What might this beauty have been? One of the Spanish king's mistresses? Did Philip IV himself commission the painting? And why didn't Velazquez paint her from the front? Who slept on black silk sheets? Were pictures of nudes really forbidden? Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagben have put such questions to world-famous masterpices. They show what painters were allowed to portray and what their clients demanded. They tell of love, money, politics, suffering, greed, raw ambition and sensual indulgence, and disclose what pictures spanning six centuries can still relate.