The Spanish Habsburgs and the Alcázar in Madrid
Although the reign of Philip II had seen the Spanish Empire reach its greatest extent, and Spain’s armies had proved all but invincible on the European mainland, this hegemony had come at great cost (the country had gone bankrupt on four occasions during the late sixteenth century). Consequently, as the new century dawned, there was a widespread feeling that the country was in urgent need of reform. A number of reformers, known as arbitristas, made a genuine attempt to analyse ways of creating an economic recovery and promoting social and moral regeneration. Their ideas involved cutting government expenditure, reforming the tax system, encouraging immigration into Castile, the Spanish heartland, improving transport and industry and arranging the more equal distribution of the economic costs among the five constituent kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula (from 1580 until 1640 Portugal was a part of Spain). It was to be Spain’s tragedy that these ideas should never have been implemented.
The country that benefited most from Spain’s inability to reform was its neighbour France. After suffering from a series of civil wars between Catholics and Huguenots in the later sixteenth century, the nation was reunited by Henry IV, who converted to Catholicism in 1593, supposedly making the cynical statement that ‘Paris was worth a mass’. His finance minister Maximilien de Bethune, Duke of Sully, centralized the administration, overhauled the tax system, reduced expenditure and consolidated the state’s debt. These reforms, together with Henry’s concerted effort to placate the rebellious nobility by awarding them titles and privileges, led to the revival of France. Henry’s son Louis XIII appointed the immensely able Cardinal Richelieu as his chief minister and it was the cardinal who led France into the Thirty Years’ War on the side of the Protestant forces of Holland and Sweden against Spain and Austria. France and her allies won a series of notable victories, and Richelieu’s policies were continued by his equally talented successor Cardinal Mazarin and resulted in France making a number of important territorial gains in Flanders and Catalonia at the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659.
A year later Louis XIV entered his majority (he had been king since 1643) and his aggressive attempts to extend France’s borders into the Spanish Netherlands led to a series of wars with Spain. France’s ability to pay for these wars was largely due to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the able and energetic Minister of Finance. Like Sully, he continued to reform the tax system, punishing corrupt officials employed in collecting taxes, reorganized industry and commerce, increased the manufacture of high quality goods and built up the navy. Colbert’s reforms were dedicated to the basic principle that the nation with the most money would be the most powerful, and the success of his reforms meant that by 1700 the strength of France was feared by all other European nations, particularly the much-weakened Spanish.
Although Spain had failed to implement much-needed reforms, and suffered a number of defeats at the hands of the French, nevertheless the seventeenth century was a golden age in terms of the arts. Indeed, many of Spain’s most remarkable literary works actually gloried in this failure to reform. The picaresque novel, perhaps the most important literary development in seventeenth-century Spain, celebrates the craftiness of idle, low-born rogues triumphing over the idealistic world of hidalgos, or gentlemen. Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes, published in 1605 and 1615, is both a comedy and a satirical commentary on the rigidity of Spanish society, with its obsession with class, where a well-meaning hidalgo, deceived by the chicaneries of the world, ends up tilting at windmills. The three major playwrights, Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina and Pedro Calderon de la Barca, wrote conventional morality plays depicting conflicts between all classes of society, imbued with good humour and cynicism.
Despite her economic problems, gold and silver continued to pour into Spain from the New World, and, although this led to inflation, the city of Seville, in particular, which enjoyed a monopoly on all trade with the New World, boomed. Diego de Velázquez and Bartolomé Murillo, two of the great names in Spanish seventeenth-century painting, both hailed from Seville, and Francisco de Zurbarán, the third leading painter in Spain, spent much of his career in the Andalusian port. However, it was Madrid, the home of the court and therefore the centre of patronage, that gradually took over from Seville as the main artistic centre. Unlike Philip II, his successors lived in the Alcázar, the main royal palace in their capital, and Velázquez was one of a number of ambitious painters who came to Madrid to advance their careers. At the Spanish Court he was welcomed by his fellow-Andalusian Gaspar de Guzman, Count-Duke of Olivares. Olivares was chief minister of Philip IV and introduced the promising artist to the king. It was to prove one of the most successful unions of artist and patron in the history of art.
Philip IV (1621–65) rivalled his grandfather Philip II as the greatest art collector of his day. This was in contrast with his father Philip III (1598–1621), who made a negligible contribution to the arts, the only painting that excited the king’s imagination being Titian’s Venus del Pardo (Paris, Louvre), the most overtly erotic of all his mythological works, for which he developed a passion. This was not for lack of opportunity; the king’s powerful chief minister, Francisco Gomez de Sandoval, Duke of Lerma, amassed some 1,400 paintings, many by the great Venetian artists of the sixteenth century, as well as commissioning a magnificent equestrian portrait of himself by the young Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens.
Owing to Philip III’s lack of interest in the arts, there is no record of the Rape of Europa during his reign and it is not until the 1620s that we begin to find accounts of the painting by notable visitors to Madrid. These included Charles, Prince of Wales, who came to Spain in 1623, and Cassiano del Pozzo in 1626, secretary to the papal ambassador Cardinal Francesco Barberini and a noted Roman connoisseur, who named it the Rape of Europa (Titian had originally entitled it Europa on the Bull). Rubens was the most important foreign artist to visit Madrid, and was strongly influenced by Titian’s painting. The Fleming executed a copy during his visit of 1628–9, while Velázquez, who worked for many years in the Alcázar as the court painter and palace marshal, included it in the background of one of his greatest works.
Philip IV, like his grandfather, kept the Rape of Europa and Titian’s other poesie away from public view, hanging them in the south-west corner of the Alcázar, where the king’s apartments were situated. These apartments looked on to a garden, known as the Garden of the Emperors, named after 25 statues of Roman emperors that were housed here, alongside bronzes by Leone Leoni of Philip II and his half-brother Don John of Austria. Juan Gomez de Mora, architect to Philip III, had constructed arched spaces round the garden at the beginning of the seventeenth century to protect the king and his family from the fierce summer sun. In these rooms Philip IV hung Titian’s erotic mythologies: the Rape of Europa and the other poesie, together with Venus and the Organ-player and Tarquin and Lucretia. They were joined by Venus with a Mirror, which was moved here from Philip IV’s bedroom.
