Diego Velázquez
Spanish painter (1599-1660), court painter to Philip IV from 1623 — after one portrait, the king would allow no one else to paint him. Las Meninas, with the painter's self-portrait wearing the cross of Santiago he received in 1658, stands at the center of European painting's history; the claims here follow the National Gallery's account.
Why this wins its question: Velázquez coverage is abundant but unanchored; these claims are bound to a major holding institution's published account, and the Golden Age contemporaneity with Cervantes is carried by the graph's relations rather than asserted loosely.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
Velázquez was born in Seville in 1599, was apprenticed at eleven to Francisco Pacheco, and died in 1660 as the dominant painter of Spain's Golden Age.
His 1623 portrait of the young Philip IV won him immediate appointment as court painter, and from then on the king would allow no one else to paint him — the basis of the unmatched sequence of royal portraits that followed.
In Las Meninas he painted himself at work at court, adding to his self-portrait the badge of the Order of Santiago after being knighted in 1658; the Rokeby Venus, painted in Italy for a Spanish nobleman, is the celebrated survivor of his rare nudes.