Madrid,
Three years ago the Prado Museum launched the initiative The Prado in feminine: annual itineraries aimed at offering alternative visions of their collections, featuring women who promoted, collected and inspired part of the works in their collections.
Since 2022, and with the scientific direction of Noelia García Pérez, professor of Art History at the University of Murcia, the project has achieved notable success and received recognition from both feminist institutions and art historians; as Miguel Falomir has emphasized today, for its content and its form. It has also garnered replicas in other art centers.
After chapters dedicated to patrons between the 15th and 17th centuries and the Baroque period, this third edition of The Prado in feminine It focuses on Isabel de Farnesio, whose figure was more than decisive in the formation of the art gallery’s collections: she acquired or commissioned nearly five hundred of the pieces that can be seen today in approximately half of its rooms.
From 1714, when she married Philip V (recently widowed), to 1766, the year of her death, she carried out active patronage work, with a considerable degree of freedom and sustained largely by her own economy, by the so-called queen pocket. His tastes were very defined, and also synonymous with quality: among his favorites were Murillo (since royal lustrum in Seville), Velázquez, Rubens, Van Dyck or David Teniers the Younger, but he also made the final decision to acquire the classical sculptures that belonged to Christina of Sweden, today on the 2nd floor of the Villanueva building, and ensured that their packaging and transportation were appropriate.
García Pérez has recognized the difficulty of selecting the forty-five pieces that are part of the route among those half a thousand possibilities. Their representativeness has been sought and they are articulated in three sections, the first relating to the construction of the image of the queen, in our country called the parmigiana because of its origin. Given the fragile health of Philip V, he assumed government tasks on several occasions and his power was iconographically underlined; The uses and functions linked to their portraits by Jean Ranc and Van Loo can be completed with the study of those of the consorts of their children and stepchildren: Luisa Isabel of Orleans, Barbara of Braganza and María Amalia of Saxony.
A second section reviews his collection of paintings: he accumulated more than a thousand – a third today in the Prado. Around half of them are due to Flemish painters (Rubens, Teniers the Younger, Brueghel) and they also served Italians (Correggio, Veroneses, Parmigianino, Guido Reni) and Spaniards (the aforementioned Murillo, Velázquez, Ribera and Carreño de Miranda or Claudio Coello). The presence of French and German painters was minor in its funds. And the third corresponds to what García Pérez understands as the most eloquent pieces with respect to his criteria and his way of collecting, the aforementioned most sought-after sculptural group of the moment: those compositions that had seduced Cristina of Sweden, from the Roman workshop or from the School of Pasiteles, which we can admire between rooms 71 and 74 and in the Room of the Muses.
From them the queen wanted to prepare what would be the first illustrated catalog in a royal collection, a task that was entrusted to the Sicilian abbot Ajello e Liscari. However, Isabel de Farnesio was not satisfied with the result and decided not to publish it: aware of the importance of her collections, she was also aware that not displaying them adequately could be a demerit (for those works and for her own fame). That catalog is not preserved, but a set of fifty-nine preparatory drawings is, also in the Prado.
If the pieces that belonged to Philip V were marked with a Burgundy cross, those of his wife incorporated a fleur-de-lys, and the same sign has now been added to the cartouches of the works that belonged to the queen, whether or not included in this tour. Recently arrived in Spain, the sketch of The education of the Virgin by Murillo that was stolen from the Museum in 1897 and has recently been found in Pau; For the moment, it has been temporarily transferred for a decade in the absence of approval in France of legal formulas that channel its possible restitution.
In reviewing these compositions with the seal of Farnese interest, it is worth stopping at the rich scenic apparatus of the family portraits of the kings and their children by Ranc and Van Loo; in the blue ribbons, alluding to the Bourbons, and the miniatures with the faces of their husbands that some of the consorts of Philip V’s children wear; in the conjunction in Murillo of theology and tenderness – an Immaculate Conception, a Ecce Homo and a Sorrowful one; or in the very different graceful elegance of Watteau in Wedding capitulations and country dance.
Also part of this route is Saint John the Baptist by Solimena, vigorous and immersed in an expressive chiaroscuro; the Sibyl by Velázquez (thanks to the queen’s inventory we know that it is his wife, Juana Pacheco); the apostolate of Rubens (he commissioned copies of some compositions by this author, which were not devalued at the time); or the Jacob’s Dream by Ribera, purchased at the time as a work by Murillo.
It was also done with the recently restored San Sebastian by Guido Reni, with still lifes by Clara Peeters (a sign of his recognition); the pious Santa Barbara of Parmigianino or The triumph of death and The snowy landscape with skaters and bird trap of Brueghel, the first terrifying and only apparently harmonious the second.
As for the sculptures that belonged to Christina of Sweden, she had the support of numerous intermediaries (cardinals, artists, nobles) and the encouragement of the education she had received in her childhood and the desire to raise the horizons of the Spanish royal collection.