Few people were allowed into these rooms, an exception being the famous collector Cassiano del Pozzo, who noted the number of nudes by Titian and Rubens. Philip’s Queen Elizabeth found the overt sexuality of Titian’s nudes so disturbing when she came to visit her husband that she ordered them to be covered over (her own apartments were in a separate quarter of the vast palace beyond the royal chapel of St Michael). The queen’s prudishness was almost certainly exacerbated by Philip’s numerous infidelities. Despite his lugubrious and melancholy appearance, so brilliantly captured by Velázquez, the king had a number of mistresses and was rumoured to have sired as many as 32 natural children. His son by Maria Ines Calderon, known as La Calderona, was even brought up as a royal prince. No doubt the queen imagined that her husband’s ardour was increased at the sight of Titian’s naked beauties. It was not only Titian’s nudes that the queen found offensive. In the early 1630s Rubens’ mildly erotic Diana and her Nymphs setting out for the Hunt was moved from the queen’s apartments to the summer ones of the king.
Not surprisingly, in the light of the queen’s reaction, Philip was careful who was allowed to view the Rape of Europa. He knew that many people in Counter-Reformation Spain, a highly conservative, Catholic society, disapproved of Titian’s mythological paintings. The poet and historian Bartolome Leonardo de Argensola, an influential figure at court in the early seventeenth century, was one of many to be scandalized by them. He recorded his feelings in a poem (despite its strongly disapproving tone the author had obviously studied the paintings closely):
Invite others to visit the breasts
In the grand city [Madrid] filled with silk and gold and amazing paintings
Which by the laws of talent are worth a fortune
Only God knows what they are worth
Leda on the swan, Europa on the bull
Venus wantonly unseemly
Promiscuous satyrs, fleeing nymphs
Diana immodestly among her companions
That she would keep them as living beings
He who allowed his eyes to judge
As he judges them as lewd
Why did he not use the brush for a tentative veil
To hinder our view
Despite Argensola’s disapproval, Titian’s poesie, however, hidden away in the king’s private apartments did little to disturb the rigorous formality of life at court in the Alcázar. Visitors to the palace in the seventeenth century found the experience extremely unsettling. Philip IV was so impassive when he appeared in public that he resembled a statue. He was reputed to have laughed only three times in public during his entire life. Foreign ambassadors visiting the Alcázar for an audience with the king recorded the claustrophobic formality of life at court. The ambassador would be led through a succession of dark and gloomy rooms, with not even one chair to provide a modicum of comfort, before he reached the audience-chamber, where he would be greeted by Philip IV, standing beside a console table. Having saluted the ambassador by touching his hat, the king would stand motionless throughout the interview, which he would terminate by making a number of courteous but anodyne remarks. No wonder Alonso Carrillo, in his Origin of the dignity of the grandees of Castile of 1657, described Philip IV’s court as ‘a school of silence, punctiliousness and reverence’. Occasionally, the king escaped from this ultra-formal world to indulge his love of hunting. He was a brilliant horseman and a keen hunter; a contemporary, writing in 1644, praised Philip’s ability at pig-sticking and claimed that his trophies included a grand total of 400 wolves, 600 stags and 150 wild boar.
The occasional hunting excursion was one of the few opportunities Philip had to escape from his duties. Even his love of art was a part of his public persona. Philip ruled Spain throughout the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), which the Spanish regarded as a crusade against Protestantism. Philip was leader of the Catholic cause and promoted a number of moral reforms including closing legal brothels in Spain and attempting to regulate priests’ sexual behaviour. His subjects would have been horrified if they knew that the king spent hours gazing at a series of erotic nudes by a Venetian artist.
In contrast, Titian’s major portraits, historical and allegorical paintings were shown in the public rooms in the Alcázar. Great care was taken in hanging them in the main reception room, known as the New Hall, or Hall of Mirrors, so that they could demonstrate the power of Spain. This was where Philip received ambassadors from as far afield as Russia and Ottoman Turkey, seated on his throne beneath Titian’s Equestrian Portrait of Charles V. A number of changes were made to the Hall of Mirrors during his reign, but they did not affect the Titian which remained in place, the most potent image of the Habsburg monarchy. Other works by the artist in the room included Religion aided by Spain, an allegorical portrait of Philip II after the battle of Lepanto, the great victory by the Christian navy, led by Spain, over the Ottoman fleet in 1571.
The painter Vincenzo Carducho, who had worked for Philip II, Philip III and Philip IV and was the author of Dialogues on Painting, thought the scheme of decoration in the Hall of Mirrors was worthy of the highest praise, ‘grave, majestic, exemplary, and worthy of imitation’. Interestingly, he contrasted this with paintings that depicted scenes from the myths of Ovid with ‘impure and immodest boorishness’, a criticism that seems to refer directly to Titian’s poesie.
One of the reasons why the Hall of Mirrors was constantly being redecorated was because of the urgent need for the king to bolster his faltering reputation. This was both personal and political. Philip IV possessed a diffident character and, in the words of Velázquez, ‘he mistrusts himself, and defers too much to others’, in particular his chief minister, the commanding Olivares, whose extravagant and ambitious personality dominated the court during the first half of Philip’s reign. Having renewed war with the Netherlands in 1621, which then proceeded to engulf the whole of Europe, Spain was committed to a generation of warfare.
Two years later Philip IV received an unusual visitor to Madrid. Charles, Prince of Wales, decided to make an impetuous visit to the Spanish capital with his friend George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, the favourite of Charles’ father James I, the two men travelling incognito under the pseudonyms Thomas and John Smith. The ostensible reason for the visit was an attempt by Charles to woo the Spanish Infanta Maria Anna, sister of Philip IV.
As it turned out, however, the most interesting outcome of the expedition was that the prince developed a passion for Old Master paintings. Before coming to Spain the Venetian ambassador in London had noted the prince’s love of Venetian painting, but Charles’ only major purchase had been Raphael’s cartoons of the Acts of the Apostles (now hanging in the Victoria and Albert Museum) from which he intended to commission a series of tapestries from the recently established Mortlake tapestry factory, the first of its kind in England. It was to be the sight of the Titians in the Spanish royal collection that inspired Charles to form his magnificent artistic collection.
At first, however, after his arrival in Madrid, political concerns took precedence. James I had been negotiating the marriage of the Prince of Wales to the Infanta with the Spanish ambassador, the Count of Gondomar, for many years, hoping thereby to secure a large Spanish dowry to help alleviate his acute financial problems (the dowry was initially set at £500,000, later raised to £600,000). This was a major political gamble since the majority of his Protestant subjects held strongly anti-Catholic views. For the latter part of the sixteenth century England had been at war with Spain, and James’ older subjects had vivid memories of the triumphant defeat of the Spanish Armada.
