NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {E} arlier this summer a new museum opened in Madrid. The Gallery of Royal Collections, next to the Royal Palace, displays paintings, sculpture, textiles, furniture, armor, books, fans — it’s Spain — as well as nifty royal coaches. It’s run by the Patrimonio Nacional, a department of the office of the Spanish president controlling palaces, gardens, religious houses, and libraries either used by the king for ceremonies or closely linked to Spain’s royals as emblems.
Spain’s government created the Patrimonio Nacional in 1865 during the long, ups-and-downs reign of Isabella II, who otherwise might have sold Philip II’s palace, library, royal seminary — as well as the gold teeth of her predecessors interred at the Escorial.
More on the Escorial in a bit. The Gallery has been in the works since the 1930s, with many starts and stops, the last in 2016 when a long-term caretaker government couldn’t find $25 million to finish it, but finished it finally was. What the government didn’t nationalize in 1865, the Republican socialists did in the ’30s after the king, Alfonso XIII, fled. More delays came from four prime ministers coming and going, King Juan Carlos’s hasty exit in 2014 after a sex-and-bribery scandal, and the ascent of his son, Felipe VI. Then there was Covid.
The Gallery is impressive. Mansilla and Tuñón, a Madrid firm, designed it. They did the snazzy, polychrome contemporary-art museum in León, inspired by the giant rose window in León’s Gothic cathedral.
The façade of gray granite and the galleries are open and bright. They work as backdrops to the art on view rather than muscling them out of the way, I’m relieved to say. The exterior is discreet, too. It’s on a steep promontory where a Moorish citadel stood nearly a thousand years ago — before there was a Madrid — defending Muslim Toledo from Christian armies to the north during the Reconquista. So the Gallery, along with the palace next door and Madrid’s cathedral on the other side of it, occupies Madrid’s birthplace. The palace and the Gallery overlook what were once the royal forests, now gardens and distant views. In an engineering and architectural triumph, the Gallery doubles as a retaining wall. At about 500,000 square feet, it’s big.
By the entrance are the remains of the Moorish citadel’s old walls, the discovery of which also delayed the project. It’s efficiently organized, with a floor for the Hapsburgs, one for the Bourbons, and the top floor for focused shows. With Royal collections holding more than 170,000 items, there’s plenty to plumb.
Everyone probably knows Ferdinand and Isabella as a general proposition and with respect to Columbus. Other headlines of their Page One story — this husband-and-wife team, she the queen of Castile, he the king of Aragon — are that they finished the 700-year Reconquista, expelled the last of the Moors, established a more-or-less unified Spanish and Roman Catholic state, filled the Inquisition’s gas tank with high test, and expelled the Jews. In an early portrait, we see that Isabella was a looker, with bedroom eyes. Her devotional polyptych by Juan de Flandes from the late 1490s — 47 small religious paintings, of which 15 are in the Gallery, with abundant everyday-life details — was meant for her personal devotion. The Gallery does many things. Among them is an up-close-and-personal look at royals who ruled the world’s biggest empire since Rome’s.
Ferdinand and Isabella’s daughter, Juana the Loca, was, as her name suggests, crazy, too much so to rule. Her son was the Holy Roman Emperor and an Austrian archduke. On her death in 1519, he became Spain’s king. Known today as Charles V, though he’s Charles I in Spain, he ruled not only Spain but the Netherlands, pieces of Italy and Germany, and before long, Spain’s vast New World empire. His son was Philip II. Charles’s armor is there, and grand it is.
Each reign, the Habsburg and the Bourbon, gets a section, and this makes sense. Spain, as countries go, is unusually covetous of its kings and queens. Unification was a slog, and that surely bred an instinctive loyalty to all heads crowned. Spain was once — and far less so now — intensely Catholic, with the kings as defenders of the faith. The imperial adventure — guided by Charles and the three generations of King Philips that followed him — enriched Spain’s establishment. Yes, there were two republics, a very short one in 1873 and the 1930s socialist republic, which led to the Spanish Civil War and half a million deaths. Both times, though, the public clamored for their king to return.
The monarchy was never absolute or despotic during Spain’s Golden Age, running roughly from the days of Charles V, who reigned from 1519 to 1556, to, at most, 1800. The kings ruled a massive empire and court bureaucracy, so there were few off-with-his-head moments maximizing efficiency, and not much success in making decisions with dispatch, much less decisions that stuck. After 1800, the monarchy was broken but still much loved.
Not paintings but tapestries wowed the early monarchs. The silk and wool Triumph of Time, from the 1520s, has kept its vibrant colors. Tapestries, with a thread count per inch rivaling Weimar-inflation numbers, were infinitely more demanding and better suited to big — and cold — palace walls. Pieter Bruegel the Elder oversaw the transition of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights into a tapestry in the 1550s.
