In this essay I examine representations of court dwarfs who lived in the Spanish Hapsburg court between the early 1550s and the late 1650s. I look at three categories of painting: the portrait of a dwarf and dog; a double portrait of a dwarf and her average-sized mistress; and a group painting that includes individuals with different types of dwarfism. Although other ‘marvels’, such as conjoined twins and bearded ladies, were occasionally brought to court and captured on canvas, only dwarfs were painted alongside members of the royal family. ¹ In order to understand why this was the case, it is important to be aware of how dwarfs were perceived in early modern Spain. Therefore, I present some contemporary descriptions of the ‘monstrous’ figure of the dwarf that reveal how discussions were framed within the discourse of the ‘natural’ and the ‘unnatural’. My aim in studying the visual and textual evidence is to achieve what Ivan Gaskell has defined as ‘historical understanding’:

One of the conditions of the creation of art objects is that, however they might have been understood and used by their makers and their competent contemporaries, they will inevitably be subject to different uses and understandings thereafter … original meaning as such must remain inaccessible. Yet to regard the changes in the world between the original circumstances of the art object and the present time as a screen or obstacle that prevents us from addressing the question of what an original significance might have been is equally mistaken. We might profitably think in terms of historical understanding rather than art-historical retrieval. ²