The Spanish, with their love of protocol, were aghast at the unexpected arrival of two such important guests on such a delicate diplomatic mission. Charles and Buckingham made a formal entry into Madrid on 26 March. They were greeted by Philip IV and the Count-Duke of Olivares who, with typical love of self-dramatization, was dressed in gold-embroidered clothes. The two Englishmen, in contrast dressed ‘in the English manner’ without jewels or embroidery, were then escorted in a lavish procession from the monastery of San Jeronimo to the Alcázar. Crowds gathered to watch the king riding alongside the prince beneath a canopy, entertained by dancers as they went, and one spectator commented that Charles was ‘a handsome youth of about twenty-two with a long face … rather sunburnt from the journey, and his beard is just beginning to show’.
At the Alcázar a suite of rooms had been hastily prepared for Charles and Buckingham. During the spring and summer they had ample opportunity to study the works of art in the royal apartments, particularly the wonderful group of Titians. Buckingham was already in the process of forming an important collection, including an Ecce Homo by Titian, purchased by his agent Balthasar Gerbier in Italy, and Gerbier now joined the royal party in Madrid, along with his fellow agent Tobie Matthew. The duke was later to acquire a total of 19 Titians for his London Residence, York House. Charles followed Buckingham’s lead in developing a passion for the works of Titian and the other leading artists of the Venetian School. What is apparent from the outset is that the two Englishmen regarded these works of art purely on their aesthetic merits, and their aim was to purchase examples whenever they could.
The Spanish took a very different view. They had noticed the prince’s growing interest in works of art and determined to take political advantage of this. They observed the lack of progress in the relationship between Charles and the Infanta, largely because the couple only met formally during pageants, masquerades and firework displays. But could the prospect of acquiring important paintings from the royal collection be used to persuade the Prince of Wales to convert to Catholicism? The Spanish were fighting a protracted war with the Dutch for control of the Netherlands. Just as in Philip II’s day, there was a major logistical problem in transporting troops from Spain to the Low Countries. One route was to bring them by sea up the English Channel. Protestant England was likely to favour an alliance with fellow Protestants in Holland rather than Catholic Spain, but, if there was a Catholic monarch on the English throne, it was much more likely that England would remain neutral. For Olivares, who had renewed war with the Dutch in 1621, this was of cardinal importance.
Despite Charles’ success in purchasing two Titians, he had difficulty in buying major works by the artist on the open market (Spanish nobles, acutely conscious of status, were reluctant to part with their paintings to a foreign prince until he was married to the Infanta, and would then become part of the Spanish royal family). Olivares calculated that Spain could benefit from the Prince of Wales’ new-found passion by persuading his royal master to part with some Titians from the royal collection. The first painting to be offered to Charles was Titian’s magnificent portrait of Charles V with his Hound (Prado, Madrid), painted in 1530 shortly after he had been crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Clement VII. This priceless gift sums up the difference between the two parties. For the Spanish, the painting carried a clear, political message: Charles V had been crowned as emperor by the pope for his championship of Catholicism. By accepting the gift they assumed that the Prince of Wales was going to join the Habsburg royal family, accepting the authority of the pope and converting to Catholicism. Charles, however, chose to ignore the political message, and accepted the Titian purely for its aesthetic qualities. On 11 June, the prince was offered another masterpiece by Titian, his Jupiter and Antiope, better known as the Venus del Pardo (Louvre, Paris), a particular favourite of Philip III.
As a final inducement Olivares persuaded his sovereign to offer Charles the Rape of Europa and the rest of the poesie, so beloved of Philip II, and widely regarded as some of the greatest works of the Venetian master. There could be no better example of the role that major works of art played as a diplomatic counter. Vicente Carducho, like the rest of the Spanish Court, was amazed at this largesse, recording in his Dialogues on Painting: ‘I then saw them packed into crates, for shipping to England, these being Diana Bathing, Europa, Danae, and the rest.’
The gift appeared to have had the desired effect with Charles agreeing to the key religious issues. Although the prince was not willing to convert to Catholicism, he ignored warnings from his senior advisers, the English ambassador John Digby, First Earl of Bristol, and Sir Francis Cottington, ex-ambassador and Charles’ secretary, and consented to grant freedom of worship to English Roman Catholics, repealing anti-Catholic legislation and allowing the Infanta, once they were married, to control her children’s religious education. Remarkably, James I acquiesced in the agreement. This was all the more surprising, considering the unpopularity of his pro-Spanish policy with his predominantly Protestant subjects. He had been compelled to dissolve Parliament two years earlier when the Commons, led by Sir Edward Coke, the most important jurist in England, had presented him with a petition in favour of a war with Spain and that the Prince of Wales should marry a Protestant.
Bristol and Cottington were increasingly concerned that the prince was giving too much away. They realized that he was a virtual captive in Madrid, under pressure from the Catholic divines, who frequently visited him, to convert to Catholicism. Their concerns appeared amply justified when Charles suddenly caved in to further Spanish demands on 7 July, agreeing to give the Spanish total control over the proposed marriage and to allow English Catholics virtual independence from governmental control. By now James I had had second thoughts at events in Spain, and when he heard of these new concessions his son had made on this crucial issue, he was so aghast that he feared he would lose his crown.
In fact Charles had decided that capitulation was the only course to adopt if he was to escape Madrid. Once he was free from the Spanish capital, he had decided to repudiate the agreement. This cynical ploy was to be typical of Charles’ negotiating technique throughout his reign, particularly when he felt that he had been cornered by his opponents, notably when he was a prisoner of the Parliamentarians after the Civil War. His tactic was to make an agreement he had no intention of honouring.
The Spanish, however, were taken in. On 9 September, Charles and Buckingham left Madrid, their first stop being the Escorial, where the two Englishmen had a further chance to admire the extraordinary collection formed by Philip II, centred on the works of Titian. Charles then took leave of Philip IV, reiterating his promise to marry the Infanta by proxy once he had received papal dispensation. In fact, as soon as he reached Segovia, he instructed the Earl of Bristol to formally call the match off. This greatly upset the Spanish and, not surprisingly, they made haste to prevent Titian’s paintings, which had been packed up, from leaving for England. They were brought back and rehung in Philip’s apartments in the Alcázar.