There’s a good section on the Escorial. I think it’s impossible to grasp the fundamentals of Spanish culture and history without visiting the Escorial, the austere complex initially funded by Charles II for his entombment but more intimately linked to Philip II, who reigned from 1556 to 1598. Philip saw it as his pyramid. It was his place for study and contemplation. That he included a seminary shows the duality of the king as head of state but also Catholicism’s strongest defender. Franco’s former tomb in the Valley of the Fallen, hewn from rock in a hill, is a few minutes from the Escorial — Spain transferred the dictator’s remains to a crypt in the state cemetery in 2019.
Philip, though a big buyer of Venetian nudes by Titian, was a strict believer in genuine Catholic orthodoxies, and, in his personal style, he was into basic black, no flounces and ruffles allowed. The Escorial is a gigantic granite quadrangle on the outside but, on the inside, a showcase for Philip’s collection, much of it religious art. In the time of the Kings Philip, the Escorial held one of the best libraries in Europe. Philip II saw erudition as essential to a good, wise monarchy.
The Adoration of the Name of Jesus, from 1577–79, was painted by El Greco to schmooze Philip II. In it, Philip II, Pope Pius V, the Venetian doge, and Don Juan of Austria, who led the Holy League’s charge in the Battle of Lepanto, pray in celebration as sorry, dead Turks fill the jaws of a gaping fish. It’s been at the Escorial for centuries, but the Patrimonio Nacional grabbed it for the Gallery. El Greco, by the by, wanted to work for Philip as court painter, but the king saw his art as too la-di-da and thought its sumptuous colors and stretched figures distracted from the religious and political themes he favored.
I’d never seen Caravaggio’s Salome with the Head of St. John the Baptist, from 1607. Velázquez’s White Horse is there, too. It’s from the late 1630s when the artist was already the much-esteemed court painter and curator for Philip IV. By that time, Velázquez was painting equestrian portraits of the king, his family, and court big shots. This very grand, riderless horse, which I’d only seen once before, might have been painted for a rider who skipped his sittings or for the artist’s own edification, since it’s highly finished.
Luisa Roldán’s St. Michael Smiting the Devil, from 1692, is the zenith of Spanish polychromatic wood sculpture. It has never been displayed in public. Her estranged husband, it’s said, was the model for the Satan.
When Charles II — Philip IV’s deeply inbred, possibly idiotic, and certainly childless son — died in 1700, the brutal War of the Spanish Succession determined who would succeed him. It was a Europe-wide war from which Charles’s grand-nephew — the Bourbon Philip of Anjou, who was Louis XIV’s grandson — emerged as king. Though bipolar, he ruled for 45 years, with one tiny interval when, flattened by melancholy, he abdicated in favor of his son. Months later, his son died and back on the throne went Philip. Late in life, Philip famously brought the castrato opera star Farinelli to Madrid to sing arias to him each night, a move that proved soothing. Philip died in 1746, on a high note. Couldn’t resist — vaudeville’s not dead.
Two giant portraits of Philip V and his consort, Isabella Farnese, tell us that the Bourbons were in charge. Louis-Michel van Loo became the chief court painter and brought, at Philip’s command, French style to Madrid. In 1734, a fire destroyed much of the Alcazar, the old royal palace, making a new palace necessary. Its French style, in its exuberance, was very different from the Escorial and other royal places. There’s a nice musical-instruments gallery that has a five-octave piano with sumptuous marquetry, and Isabella II’s hand gymnasium for her to augment her speed and strength as she played the piano. In another gallery is a first edition of Don Quixote.
After the Peninsular War (1807–14), loss of empire, and a revolution or two, high-end royal acquisitions declined to things like Isabella II’s hand gymnasium. When the fall came, it came hard, as falls do. Goya’s Portrait of Charles IV in the Uniform of a Colonel of the Lifeguards, from 1799 is splendid. If Philip IV is the icon of austerity, he’s as bedecked as Zaza Napoli in La Cage aux Folles. Less than ten years later, he was forced to abdicate, pushed from power by his son. The Peninsular War followed, leaving Spain a wreck.
An exhibition on the Gallery’s top floor, On the Move: National Heritage Carriages and Vehicles, was very fun. Queen Bárbara of Braganza’s sedan chair from the late 1750s, with Rococo-style painted side panels, was my favorite for its gaudy look and ridiculousness. She was Ferdinand VI’s consort and known, at least to me, as the great patroness of the harpsichordist Scarlatti.
A big coach from the early 1830s has a double suspension system that, I read, actually gave a smooth ride. Though not as speedy as a car, and then there’s the issue of horses, it won’t explode, unlike electric cars, and it also won’t assault the planet with the extreme mining that EVs demand. Hitler gave Franco two fancy Mercedes cars while he wooed him to join the Axis. Though tempted, Franco steered clear.
The Gallery is a coup for Spanish culture and certainly for its organizers. The curators took things not only from the royal palace next door but from Patrimonio Nacional properties throughout Spain. Much teeth-gnashing ensued on the part of locals, though we’re told that replacement objects were supplied. At $185 million and 90 years in the making, the Gallery will no doubt be a huge draw.