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12 Aug 2026
Mary
Mulholland
Aug 28th
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The girl I saw in Avilés
After Juan Carreño de Miranda’s
Eugenia Martínez Vallejo, Clothed (c.1680)
A guard keeps watch of the museum’s treasure,
Eugenia, la monstrua. Framed in gold, in the dark
room, she’s under a spotlight. Her tight red brocade
reveals every bulge of a prematurely buxom body
that could pass for twenty-six, not six.
A man beside me mutters: ‘That syndrome will
have caused her weight, moon face, florid cheeks ... ’
Shamefully, we all stare at a little girl with ribbons
in her hair. Then I see her eyes, the tears held inside
which the artist has captured. He sits outside
in the square – a bronze of him flaunting a palette,
basking in the Spanish sun.
Behind the poem...
While in Avilés for the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine, I went with a friend to the Niemeyer Centre. There, exhibited in a dark room, was Juan Carreño de Miranda’s painting of the six-year-old ‘court jester’ Eugenia Martínez Vallejo: a child considered a monster, there to entertain the court of Charles II. About 20 of us were gathered around this image, staring. Some chatted, others laughed. My friend, a doctor, said Eugenia had what is now thought to have been Prader–Willi syndrome. I just felt deeply moved by how unhappy this girl looked – how isolated she must’ve felt. Later, I saw a bronze statue of the artist, gleaming in a sunny square.