Bristol, who had spent many years promoting the idea of the marriage, but had strongly opposed the sudden appearance of the Prince of Wales in Spain, was most upset that the Spanish, with whom he was on excellent terms, should have felt that he was acting in bad faith when he relayed the news. The earl was made the scapegoat for the whole affair. As a typical example of Charles’ bad man-management, on returning to England Bristol was confined to his estates but was permitted to return to court if he would admit his fault. This he refused to do, resulting in Charles, by now king, sending his stubborn minister to the Tower where he remained until 1628. Charles thus alienated one of his most able servants; the two men were not reconciled until the eve of the Civil War in 1641.
The failure of the expedition inflamed anti-Spanish sentiment in England. The nation celebrated the Prince of Wales’ return without a Catholic bride (though their jubilation was short-lived as Charles was shortly to marry a French Catholic princess, Henrietta Maria, sister of Louis XIII). Englishmen flocked to watch Thomas Middleton’s A Game of Chess, which opened in London in August 1624 to packed audiences. Spectators particularly enjoyed the ridicule heaped on the Jesuits, portrayed as lecherous and avaricious, and the Count of Gondomar, Spanish ambassador to England for many years, caricatured as the Black Knight, with numerous jokes about his physical impediments. The Privy Council, sensitive that this was subtle criticism of the government’s promotion of the Spanish alliance, closed the play after just nine days. The king, however, influenced by the mercurial Buckingham, was soon leading England into a war with Spain and the idea of an Anglo–Spanish marriage between Charles and the Infanta was therefore politically dead. (The Infanta was to marry her cousin Ferdinand III, the Holy Roman Emperor, a much more suitable match.)
For Charles, however, the Spanish trip was a voyage of discovery. The prince had been very impressed by the court of Philip IV and on his return to England he took to wearing sober, Spanish costume and based his courtly protocol on the Habsburg model. Charles brought back three major works by Titian: the Portrait of Charles V with his Hound, the Pardo Venus and the Woman in a Fur Wrap (Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna) but, tantalizingly, the group of poesie, including the Rape of Europa, never left Spain. Charles lamented his failure to land this ultimate artistic coup (copies made by Michael Cross, a minor painter, sent over by the king, proved a scant substitute). Six years later, the king was still pestering Sir Francis Cottington, who was now English ambassador to Spain, to try to extricate the Titians from Spain.
The situation in 1629, however, was very different from that of 1623. The Spanish could see no political advantage in sending the paintings to England, so they remained in situ. Spurred on by this failure, Charles was to spend the rest of his reign amassing as many works by Titian and his fellow Venetians as he could buy to form the central part of his collection, the finest formed by any British monarch. His greatest artistic coup was the acquisition of the Gonzaga collection from Mantua. As in his dealings with the Spanish on his adventurous trip to Madrid in 1623, Charles took a very different view of the purchase of these paintings to that of his opponents. For the king, the acquisition of these magnificent Renaissance and Baroque paintings was well worth the enormous price he had to pay for them. His Puritan enemies, however, condemned the numerous religious paintings, filled with Catholic symbolism, which they felt gave clear evidence of the king’s crypto-papism.
Interestingly, Charles I’s taste was very similar to that of Philip IV. Both monarchs had a passion for the work of Titian; Philip, of course, was fortunate enough to inherit his collection from his grandfather while Charles was obliged to purchase his collection of 45 works by the Venetian artist. The two monarchs also enjoyed the works of Raphael and his followers. Among contemporaries, Charles I preferred to patronize Anthony Van Dyck, whose majestic portraits, strongly influenced by the richness of Titian’s colours, created an iconic image of the king, based on the idea of the Divine Right of Kings (he was knighted by the grateful monarch). His portraits were to exert a formative influence on the great eighteenth-century British portraitists Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Thomas Lawrence.
Philip IV preferred the works of Van Dyck’s master Peter Paul Rubens, and the Fleming was to make an impact on Spanish painting as great as that of Titian. Rubens had already visited Spain in 1603, where he had paid homage to Titian in his powerful equestrian portrait of Philip III’s chief minister the Duke of Lerma. Rubens had been struck by the ‘splendid works of Titian, of Raphael and others’, comparing them with works by contemporary painters, which he dismissed as showing ‘incredible incompetence and carelessness’.
The Flemish painter made his visit during an eight-year sojourn in Italy, where he made an intense study of the great works of art in the main artistic centres, Venice, Genoa, Florence and Rome. He also spent several years based in Mantua, making a careful study of the Titians in the Ducal Palace, commissioned by the duke’s ancestor Federico Gonzaga (this was the collection that Charles I acquired in 1627–30). On returning to his native Antwerp, Rubens became the leading painter in Flanders. He acknowledged his debt to Titian, and was seen as the leader of the colourists, who took their inspiration from the great Venetian painters, as opposed to the classicists led by Nicholas Poussin, the leading French artist working in Rome, who based their style on the art of Raphael and antique sculpture.
Rubens executed a number of works for Philip IV’s aunt the Archduchess Isabella and her husband the Archduke Albert, joint rulers of the Spanish Netherlands. Isabella was impressed with Rubens’ intelligence and sent him to Spain in 1628 in the role of a diplomat, rather than a painter. The snobbish Spanish grandees were not impressed at the painter’s new-found status, the Duke of Aarschot writing dismissively to Rubens: ‘I should be very glad that you should learn for the future how persons in your position should write to those of my rank.’ Rubens, however, was more concerned to win the friendship of the king, and brought with him eight of his own paintings which were soon displayed in a state room in the Alcázar. As he had hoped, the king was full of admiration and the painter was soon enjoying a close relationship with Philip.
Rubens was an indefatigable worker and, despite his arduous diplomatic duties negotiating a peace treaty between Spain and England, he still managed to find time to execute a large number of paintings, notably an Equestrian Portrait of Philip IV, with a landscape showing the view out of the window of the Alcázar. It was hung as a pendant to Titian’s Equestrian Portrait of Charles V, a true vote of confidence for the Fleming. In effect, it proclaimed Rubens as the heir of Titian. There is a note of self-satisfaction in the letter Rubens wrote on 2 December to his friend Nicolas-Claude Peiresc, the French astronomer, antiquary and collector, describing the intimate relationship he enjoyed with the king: ‘[Philip IV] takes an extreme delight in painting, and in my opinion this prince is endowed with excellent qualities. I know him already by personal contact, for since I have rooms in the palace, he comes to see me almost every day’. The two men obviously got on very well. At the end of the month Rubens was writing to Jan Gevaerts, the poet, philologist and historiographer: ‘The king alone arouses my sympathy. He is endowed by nature with all the gifts of body and spirit, for in my daily intercourse with him I have learned to know him thoroughly. And he would surely be capable of governing under any conditions, were it not that he mistrusts himself and defers too much to others.’
