On the first of November 1661, the heir to the Spanish throne died. Philip Prospero, the four-year-old prince, had been the last frail thread of a dynasty that had spent two centuries marrying its own blood back into itself. For five days, Spain had no male successor. Then, on the sixth, Queen Mariana gave birth to a son.

The king, Philip IV, was fifty-six years old. The infant was named Charles. He would grow into the king his own court called El Hechizado—the Bewitched—and his body would be taken apart after death in search of a curse that doctors could not find. To understand how a royal family arrived at such a state, one has to begin with the father.

Philip IV was born in Valladolid on the eighth of April 1605, and became king of Spain at fifteen, in March 1621. He was also king of Portugal, and had been married since the age of ten to Isabel de Bourbon, a French princess of thirteen. For the next twenty years, effective rule lay in the hands of his favorite, the Count-Duke of Olivares, while Philip did something foreign visitors found genuinely unsettling. A French traveler who was in Madrid in the 1650s described the king at an audience as being like a perfectly still statue, moving nothing but his lips and eyes when he spoke.

That was the point. The rigid face was Spanish majesty. It is the same face that Diego Velázquez painted again and again for more than thirty years, a fact that would matter enormously later. Behind the mask, the kingdom was coming apart.

Portugal broke away on the first of December 1640, and Philip never got it back. Catalonia rose in revolt. Olivares was dismissed in January 1643. Then the family began to collapse.

Isabel died in October 1644. Two years later, their son and heir, Baltasar Carlos, fell ill at sixteen. On the seventh of October 1646, while the boy was delirious, Philip wrote to a cloistered nun named María de Ágreda, a woman he had corresponded with for years about his conscience. He told her he knew he deserved severe punishment, and that nothing that could happen to him in this life could atone for his sins.

Two days later, Baltasar Carlos died. Philip also had children recognized outside marriage. The most politically prominent was Don Juan José de Austria, son of an actress. The number thirty, often attached to his illegitimate children in popular histories, is a later count, not a documented record; no one has produced the supposed source for it.

What is documented is a king who kept writing to a nun that the deaths under his care were what he deserved. So in October 1649, at forty-four, Philip married again. The bride was Mariana of Austria, fourteen years old. She was his niece, his grandniece, and his first cousin, and she had originally been betrothed to the son who had just died.

He married his dead son’s fiancée. Both of them were already the product of generations of intermarriage, and this is the fact around which the entire story turns. Their daughter, Margarita Teresa, was born on the twelfth of July 1651. From her earliest childhood she was painted repeatedly, and the portraits were sent to Vienna, because she was promised to the imperial branch of the family, and her grandfather the emperor wanted to watch her grow.

As late as the first of January 1654, Ferdinand III was still writing to Madrid that he would wait for a portrait of his granddaughter in time for the king. This is why the girl’s face exists at all in art. Velázquez painted her in a pink dress at about age two, in a blue dress at age eight, and in 1656 he placed her at the center of Las Meninas, at age five, with her parents reflected in the mirror behind her. Philip’s eldest daughter from his first marriage, María Teresa, had already gone to France to marry Louis XIV.

She is a completely different woman from the young queen Mariana, yet people constantly confuse the two. Then in the autumn of 1661, the line of succession collapsed and was rebuilt within five days. The little heir, Philip Prospero, died on the first of November at age four. On the sixth, Mariana gave birth to a son.

The infant was Charles II. A clarification is needed immediately, because names become confusingly similar in English. This is not the Charles II one might imagine. The merry king with the spaniels is the English one, a different man in a different country.

This is his Spanish cousin and he did not resemble him at all. Philip IV died on the seventeenth of September 1665, at sixty. He left behind Velázquez and Calderón, the end of the Golden Age, and a king of four years—three years and ten months, to be precise—with Mariana as regent. That brings the story back to the girl in the painting.

Margarita was betrothed at eleven, in April 1663, to Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor. He was twenty-two, her mother’s brother, her uncle, and her cousin. When her father died she was fourteen, and someone painted her in black mourning clothes. Leopold received her at Schottwien in November 1666.

She entered Vienna officially in December, and they married on the twelfth of that month. She was fifteen. He was twenty-six. Then came six years that are difficult to read through to the end.

Ferdinand Wenceslaus, born in September 1667, dead by January. Maria Antonia, born in January 1669, the only one of her children to reach adulthood. Johann Leopold, born and dead on the same day in February 1670. Maria Anna Antonia, born in February 1672, dead within two weeks.

