It was mid-morning Saturday in downtown Portland, Oregon; the clouds were grey but the city hummed quietly — not exactly the “war-torn” image certain federal voices and media outlets have been shouting about these past few weeks. (I’ll spare the reality-TV president of the White House the attention.)
On this day, I had four hours of free time before I had to be at the Keller Auditorium to attend both a Preformance Perspective pre-show talk and the 2pm “Dracula” performance from the Oregon Ballet Theatre.
To make the most of the four hours, I decided to walk towards the renowned Portland Art Museum, embarking on a mini Saturday cultural adventure.
Inside the museum, I began my tour through the permanent collection first. When I arrived at the European galleries on the second floor, the air felt suspended — quiet as breath before a performance.
And there she was. Infanta María Ana de Austria, radiant and immovable, her crimson gown lit by the soft museum lights like an ember preserved for four centuries. The red throughout the painting drew my attention (funny as I was wearing an elegant red overcoat for the Dracula ballet, though her fashion choices are centuries different than mine).
Felipe Diriksen painted her in 1630, yet her stillness carried the gravity of ritual — a young woman adorned not only in jewels but in expectation. In a way, it’s a self-portrait of power: a composed, court-approved “selfie” of the seventeenth century, long before social media gave everyone their own throne of visibility.
Her hand rested lightly on a chair; the other held a delicate white glove, poised as if awaiting a world that never arrived. Or maybe she got tired of wearing the white gloves and told Diriksen that her hands were going bare, whether he liked it or not.
About the Artist:
A Flemish Eye in Spain
Felipe Diriksen (1590–1679) was a painter born of crossings — a descendant of Flemish artists who brought the precision and luster of the Northern Renaissance to Spain. He belonged to a generation that bridged two worlds: the ornate clarity of his ancestors and the solemn grandeur of the Spanish court. Working in Madrid, Diriksen’s brush favored ceremony over spontaneity. Each fold, ruff, and thread became a study in hierarchy, devotion, and control.
In Portrait of Infanta María Ana de Austria, an oil painting from 1630, that lineage shows. Every detail — the ribbed armor-like bodice, the structured fall of scarlet silk, the ornate chair at her side — seems less portrait than proclamation. This is not merely a likeness but a codified statement of imperial power. The young Infanta stands as both person and emblem, her image rehearsing the future that awaited her: Holy Roman Empress, consort, and mother to dynasties.
The Infanta’s Presence
Standing before her, the first thing you notice is the red — deep and alive, like lacquer catching fire under candlelight.
It’s a color that commands silence. And power.
The gown seems less fabric than architecture, a fortress of pleats and embroidery rising around her small, pale face. Even the ruff encircling her neck feels like a halo of restraint — beauty forged by discipline. It’s a reminder that even in the seventeenth century, women were bound by impossible ideals of decorum and display — centuries before social media turned image-making into a daily ritual.
When I look at her red dress, I can’t help but think of the Queen of Hearts from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—though I’m sure Carroll, writing in 1865, drew his inspiration elsewhere. Still, the resemblance lingers; it’s a thought.
Her eyes are young yet unyielding, the kind of gaze painted not for intimacy but endurance. There’s a faint melancholy to her expression, as if she already knows her destiny will be arranged in treaties and signatures rather than desires.
Or perhaps, like so many famous women in history, she would be dismissed, judged, or even executed — another Marie Antoinette caught in the machinery of power. History rarely lets women rule the day in their own way; it just sends the chaos mobs.
The glove she holds dangles like a symbol of both refinement and absence — the softness permitted only when power is properly contained.
The longer you look, the more the room stills. You become aware of your own reflection faintly mirrored in the varnish, sharing her space across centuries. For a moment, time behaves strangely — and the gallery becomes less a museum than a court, its air perfumed with ceremony and silence. Even in that stillness, you feel an almost instinctive urge to bow before her — out of respect, or perhaps recognition.
The Pearl’s Journey
At her throat glimmers a story within a story — La Peregrina, the wandering pearl. Shaped like a teardrop, it once drifted through royal hands as though destined to outlive every empire it adorned. In 1630, it rested against the Infanta’s bodice, radiant and obedient, a symbol of chastity and lineage.
Yet centuries later, it would shimmer on a different stage entirely — clasped by actor Elizabeth Taylor, the pearl reborn as Hollywood legend.
Few objects have traveled so far or carried such continuity of gaze.
Whether at a Spanish court or under studio lights, La Peregrina has always reflected the women who wore it — women bound to spectacle, yet defining it on their own terms.
In Diriksen’s portrait, the pearl anchors María Ana’s composure; in Taylor’s era, it became a declaration of presence, a glittering defiance of transience.
Today, the pearl resides in private hands again, silent as ever. But its passage reminds us how adornment can become inheritance — how beauty, once placed upon a woman, can escape its maker and move through time as its own kind of sovereignty.
Echoes of Power and Image
In portraits like this, power is performed as much as painted. María Ana’s stillness is not a symptom of modesty but a choreography — every gesture rehearsed to affirm her role within a dynasty.
In seventeenth-century Spain, royal portraiture served as visual diplomacy: to be seen was to be secured, to embody grace was to ensure order. The women of the Habsburg court were not merely daughters or brides but instruments of lineage, their images dispatched across Europe like vows sealed in oil and gold leaf.
This idea of women as instruments of visual lineage reminds me of Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, my personal favorite film — set in eighteenth-century France, where a countess hires the painter Marianne to create a portrait of her daughter, Héloïse, who is unwillingly promised to a Milanese noble.
Seen through a modern lens, these portraits read almost like propaganda — images designed to secure allegiance as much as admiration. And we know too well how propaganda has been wielded across history by authoritarian powers, manipulating the people through image and spectacle.
Yet, centuries later, the image reads differently. The austerity once meant to impress now reveals its cost — the weight of expectation, the disappearance of the self beneath protocol.
What fascinates is not her status but her endurance: the quiet defiance of a gaze that has outlasted kingdoms. The Infanta remains, composed yet unreachable, her portrait no longer a tool of empire but a testament to survival through representation.
When you stand before her, you begin to sense how art preserves both the pageantry and the person — how even within constraint, a woman’s presence can radiate something ungoverned.
A Glimpse of Continuity
When I finally stepped away from her portrait, it felt as if time had folded: one visitor departing, one figure forever waiting. Outside, the October light was fading toward grey.
Perhaps that’s what draws me to these moments before the frame — the recognition that art, in all its forms, records the choreography of women’s endurance. Whether royal or fictional, painted or performed, they remain — poised at the intersection of reverence and restraint, still whispering across centuries.
In the hush of the European gallery, Infanta María Ana de Austria is no longer merely a portrait of rank or lineage. She becomes something else entirely — an emblem of continuity, of how women, even when silenced by ceremony, find a way to be seen.
Later that same day, I would step from stillness into shadow — attending Oregon Ballet Theatre’s Dracula.
Scott Bryant 
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