Staying in the Alcázar, Rubens was in an ideal position to study the Titians which formed such a prized part of the royal collection, and he managed to make an astonishing number of copies (there is no record of Rubens copying the work of any other artist). According to Velázquez’s father-in-law Francesco Pacheco: ‘He copied every work by Titian owned by the king, namely the two bathing scenes [Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto], Europa, Adonis and Venus, Venus and Cupid, Adam and Eve, and others …’
Rubens attached a lot of importance to these copies and kept them in his studio until his death in 1640. He particularly admired the Rape of Europa and was reputed to have referred to it as the first painting in the world; his copy is very faithful to the original. It was bought by Philip IV for 1,450 florins from Rubens’ estate after the artist’s death in 1640, along with a number of further copies after Titian including a much-cherished self-portrait of the artist in old age.
The Italian painter and engraver Marco Boschini, who had studied under Palma Giovane, who in turn had worked in Titian’s studio, described Rubens’ passion for Titian in a poem:
Rubens was as preoccupied with Titian
As a lady has her heart with her lover
And when he spoke of Titian
The marvels he had seen made by him
He confirmed in just truth
Without passion, but with certainty
That Titian had been the ultimate in painting
And the greatest master of all
As well as copying Titian’s work, Rubens was also inspired to produce original works of his own based on Titian’s poesie. These included his Venus and Adonis where the painter has reversed the composition so that the female nude, fully visible to the spectator, appears even more alluring than in Titian’s original. Some of his most beautiful mythological paintings hung in the Alcázar, including his romantic Garden of Love, hung in the king’s bedroom. Two other favourites of the king were Rubens’ erotic Three Graces and Diana and Callisto, a subject already painted by Titian, where Rubens focuses the spectator’s attention on the disgraced nymph, who bears the features of the artist’s beautiful second wife Hélène Fourment.
Rubens was now regarded, in the words of the Spanish writer Lope de Vega, as ‘the new Titian’ and he was to play a crucial role in the rediscovery of the Venetian artist whose works were still little known in Spain outside court circles. The brilliant colours and the freedom and energy of his brushwork paid obvious homage to the Venetian and the large number of works he executed for the Spanish king made a strong impact on Spanish artists working in Madrid. Artists such as Francisco Rizi and Francisco de Herrera the Younger painted with a virtuosity that owes a clear debt to both Titian and Rubens.
Rubens himself did not stay long in Spain, leaving in April 1629 laden with gifts, including a valuable ring worth 2,000 ducats given by the king. He continued his diplomatic mission in England, where negotiations ultimately led to the successful conclusion of a peace treaty in 1630, for which Charles I knighted the painter in Inigo Jones’ Banqueting House in Whitehall, beneath the ceiling on which he had painted the Apotheosis of James I. In 1631, Isabella petitioned Philip IV on Rubens’ behalf that he should be granted a similar honour, citing the precedent set by Titian who had been knighted by Charles V, and Philip made haste to acknowledge the request. Interestingly, the petition stressed that Rubens was in a class of his own, and that ‘his services in important matters … will not have the consequence of encouraging others of his profession to seek a similar favour’.
Velázquez was a generation younger than Rubens but a mutual love for the paintings of Titian helped to draw the two artists together. As Pacheco recorded: ‘[Rubens] communicated little with painters. He only established a friendship with my son-in-law … and together they went to see the Escorial [to study the Titians].’ Velázquez, however, paid homage to Titian in a subtler and less overt manner than Rubens. Unlike the Fleming, he did not make direct copies of paintings of the Venetian master.
Rubens encouraged Velázquez to go to Italy to study the works of the great Italian masters. Within three months of the former’s departure, Velázquez had left Madrid for Italy where he was to spend 18 months. He greatly admired the works of Titian and Tintoretto in Venice, and Raphael and Michelangelo in Rome. Sadly, the self-portrait that Velázquez executed in 1630 while in Rome, ‘a famous likeness of himself’, as Pacheco described it, ‘painted in the manner of the great Titian’, has been lost. Back in Madrid Velázquez assumed the role of court painter, executing portraits of the king and members of the royal family in his studio in the Gallery of the North Wind in the Alcázar, which he had invited Rubens to share on his visit to Madrid. The two artists got on very well and it seems that Velázquez accepted the fact that, when commissioning mythological paintings, Philip preferred the internationally renowned Fleming.
In 1650, Velázquez was to visit Italy again. This time the painter went with specific instructions from the king to purchase works of art, both paintings and antique sculpture. He assured Philip that he would succeed in this, listing the Italian artists he ranked highest, with Titian top of the list. However, although Velázquez had ample opportunity to refresh his knowledge of the greatest artistic treasure-trove in Europe, his attempt to buy top quality Old Masters proved largely unsuccessful. His most notable purchases were two paintings by Veronese and numerous casts of antique statues.
On his return Philip IV appointed Velázquez to the office of Palace Marshal. This office was largely devoted to arranging court festivities and overseeing daily affairs. It shows the overwhelming importance attached to court protocol that one of the foremost artists in Europe should have devoted so much of his time to such weighty matters as opening the king’s doors and windows, making sure that Philip was correctly attired, and placing the king’s chair in the right spot when he dined in public. The job also involved Velázquez in the maintenance of the royal collection and, in the 1650s, he was put in charge of the decoration of the Alcázar. The Rape of Europa was now moved to a long, formal gallery overlooking the Garden of the Emperors, where it was hung between Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto. Lazaro Diaz del Valle, writer, genealogist and historian, and author of The Lives of Artists, a work similar in concept to that of Vasari in Italy, considered ‘that there is no Prince in all the earth who has his Alcázar adorned with such precious and admirable paintings and statues of bronze and of marble, nor such rare, showy, furnishings.’
Velázquez was an important figure at court and, to cement his status, he longed to emulate Titian and Rubens and earn a knighthood from the king. To do this he needed to overcome the in-built conservatism of the Spanish nobility who controlled the Council of Orders, the governing body that awarded honours. The nobles continued to regard the profession of a painter as that of a mere artisan, and there was considerable resistance before Velázquez was finally awarded the coveted Order of Santiago in 1659. This is the cross that the painter so proudly displays in Las Meninas, his final masterpiece.