There were miscarriages in that period as well. Biographies differ in counting them, so no reliable number can be given. By January 1673 she was pregnant again, and a Spanish midwife named Lucía Panagi arrived in Vienna on the eleventh to attend her. In March, Leopold wrote that his wife had had a cold in her throat for about three weeks.

Around two in the morning on the twelfth of March 1673, Margarita died. She was twenty-one. Her husband recorded that she had been pregnant and that a dead son was found in her womb. What is missing is her own voice.

Not a single line survives in which she gives her opinion of Vienna, or of Leopold, or of her own face. Her record as an adult is pregnancy, piety, and her husband’s calendar. Leopold remarried seven months later. Maria Antonia, the daughter who lived, died at twenty-three.

Her younger brother Charles was late in everything. He did not walk until about age eight. He did not speak until about age four. Foreign courts considered him feeble-minded, and that judgment stuck for three hundred years.

But caution is warranted with that claim. Almost everyone who described him was an ambassador with a professional interest in a weak Spanish king, and his intellect was never definitively settled. How much was illness and how much was enemy distortion of his reputation is genuinely unknown. He married twice.

The first time was in person at Quintanapalla in November 1679, to Marie Louise d’Orléans, niece of Louis XIV. He was eighteen; she was seventeen, and French diplomatic circles had already sent home word that the groom was frightening in appearance. She died on the twelfth of February 1689, at twenty-six, after abdominal pain, convulsions, and vomiting following a ride on horseback. France whispered poison.

The autopsy conducted at the time said otherwise, and modern physicians usually speak of a ruptured appendix. Her body cannot be re-examined, so no one should confidently tell you she was murdered. In May 1690, Charles married Maria Anna of Neuburg, chosen mainly because her parents had produced a huge family. They had no children.

By the mid-1690s, the British envoy Alexander Stanhope wrote home that the king had a voracious appetite and swallowed everything at once because his lower jaw protruded so far that his two rows of teeth could not meet. This is the testimony of a hostile witness with a fascinated eye, not a medical report, but it matches uncomfortably with portraits painted late in his life. The royal court’s explanation was magic. This is not a Victorian invention.

El Hechizado—the Bewitched—is a term from that era, and people acted on it. One astrologer suggested that the king’s infertility stemmed from his failure to bid farewell to his father on his deathbed. So Charles went to the Escorial, had Philip’s body removed, and spent time with the corpse. In 1698, the king’s own confessor, Fray Froilán, performed an exorcism and put questions to demons to learn who had cursed the king.

No historian believes he was actually bewitched, but the fact that Spain believed it and practiced it is real, and it shows how far beyond medicine they had gone. Mariana died in 1696. Charles died in Madrid on the first of November 1700, five days short of his thirty-ninth birthday. His will left the entire Spanish inheritance undivided to Philip, Duke of Anjou, grandson of Louis XIV, and a war broke out in Europe over that.

Because the court believed he had been bewitched, they performed an autopsy, which was not routine for monarchs. The report that survives says they found a heart the size of a peppercorn, corroded lungs, three large stones in the kidney, a testicle black as coal, and a head full of water. This is a seventeenth-century record, not a laboratory result, but it is the closest thing we have to a look inside a Habsburg body. What did these three actually look like?

There are four voices from the period, each with its own agenda. In the mid-1680s, the secretary of the papal envoy described Charles at twenty-five as short rather than tall, not badly formed, ugly of face with a long neck and a long face curving inward, with the protruding lower lip that distinguished the House of Austria. This is a Vatican diplomat watching a Catholic monarchy collapse. Stanhope, already heard from, was a Protestant envoy, shocked and unable to look away.

For Philip, there is no description from an ambassador with that kind of credibility. Claims circulate online that he stood over six feet tall, but no measurement can be pointed to, so that cannot be repeated as fact. For the adult Margarita, nothing. No one wrote about her skin color, her build, or the shape of her jaw.

That silence is itself a result. What survives instead is paint. For Philip, begin with Philip IV in Brown and Silver, painted in 1631, now in the National Gallery in London; the petition in his hand is a fictional one that Velázquez signed himself. Then Philip IV at Fraga of 1644, in the Frick Collection, a documented sitting that lasted three days in a temporary studio during a military campaign, so the face was painted from life.

