MADRID, SPAIN.- The Royal Palaces present today “Baroque Courts: From Bernini and Velázquez to Luca Giordano,” on view through January 11, 2004. In the second half of the seventeenth century great masters and patrons ushered in a period of intense artistic activity that revolved around the courtly social, political and cultural environment. The exhibition Baroque Courts. From Bernini and Velázquez to Luca Giordano brings artists and promoters, the essential players in the process of artistic creation, face to face for the first time in order to explore their common ideology and shared tastes, and to seek explanations for the type of art they produced and their different sensibilities. The subtitle of the exhibition refers to the specific names who shaped the chronological and aesthetic framework of this particular conception of art. Velázquez is thus the starting point and an essential reference when addressing the aesthetics and tastes of the Spanish court in the mid-seventeenth century, while the Neapolitan artist Luca Giordano is the last exponent of a long line of artists who flourished in the environment of the Habsburg monarchs and interpreted traditional ideas and forms from an innovative formal approach that, in turn, paved the way for the espousal of French taste with the arrival in Spain of Philip V and resulting dynastic change. Gian Lorenzo Bernini exemplifies the diffusion of the taste developed at the papal court of Rome, the capital of Catholicism and centre of all artistic production during this period of history. The exhibition was curated by Fernando Checa, Professor of Art History, Universidad Complutense de Madrid and coordinated by Concha Iglesias.

The exhibition Baroque Courts. From Bernini and Velázquez to Luca Giordano aims to embrace all the art-historical aspects of the courtly world. The Royal Palace in Madrid is showing a set of outstanding works of art, many unfamiliar to the public, other universally known. These works range from the portraits of the women who were Philip IV’s companions during the last years of his life—Mariana, Maria Teresa and Margarita of Austria—painted by Velázquez, to a number of works by Bernini that are almost an exhibition in themselves, including Christ on the Cross and a Drawing for the equestrian portrait of Louis XIV. The same could be said of the works on show in the rooms that illustrate the significance of the patronage of Christina of Sweden or the three rooms that offer a comparison of artistic life at the related courts of Madrid, Vienna and Paris.

The Royal Palace of Aranjuez is hosting one of the most characteristic sections of the exhibition that centres on some of the essential debates of the formal language of the Baroque and on the basic aspects of palace decoration. The works on show here were designed to decorate the palaces and gardens, such as Algardi’s three pieces for the Fountains of Neptune and the large canvases painted by Luca Giordano for the apartments of Charles II, such as Orpheus Playing to the Animals. A special section focuses on the attitudes of the artists of the period to theoretic debates such as ancients versus moderns, which is illustrated by works as outstanding as the Nozze Aldobrandini. This section also addresses the importance institutions such as the academies attained during this period and artists’ conscious use of rhetoric devices such as allegory, as illustrated by Fra Pozzo’s sketches for his famous illusionistic ceiling frescoes in the Roman church of S. Ignazio.