As Palace Marshal, Velázquez had the run of the palace and was therefore one of the few with the opportunity to study the Rape of Europa and Titian’s other poesie. The morality of Counter-Reformation Spain, where the whole question of depicting the nude in art aroused considerable controversy, meant that the king would never have dared to display these paintings in public. Foreign artists may have been permitted to paint nudes, and Rubens was keen to emulate Titian in taking advantage of this, but Spanish artists were forbidden to do so and anyone suspected by the Inquisition of painting ‘obscene pictures’ could have their works seized or repainted, and the artist could suffer excommunication, a fine of 1,500 ducats and even banishment for one year.
There were, however, double standards, and some collectors ignored the ban on painting nudes and while others sought out erotic works. As one commentator recorded, figures at the court of Philip IV greatly ‘appreciated painting in general, and the nude in particular, but … at the same time, exerted unparalleled pressure on artists to avoid the depiction of the naked human body’. This discrepancy is portrayed very clearly in Lope de Vega’s play La Quinta de Florencia where an aristocrat commits rape after viewing a scantily clad figure in a mythological painting by Michelangelo (interestingly the playwright chose an Italian, not a Spanish artist).
Velázquez, too, ignored the ban and painted a number of nudes, none of which have survived with the exception of Venus at her Mirror, better known as the Rokeby Venus (after leaving Spain during the Peninsular War, it hung in Rokeby Hall in Yorkshire until 1906, when it was bought by the National Gallery, London). This beautiful painting, painted in sumptuous colours and in a wonderfully free style, shows a very obvious debt to Titian.
Velázquez paid more direct homage to Titian in his painting known as The Spinners or Arachne’s Fable, executed in 1656–8. Like Titian’s poesie, Velázquez chose a myth from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, depicting the scene where Arachne had the temerity to challenge the goddess Minerva to a spinning competition. It is one of the Sevillian painter’s most sophisticated compositions. On the surface the painting depicts a tapestry works, perhaps the Royal Factory of St Elizabeth in Madrid (Velázquez knew the Factory intimately since one of his jobs as Palace Marshal was to supply tapestries for religious feasts and public festivals). In the painting, spinners are hard at work in the foreground, while in the background Minerva, wearing a helmet and watched by three courtly ladies, appears before Arachne, who is standing in front of a tapestry depicting the Rape of Europa, a copy of the Titian.
On closer inspection the picture appears like a theatrical performance, a picture within a picture, the two main protagonists appearing twice: Arachne on the right in the foreground winding a ball of yarn (an allusion to her subsequent transformation into a spider for daring to challenge the goddess), while Minerva appears disguised as the old woman handling the distaff, before they reappear in the middle distance. The light pours in through windows on the left of the composition, brilliantly illuminating the figures in the background.
All sorts of allegorical interpretations have been put forward and it is possible that the composition represents the Art of Painting, and that the courtly ladies in the middle distance, who present such a contrast with the working spinners in the foreground, may be the Muses, with the lady standing beside the viol de gamba, propped up in the alcove, representing the Muse of Music. What is clear is that the depiction of the Rape of Europa as the subject of the tapestry in the background is a deliberate act of homage by the Spanish artist to Titian. Velázquez’s painting was highly regarded by contemporaries. The first record of the painting was in 1664 when it was owned by Don Pedro de Arce with a valuation of 500 ducats, considerably higher than that of any of the other important Spanish and Italian works in his collection.
Interestingly, Velázquez’s last great work, Las Meninas, also pays homage to the Rape of Europa, but more indirectly. The painting depicts a group of royal children, with their maids of honour (known as las meninas) who have just entered a vast room in the Alcázar, where the painter, standing at an easel, is at work. A mirror in the background shows the king and queen, who seem to be posing for the artist. On the back wall are two mythological paintings by Rubens, one of them depicting the Rape of Europa, a work that was strongly influenced by Titian’s original.
The collection formed by Philip IV was the finest in Europe. His long reign, though disastrous politically, was a golden age of Spanish arts and literature. The king studied history and geography and spoke several languages, earning himself the epithet of the Planet King, the sun that blazed at the centre of the Spanish Court. This idea was to be taken up by Philip’s son-in-law the French King Louis XIV, who was to portray himself as the Sun King. The Spanish king attended literary salons where he and his friends could indulge in a light-hearted analysis of contemporary literature and poetry. Philip also loved the theatre and attended plays by Lope de Vega, Pedro Calderon de la Barca and Tirso de Molina, who wrote the best dramatists of the age. Their humorous and cynical plays poked fun at the rigid morality of Spanish society.
But Philip made his strongest mark in the visual arts. As well as carrying out work restoring and improving the Alcázar, the king continued the tradition of his ancestors in building two new palaces, the hunting lodge Torre de la Parada and Buen Retiro, and filling these palaces with paintings he had commissioned. These were to hang alongside the great collection of Old Masters that he had inherited. Vicente Carducho noted the pre-eminence of the Venetian School: ‘There are many paintings [in the Alcázar] and the most esteemed of all were always those by Titian, in which colour achieves its force and beauty’.
When Philip IV decided to decorate Torre de la Parada in the late 1630s, he preferred to commission mythological subjects from Rubens rather than Velázquez. Like Titian before him, Rubens was treated as a court painter in absentia. For Philip IV, his work contained a pastoral lyricism close to that of Titian’s poesie. The Fleming was also a famously fast worker with a well-organized studio. During the 1630s he despatched over 100 paintings from his workshop in Antwerp to Madrid.
Velázquez’s paintings for the royal hunting lodge consisted of portraits of the royal family, antique subjects, two paintings of dwarves and one hunting scene. Few other Spanish artists were represented, giving some justice to the bitter criticism made by the painter Juseppe de Ribera, a major Spanish artist working in Naples, where he felt that he could earn more commissions than in his native land. He considered Spain ‘a loving mother to foreigners and a very cruel stepmother to her own sons’.
