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| Pietro Facchetti, after Raphael Saturn with Sagittarius late 16th century Prado |
Jonathan Brown and J.H. Elliott continue their story of Buen Retiro Palace on the outskirts of Madrid, built from the ground up for Philip IV during the 1630s. Yesterday we looked at paintings for the Retiro from the hands of Spanish artists employed by the Court. Today we look at "Spanish" pictures acquired outside the court, including paintings by Spanish artists and paintings by artists from other countries in the possession of Spanish collectors.
Brown and Elliott estimate that in the course of his forty-three year reign, Philip IV added more than two thousand pictures to the Spanish royal collections. For the Buen Retiro alone, their figure is around eight hundred paintings acquired over the course of only eight years. The public part of the palace, they point out, featured fourteen galleries, in addition to numerous suites of smaller rooms in the living quarters. And the taste of the times decreed that walls should be solidly filled with framed paintings.
"The first line of attack was to appropriate paintings from the one or two palaces which the king seldom if ever visited. The prime candidate was the palace at Valladolid, which had been decorated between 1601 and 1606, when the court was resident there, and had since fallen out of use." Facchetti's Saturn with Sagittarius (above) came from Valladolid, one of seven Facchetti canvases representing the planets and brought to Spain by Rubens in 1603 as a present to Philip III from the Duke of Mantua.
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| Luca Cambiaso Death of Lucretia late 16th century Prado |
The Marchioness of Charela, grandmother of one of the king's bastard children, was recorded among the many Madrid aristocrats who sold batches of pictures to Philip, including these grim episodes by Cambiaso and Ribera from the classical past.
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| Jusepe de Ribera Ixion 1632 Prado |
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| Jusepe de Ribera Tityus 1632 Prado |
Many other Spanish transfers and purchases were vaguely documented, grouped in batch-lots with only sketchy attributions. Their identification with specific Retiro pictures is still conjectural.
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| Bassano Workshop Family of Noah after the Flood late 16th century Prado |
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| Artemisia Gentileschi Birth of St. John the Baptist 1635 Prado |
It i s thought that the canvases below representing six of the twelve months of the year (from a series dating back to the 1580s) were also among the pictures obtained for the Retiro by royal transfer. Philip IV refused to allow transfers from any of the important, regularly-visited palaces.
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| Francesco Bassano April 1580s Prado |
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| Francesco Bassano May 1580s Prado |
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| Francesco Bassano June 1580s Prado |
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| Francesco Bassano September 1580s Prado |
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| Francesco Bassano October 1580s Prado |
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| Francesco Bassano December 1580s Prado |