Portrait of Mariana of Austria is a 1652–1653 oil-on-canvas painting by Diego Velázquez, the leading artist of the Spanish Golden Age, existing in a number of versions.

He died in 1646 aged sixteen, and in 1649 she married her uncle, Baltasar Carlos's father, Philip IV, who sought her hand so as to preserve the hegemony of the Habsburg dynasty.

Mariana was described by art historian Rose-Marie Hagen as a "ruddy-cheeked, naive girl who loved a good laugh",[9] and her day-to-day courtly duties came to weigh heavily on her, not least the pressure to produce a male heir.

[4] The marriage was initially viewed as a success by the royal court when Mariana gave birth to a daughter, the Infanta Margaret Theresa.

He was over 40, she was 19, and her bid to provide Philip with a male heir in a family whose sons tended to be sickly,[4] included several false hopes and miscarriages.

[16] Velázquez sought to reinvigorate 16th-century court portraiture, which was then, according to art historian Javier Portús, "petrified into a rigid format ... with its clichés of gesture and deportment".

[18] Her extravagant taste in clothes and jewellery is evident, but a modern view is that she was a rather plain looking woman in an unhappy marriage, perhaps lacking in much of the elegance that Velázquez attributed to her.

[19] The chair and table signify her royal status, while the clock draws attention to her duties as Queen consort[18] and suggests the virtue of prudence.

According to Hagen, Mariana felt constricted by the demands of court, and suffered from "boredom, loneliness, home-sickness and illness in consequence of her never ending pregnancies [which] transformed the lively girl into that willful, mulish German".

[9] Her pout reappears in several of Velázquez's later portraits, including Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo's 1666 Mariana of Spain in Mourning, painted just after her husband died and the year her daughter Margarita, then twelve, was sent to marry her uncle, Emperor Leopold I.

[24] The dress is supported by a wide and stiff farthingale; its width emphasised by the broad lace collar and the horizontal patterns of its trimmed borders.

[3] Her left hand holds a large and elaborately folded white cloth, whose depiction, in its attention to line and abandonment of scale, has been described by art historian Antonio Domínguez Ortiz as "worthy of El Greco".

[27] He admitted to being drained by his workload,[26] and that his official duties limited the time he could devote to painting;[28] he produced fewer than twenty works during the last eight and a half years of his life.

The run of portraits began with Philip and Mariana's marriage in 1649, and include canvases of Maria Theresa of Spain and Felipe Prospero, their first two children to live beyond infancy.

[33] The painting was recorded in a 1700 inventory when it was paired with Philip IV in Armour with a Lion, which is now in El Escorial, Madrid,[3] and attributed to members of his workshop.

[33] According to the art historian Georgia Mancini, sometime before 1700, another hand "added a piece of canvas to the top of the original composition and painted the upper part of the curtain", so as it would match the size of Philip's portrait.