The king’s preference for Rubens was not shared by his chief minister Olivares. The palace of Buen Retiro, the other major royal residence to be decorated during this period, was placed under the overall control of the count-duke, who proceeded to fill the interior with Spanish paintings. To demonstrate his powerful position, Olivares placed his portrait by Velázquez beside that of the king, an unheard of liberty. The count-duke was a great admirer of Velázquez, a fellow Andalucian, and hung many of his finest works in the palace: the Surrender of Breda (Prado, Madrid), a major Spanish triumph in the Thirty Years’ War, Apollo in the Forge of Vulcan (Prado, Madrid), the Water-Carrier (Apsley House, London) and several equestrian portraits of the royal family. The Surrender of Breda hung in the central room, known as the Hall of the Realms, as part of a series of 12 scenes of great Spanish victories in the Thirty Years’ War, designed to impress all visitors with the increasingly illusory might of Spain. Many of these battle pieces were by Francisco de Zurbarán, who also executed a series of scenes from the Labours of Hercules (Prado, Madrid), the mythical hero from whom the Spanish Habsburgs (along with many other royal families) claimed descent.
Olivares wanted Buen Retiro to be a palace of the arts, with its own theatre, galleries and ballroom. Tournaments and jousts were staged in the bull ring and the gardens, adorned with fountains, alleys, hermitage chapels and artificial lakes. Works of art were brought from all over the Spanish Empire: tapestries from Lisbon, Leone Leoni’s bronze statue of Charles V from Aranjuez, and Old Masters despatched by the Spanish viceroy from Naples. There was also a gallery with 50 paintings by northern artists working in Rome, including works by Claude Lorraine, Nicholas Poussin, Jan Both and Gaspard Dughet. The finest work Rubens executed for Olivares’ palace was the Judgement of Paris. The painting of the three nude goddesses, one of them modelled on the artist’s second wife, was regarded as so erotic that it was kept behind a curtain.
Building these two royal palaces and filling them with major works of art proceeded throughout the Thirty Years’ War, despite the political and financial disasters that afflicted Spain. During the 1620s the Spanish armies scored a number of military successes, such as the capture of Breda in the Netherlands, painted by Velázquez. The tide turned when France and Sweden entered the conflict in the 1630s, their cavalry and musketeers inflicting a number of defeats on the Spanish pikemen who had previously been such a potent force on European battlefields. To finance the ruinously expensive war Castile, the heartland of Spain, was forced to endure punitively heavy taxation. Olivares’ attempts to distribute this financial burden among other Spanish provinces and in the empire overseas led to the outbreak of widespread revolts in Portugal, Catalonia, Naples and Sicily during the 1640s. These revolts led to the dismissal of the count-duke as chief minister.
Remarkably, despite these setbacks, Philip continued to buy the best paintings that came on the market. When there was a sale following Rubens’ death in 1640, the king instructed his agent to bid for major works such as the Rest on the Flight into Egypt and the Peasant Dance. A decade later Philip had an even better opportunity to make important additions to the royal collection. In England Charles I, who had formed an outstanding collection of painting following his visit to Madrid in 1623, had proved a disastrous ruler. His political and religious policies aroused increasing opposition which culminated in civil war in the 1640s, ending with Parliament’s defeat of the royalist forces and the imprisonment of the king. Late in 1648 Charles was put on trial, and on 30 January 1649 he was beheaded outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall, which had been so lavishly decorated by Rubens. Following the king’s execution, Oliver Cromwell, leader of the Commonwealth, decided to sell off Charles’ art collection.
This was a golden opportunity for Philip to add to his collection. As early as 1645 he heard that the English king’s enemies in Parliament were considering selling some works from the royal collection, and wrote to his ambassador in England, Don Alonso de Cardenas, to look out for possible acquisitions. He was, as always, particularly interested in paintings by Titian and Veronese. When Cromwell authorized the sale of Charles’ collection of works of art Philip was determined to benefit from this unique opportunity. In order not to be seen to be too obviously taking advantage of the plight of a fellow monarch, he encouraged his chief minister Don Luis de Haro, Sixth Marquis of Carpio, nephew of the disgraced Olivares, to buy masterpieces in the sale, using Cardenas as his agent. The king would then acquire them from Don Luis after they had been inspected and valued by Velázquez.
The system worked extremely well and Cardenas proved a highly effective agent, purchasing major works by Raphael, Andrea del Sarto, Durer and Philip’s favourite Venetian artists. Among the Titians the king acquired were a set of 12 paintings of the Caesars, a Rest on the Flight into Egypt and a half length Venus. In addition, the enterprising Cardenas bought two Titians that Charles had acquired in Madrid in 1623: the Allocution of the Marquis of Vasto and Lady in a Fur Wrap. Philip was particularly pleased to buy back the Portrait of Charles V with a dog, a key component of the Habsburg patrimony, which he had given to the Prince of Wales.
In a further irony the portrait was bought by Cardenas from Balthasar Gerbier, who had accompanied Charles to Spain, for £200. In an act of breath-taking hypocrisy, Gerbier, fearing that his former royalist connections would land him in trouble with the new government, now disclaimed his previous career as artistic agent for the king, railing against the money ‘squandered away on braveries and vanities; On old rotten pictures, on broken nosed Marble’. Mythological paintings by Titian continued to fetch very high prices. The French ambassador Antoine de Bordeaux-Neufville managed to acquire his Venus del Pardo, another gift to Charles from Philip IV, but was obliged to pay the enormous price of £7,000.
Philip wanted to compare his new purchases with the greatest paintings in his collection. Many of them were brought to the Sacristy of the Escorial where they were hung alongside religious works by Titian commissioned by Philip II: his Gloria, St Margaret with the Dragon, Penitent St Jerome, Martyrdom of St Lawrence, Entombment, Ecce Homo and Christ in the Vestibule. To give some idea of the extraordinary wealth of paintings by Titian in the royal collection, when the Sacristy was rehung by Velázquez in 1656 he replaced these masterpieces with an equally impressive array of paintings by the Venetian artist: St Catherine at Prayer, the Penitent Magdalen, the Tribute Money and Mater Dolorosa. No wonder Don Luis de Haro was moved to write to Cardenas, praising the ‘many magnificent works by Titian in San Lorenzo de Real’. The royal collection remained intact, an inventory of its contents at Philip’s death in 1665 listing some 2,000 paintings, including 614 ‘originals’ by Titian.