Then the late black bust of about 1656, also in London, the last portrait Velázquez did of him, showing sagging skin, heavy eyelids, and the jaw and lower lip without flattery. There is also a seventeenth-century marble head in the Prado, a controversial piece the museum attributes with a question mark to Pietro Tacca or his circle, and the nose is not original—it is made of plaster and was added in a 1982 restoration. It is only a useful three-dimensional reference. Margarita’s series begins with the pink dress in Vienna at about age two, passes through Las Meninas of 1656, and reaches the blue dress of 1659, the betrothal portrait sent to her fiancé.

Some say she was secretly ugly and Velázquez simply lied. That does not hold up. In the childhood portraits she is a five-year-old dressed in dynastic clothing, and children’s faces are not yet finished. The family mouth looks milder there than it would later, because of age and royal court art, not because she escaped the family features.

What settles it is the Viennese paintings. Velázquez never painted her as a wife; he died in 1660. The adult evidence is Jan Thomas van Ieperen, who painted her on copper in 1667 at sixteen, costumed as Galatea for a court festival. The lower part of her adult face shows clearly beneath the pearls.

It is even clearer in the empress portraits in the black dress from about 1672. Charles has the most complete series of all, thanks to Juan Carreño de Miranda. There is the Hall of Mirrors portrait of 1673 in the Prado, the boy king at eleven standing between gilded bronze lions with a mirror reflecting his profile. Then the armor portrait of 1681.

Here it becomes interesting: technical imaging at the Prado showed that Carreño painted the young man at twenty over an existing portrait of the child, and added a strip of canvas at the top to make him look taller. The furniture in those rooms never changes size while the king does, so the height is artistic convention, not real measurement. Then the late half-length portrait of about 1680 to 1685: the protruding jaw, the drooping lower lip, the curved nose, the collapsed middle of the face. Now the science, in actual size.

In 2009, a team of geneticists rebuilt the family tree and calculated inbreeding coefficients. Charles’s coefficient was 0. 254. A child of first cousins has a coefficient of 0.

0625. Charles’s number is what would be expected from a brother and sister, because nine out of eleven Habsburg marriages over two centuries were between relatives. Then in 2019, Román Vilas and Francisco Ceballos and their colleagues did something clever. They presented sixty-six portraits of fifteen Habsburgs to ten maxillofacial surgeons and asked them to assess the faces as patients.

As Vilas stated, they demonstrated for the first time a clear positive relationship between inbreeding and the appearance of the Habsburg jaw. Two things are widely misunderstood. First, it is not just the chin. Ceballos said plainly, standing before a Carreño portrait, that it is not merely a protrusion of the lower jaw.

Charles had drooping nose, eyes, and cheeks, weakness of the jaw bones, and his entire face looked collapsed. Second—and this is the surprise—the surgeons recorded the strongest lower jaw protrusion not in Charles but in his father, Philip IV. And inbreeding explained only about twenty-two percent of that variation. It is a real indicator, but not the whole story.

It must be made clear what this video is not. There is no facial reconstruction of these three from their skulls. There is no DNA study, no CT scan, no photogrammetric measurement. Philip and Charles are buried in the Pantheon at the Escorial, and Margarita in the imperial crypt in Vienna.

No one has opened any of them for scientific purposes. Every study described here relied on evaluation of paintings and relative calculations. If a channel tells you the tombs were opened and faces rebuilt from bone, that did not happen. The paintings come with their own filters.

Spanish court portraiture followed strict rules: black clothing, a stiff collar that isolates the head, women confined in wide circular hoops, pale skin as an expression of piety, and above all, mouths always closed. Written sources insist on a huge tongue and teeth that could not meet, yet no painting shows an open mouth. The paintings were the original photo filters, and in Spain the filter worked by omission. With that method established: Philip is based on Velázquez’s recorded series—the silver portrait and the tired late bust—because no other European monarch was observed by a single painter for that long.

Margarita is based on the series of her childhood in Vienna and her adult portraits by Jan Thomas, with the emphasis on adulthood, because that is the face fully grown. Charles is based on Carreño’s dated sequence, ending in the late half-length portrait, the very paintings the 2019 surgeons assessed. And then there is the girl from the painting, after she became the empress whose reign Velázquez did not live to see. And then there is the last of them.

In every one of those paintings, the mouth is closed. Were the court painters doing history a disservice by beautifying what was in front of them? Or was that simply the seventeenth-century version of a filter—protection for a family that did not choose the faces they were born with? And as for the father and the son, which of the two had the worse jaw?

The portraits leave that question open, the way the seconds always did, frozen beneath the paint.