New Madrid museum showcases five centuries of Spain’s royal treasures

A new museum packed with hundreds of treasures collected by Spain’s monarchs over the past five centuries opened in Madrid in June.

Located just across from the Royal Palace, the Royal Collections Gallery, which opened on June 29, showcasing paintings, tapestries, furniture and elaborately decorated carriages. Most of the 650 works that is on display have not previously been accessible to the public or were sitting in quiet corners of historic sites across Spain.

“There are works that come from palaces or monasteries and here we promote another way of looking at them,” the museum’s director Leticia Ruiz Gomez said.

Among the highlights is a painting by one of Spain’s most emblematic historical masters, Diego Velazquez, depicting a horse rearing up without a rider.

 People photograph the remains of the old royal fortress of Madrid during an open visit by the media to the Royal Collections Gallery. 

“White Horse” was last shown to the public in 2015 during a temporary exhibition in Paris. The rest of the time “it sat in a corner of a room in the Royal Palace,” said Ruiz Gomez. Nearby is a massive 16th-century tapestry once owned by Spain’s Queen Isabella which the culture ministry bought in February for one million euros ($1.1 million).

Another standout item is the very first edition of Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes’ “Don Quixote”, one of history’s greatest literary works. The collection also includes paintings by Italian masters Caravaggio and Jacopo Tintoretto, as well as Spain’s Francisco de Goya whose works reflect the country’s historical upheavals.

In addition, visitors will be able to see a multicolour wood sculpture by Spain’s first female court sculptor, Luisa Roldan, which depicts Saint Michael slaying the Devil. The goal is to “show the diversity, richness and quality of what Spanish monarchs have collected over five centuries,” said Ana de la Cueva, head of Spain’s state heritage agency, Patrimonio Nacional. The idea to set up a museum to display Spain’s royal collections first emerged nearly a century ago but it was interrupted by the 1936-39 civil war.

  Two portraits painted by Francisco de Goya in 1799 depicting King Carlos IV of Spain (right) and his wife Queen Maria Luisa of Parma are exhibited. 

The new museum joins a prestigious lineup of other world-famous galleries in Madrid such as the Prado museum and the Reina Sofia, home to Pablo Picasso’s historic Guernica painting. To maintain the public’s interest, the Royal Collections Gallery plans to replace a third of its works with new items roughly every 18 months. “The idea is to show all the national heritage we have, so we can bring restored works to be exhibited. Then they can go back to their original places,” said De la Cueva. The modern building which houses the collection has won several architectural awards and is likely to add to the museum’s appeal. Built down the side of a steep hillside, the scale of the seven-storey museum is not immediately evident from street level, with the main entrance located on the top floor. As visitors descend to the lower galleries, there are impressive views onto the parklands of western Madrid.

At the entrance to one of its main rooms are four gigantic columns with gilded vines, the huge windows flooding the room with natural light. De la Cueva said the combination of seeing historical art in a modernist setting “is spectacular”. “I think the opportunity of having the most modern building with the most ancient collections is a privilege,” she added.

Built on the steep hillside opposite the Madrid’s Royal palace and the Almudena Cathedral, the Gallery building itself is an impressive work of art. Designed by Luis Mansilla and Emilio Tuñón, its unimposing vertical linear structure has won 10 architectural awards, including the 2017 American Architecture Prize. Unseen from street level, it descends seven floors. In the Hapsburg rooms you are greeted by four gigantic baroque Solomonic faux marble wooden columns with gilded vines that once belonged to a Madrid church. Madrid was originally called Mayrit in Arabic and its Islamic rulers built a fortress to protect the nearby center of power, Toledo. Following the reconquest of Spain by the Catholic monarchs, Madrid was converted into Spain’s royal court and capital in 1561 by Felipe II. Álvaro Soler Del Campo, archaeologist and Chief Curator of the Royal Armory, says Madrid “is the only current capital of the European Union that preserves a fragment of its first (founding) walls” as well as being the only European capital city that has Islamic origins.

The initial idea of building a museum to house the Crown’s collections arose during Spain’s anti-monarchy Second Republic between 1931 and 1939. The leftist government seized the royal properties but protected them under a new agency that preceded the Patrimonio Nacional. The republic was flattened during a rebellion by late dictator Gen. Francisco Franco and other Catholic Nationalist officers that started the three-year Spanish Civil War and heralded in some four decades of dictatorship at its end in 1939. Two decades after Franco’s death and the return to democracy, the initiative for a museum was taken up again in 1998. But it took another 25 years, 172 million euros ($186 million) and several government changes before the ambitious project could be finished.  Ruiz says the novelty of seeing such artistic beauty in such a modernist building will appeal to visitors. “What we want to do is capture them as soon as they enter, and I think we are going to do that,” she said. King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia inaugurated the Gallery.

Agencies