By this date there was a general, broad appreciation of the radical technique of Titian’s late works, such as the Rape of Europa, particularly among his fellow artists. Francesco Pacheco described this technique in his highly influential Art of Painting: ‘It is commonplace, when a painting is not finished, to call it “smudges of Titian”’. Friar Hortensio, a leading theologian at court, who often preached before the king, was also astonished at his seemingly miraculous ability to create a realistic image with such broad brushstrokes: ‘a Titian painting is no more than a collection of warring smudges, a dash of shadowy red glows, but seen in the light in which it was painted, it is an admirable and spirited mass of colour, a lively painting that, beheld by the eyes, lays doubt to the truth.’
The pleasure that Philip IV took from his art collection provided some consolation for the personal and political calamities that afflicted his old age. The death of Queen Isabella in 1644 was followed by that of his son and heir Balthasar Carlos, and his son Philip by his second marriage to his niece Mariana of Austria (this marriage was one of a considerable number of intermarriages between the Spanish and Austrian branches of the Habsburg family). But he continued to sit for his court painter, and Velázquez’s portraits of the king in old age, his sad, mournful face gazing out at the spectator, are some of the artist’s finest works.
Philip’s personal tragedies coincided with political disaster. At the Treaty of Munster in 1648 Holland ended 80 years of warfare with Spain, and finally gained its independence. Eleven years later Spain made peace with France at the Treaty of the Pyrenees, making a number of important territorial concessions in Flanders and Catalonia. After the treaty was signed, Cardinal Mazarin, the chief negotiator, gave his Spanish counterpart, Don Luis de Haro, a highly esteemed painting by Titian.
Owing to the death of his two elder sons, Philip was succeeded by his third son, Charles II, at the tender age of four. The young king suffered from extensive physical, intellectual and emotional disabilities. He had only just learned to speak, and even then his tongue was so large that his speech was all but unintelligible. This also meant that he was unable to chew and he frequently drooled uncontrollably. It was to be four more years before he could walk and his health was so frail that he did not attend school. Charles’ disabilities were widely attributed to his inbreeding; for generations the Spanish and Austrian branches of the Habsburgs had been inter-marrying so that all eight of Charles’ grandparents were descendants of Joanna and Philip I of Castile. Moreover, his mother was niece of his father.
The severely handicapped young king inherited a country that was bankrupt, plague and famine were widespread in the countryside, and the government’s hold on the still extensive Spanish Empire was under grave threat. Portugal had regained its independence in 1668, with the consequent loss of an overseas empire encompassing Brazil, the East Indies and parts of India. During Charles’ infancy, his mother acted as regent, relying on a series of favourites whose chief merit was that they enjoyed the queen’s fancy. With the country in severe decline, people looked for scapegoats to blame for the nation’s ills. The king himself was widely thought to be afflicted by sorcery, which had caused his disabilities, a theory to which Charles himself subscribed. The Spanish Inquisition engaged in widespread persecution of unbelievers and carried out a number of autos-da-fe, with victims garrotted or burnt at the stake.
However, despite the desperate state of the nation, the arts continued to flourish. Visitors were amazed by the splendour of the works displayed in the royal palaces. A Frenchman visiting the palace of Buen Retiro in Madrid in 1667 recorded the extraordinary legacy of Philip IV:
In the palace we were surprised by the quantity of pictures. I do not know how it is adorned in other seasons, but when we were there we saw more pictures than walls. The galleries and staircases were full of them, as well as the bedrooms and salons. I can assure you, Sir, that there were more than in all of Paris. I was not at all surprised when they told me that the principal quality of the deceased king was his love of painting, and that no one in the world understood more about it than he.
Although there was no longer a painter of the stature of Velázquez, artists such as Alonso Sanchez de Coello, Juan Carreno de Miranda, Francisco Rizi and Francisco Herrera the Younger proved worthy successors, painting in a dramatic, Baroque style that was so popular throughout Catholic Europe. They studied works in the royal collection, but it was now Rubens, rather than Titian, who provided the strongest influence. Antonio Palomino, appointed court painter in 1688, was to write a three-volume Account of the lives and works of the most eminent Spanish Painters, Sculptors and Architects, published in 1715–24, in which he included Titian, Rubens and the Neapolitan Luca Giordano, the three foreign artists he perceived to be most influential on Spanish painting, despite the fact that the Venetian had never set foot in Spain.
The king loved art, perhaps seeking solace from his grave afflictions. At the end of his reign, he turned to Italy, as his great-grandfather Philip II had done before him. Charles succeeded, where his father had failed, in persuading Luca Giordano, a brilliant master of fresco and nichnamed ‘fa presto’ for the speed with which he worked, to come to Madrid, where he painted a number of stupendous frescoes glorifying the Habsburg dynasty. It brought to an end the golden age of Spanish painting, just as the dynasty itself was about to die out.
Charles II died in 1700, the last of the Spanish Habsburgs. European heads of state had watched with fascination for several years the gradual demise of the invalid king. By the time of his death Charles was speechless and stone deaf, suffering from constant fits of dizziness and nausea. He was subjected to the most dreadful treatments, ranging from conventional methods such as bleeding and applying leeches, to more outlandish ones: freshly killed pigeons were placed on his head and the steaming entrails of slaughtered animals on his stomach. Eventually his doctors despaired of saving the unfortunate monarch and the last Spanish Habsburg finally expired in the Alcázar in Madrid on 1 November 1700. His coroner pronounced that his body ‘contained not a single drop of blood, his heart looked like the size of a grain of pepper, his lungs were corroded, his intestines were putrid and gangrenous, he had a single testicle which was as black as carbon and his head was full of water’. In this gruesome way the Habsburg dynasty, that had brought such glory to Spain, came to an ignominious end.
The pitiable death of Charles II seemed symbolic of the demise of Spain as a great power. While England, Holland and France had utilized their economic, financial and military resources, and had seen major developments in science and philosophy, the reign of Charles II had been a time of political and intellectual stagnation. Olivares’ attempt to reform Spain’s administration by the creation of a uniform taxation among the various provinces had been thwarted by Spain’s military defeat and economic collapse. His less capable successors were content to preside over an inward-looking country whose dominant characteristics appeared to be superstition, idleness and ignorance.
Across the Pyrenees, the increasingly powerful and aggressive France under her ambitious King Louis XIV determined to take full advantage of this apathy. He had launched a series of invasions of the Spanish Netherlands which Spain was ill-equipped to prevent. By 1700, Louis’s success meant that France had replaced Spain as the dominant nation in Europe. The Rape of Europa, which had travelled from Venice to Spain, following the rising fortunes of the Habsburg monarchy, was about to move to a resurgent France, where it was to be housed in one of the most splendid palaces in the kingdom.