728–1779).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

As a younger child of King Philip V of Spain, Don Luis received important religious posts, including Archbishop of Toledo and Seville. However, his philandering led to losing these titles and banishment from the court, while he became a crucial avant-garde art patron, especially of Goya. The encrustations of medals and cacophonous fabrics speak to Mengs's experiments in representing status, privilege, and royal honors in the age of Enlightenment, when rational skepticism began to confront absolutist, hereditary power.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait of Infante Don Luis de Borbon
• Date: c. 1776
• Creator attribution: Anton Raphael Mengs (German, 1728–1779)
• Culture: Germany, 18th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 180.5 x 127 x 8 cm (71 1/16 x 50 x 3 1/8 in.); Unframed: 152.7 x 100 cm (60 1/8 x 39 3/8 in.)
• Collection: P - German before 1800
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1966.14

Collection credit

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1966. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1966.
• Cleveland Museum of Art, “Golden Anniversary Acquisition,” 1966, Cleveland Museum of Art Archives.
• Stechow, Wolfgang. "Cleveland's Golden Anniversary Acquisitions." Artnews 65, no. 5 (September 1966): 30-64.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.