It has been 25 years since Francisco Álvarez-Cascos announced the current project, which at that time amounted to 60 million euros, although it cost 172 million. And almost 90 years have passed since Manuel Azaña conceived the idea of ??a museum of tapestries and carriages to show to the public the collections accumulated by the monarchy. But after many doubts, endless delays and changes in the exhibition project -the impressive 40,000 square meters of the new institution have been built and empty since 2015-, the Royal Collections Gallery has finally presented its treasures.
There will be three days of open doors on July 5, 6 and 7 in which you can see the 650 works chosen to tour the Habsburg and Bourbon monarchies through an avalanche of paintings, rich tapestries, sculptures as fascinating as El Archangel San Miguel defeating the demon of La Roldana, furniture, watches, crockery, armor, books, carriages and musical instruments. Paid visits begin on the 8th, but from Monday to Thursday from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. it will be free to access.
“We have the vocation of being a key point of culture and tourism in Madrid, Spain and Europe. It has been a difficult and complex road to get here, but the Galleries of the Royal Collections are going to mean one more night of overnight stay for tourists in Madrid, it will have a great economic impact”, stressed the president of National Heritage, Ana de la Cueva, at the presentation of this enormous building in Tuñón and Mansilla next to the Royal Palace, a peculiar Escorial of art in the that the rationalist and sober lines of the galleries contrast with the scrolls and friezes of the baroque or rococo that take the rooms.
Caravaggio with his unappealable Salome with the head of the Baptist. Velázquez and the powerful white horse on two legs that he had already painted in his studio for when the monarchs commissioned another equestrian portrait. Patinir and the allegorical Landscape of him with San Cristóbal and the child. The portraits of Carlos IV and María Luisa de Parma and a ghostly and fabulous Saint Isabel by Goya. Titian, El Greco, Mengs, Pantoja de la Cruz… The list of painters is long, especially in the Bourbon gallery, which opens a new era after the disappearance of the Habsburgs with the luminous and monumental portraits of Felipe V and Isabel de Farnese by Van Loo.
With the Habsburgs, it is the allegorical tapestries of their grandiosity and their religiosity that prevail, from Noah’s ark to Atlas, Scipio and Hannibal or the magazine of the troops in Barcelona of Carlos V in 1535 for his campaign in the north of Africa against the privateer Barbarossa and Sultan Suleiman. Precisely two tapestries on the virtues of monarchs open and close the 4,000 square meters of the two main floors: the visit begins with a Flemish tapestry from 1515, La Gracia publishes the Honors, and symbolically dismisses the tour on the ground floor with the Allegory of Peace made by Guillermo Pérez Villalta for the 25th anniversary of the Constitution of 1978.
A tour that ends in Alfonso XIII -although strictly speaking the collections end when Elizabeth II goes into exile and the assets are nationalized- and that is complemented with videos about the Republic, Civil War, dictatorship and entry into democracy, where the Family appears Actual current.
The Mühlberg armor of Charles V, the tapestry of Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights, the enormous and prodigious four Solomonic columns by Francisco de Herrera el Mozo and José Simón de Churriguera for the now-defunct church of the Royal Board of the Virgen de Montserrat Hospital , each of them assembled with eight pine trunks from the Valsaín forests, the sculpture of La Roldana, in which the devil at the feet of the angel looks like the advertisement for a current nightclub despite being from 1692, beautiful chinoiseries that show the taste for the oriental that appeared in the mid-18th century, children’s armor, the spectacular Fuente del Águila, rich books such as the General History of the Things of New Spain by the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún, a veritable illustrated encyclopedia on Mexican culture that found the Spanish…
A chronological exhibition in which religion, politics, conquests and even peace slip into a story in which history never stops, nor does culture: it goes from tapestry to painting and finally to photography. Due to the elections the official opening of this project has been postponed until July 25.
The architect Emilio Tuñón -his partner Luis Moreno Mansilla, with whom he created the building, passed away in 2012 and he says that “I see him in every corner”- and whose first drawings of the project in 1999 are included in the tour, has ensured that with this “inhabited retaining wall” that are the many floors of the Gallery -there are 20,000 square meters of warehouse- the cornice that presides over the Royal Palace and the Almudena Cathedral is completed and the origin of Madrid is closed: there It was, he recalled, the citadel that Mohamed I ordered to be built to defend Toledo, and whose remains have appeared – and are now on display – during the works.
