Portrait of Ferdinand IV
Portrait of Ferdinand IV is a 1759 oil painting by Anton Raphael Mengs. It measures 180 cm by 126 cm and is housed in the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples. The work shows Ferdinand IV of the Kingdom of Naples, who would later be called Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies after 1816. It was ordered by his mother, Maria Amalia of Saxony, to celebrate the eight-year-old king’s accession after his father Charles of Bourbon abdicated to rule Spain. It is Mengs’s first official portrait of the new king, painted in October 1759 in about a month. Some court artists, Luigi Vanvitelli, Giuseppe Bonito, and Francesco Liani, criticized it after being passed over for the commission. In 1760 Mengs made a second copy, sent to Ferdinand’s parents in Madrid, now in the Prado Museum. The main difference between the two is the signature on the 1760 copy, located on the square tile in the bottom left corner.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 08:38 (CET).