Portrait of Antonia Toledo y Colonna, 6th Duchess of Medinaceli.

The original is signed and dated 1607, the year in which the sitter was pregnant with the child who was to become Duke of Medinaceli, as his father died a month after his birth. The painting must therefore have been painted a little earlier, in the summer of 1606, on the occasion of her wedding at the Escorial monastery, and completed in the year of the inscription. The dress and pose are the same as the one painted four years earlier by the king's court painter of Catalina de la Cerda, 1st Duchess of Lerma, with the only difference being the red drapery in the background. In the ducal palace of Medinaceli in Soria, a building used more for administration and representation than as a residence, a gallery of copies of portraits kept in other palaces of the House was on display. This one, of the same size as the original, must have been one of them, and in it the sitter, by the copyist's will or clumsiness, appears to be older than in the original, in which she would have been little more than fifteen years old.