Paintings for the Planet King: The Decoration of the Buen Retiro Palace

Cloth, jacketed, 300 x 240 mm portrait, 200 colour illustrations, 304 pages
PRICE: £60.00
ISBN: 9781903470435

Edited by Andres Úbeda de los Cobos, with contributions from José Álvarez Lopera, Jonathan Brown, Giovanna Capitelli, John Elliott and others

Philip  IV of Spain (ruled 1621-1665) was known as the 'Planet King', shining brightly in the universe of the arts even if the Golden Age of Spanish painting coincided with imperial decline. The Buen Retiro Palace surpassed any palace ever built in Europe for the collection of paintings it contained, most of them commissioned in the 1630s from the finest painters in Europe at the time - Velázquez and Zurbarán, Rubens, Claude, Poussin, Jan Both, Herman van Swaneveld, Domenichino, Lanfranco and others.

This magnificent catalogue contains a mouthwatering display of paintings by these masters, and studies in particular the Battle Paintings and Hercules series of the throne room  (Hall of Realms), the Landscape Gallery, and the hitherto virtually unknown History of Rome cycle. Many of these works are already very famous (e.g. Velazquez's Surrender at Breda), but are seen now  in their original context, while others have remained unidentified until now in the Prado's storerooms.

Accompanies the landmark exhibition at the Prado, Madrid, July-November 2005.

Jonathan Brown and John Elliott are well known for their landmark publication on the Buen Retiro Palace in Madrid. In this catalogue accompanying a major exhibition at the Prado Museum in the summer of 2005, they summarize and add details to their earlier research. The other authors break new ground in their further exploration of the extraordinary collection of masterpieces, old and new, for the Buen Retiro - Giovanna Capitelli writing on the landscapes by Claude, Poussin, Lemaire and others, Álvarez Lopera on a new reconstruction of the Hall of Realms, Úbeda de los Cobos on the rediscovered History of Rome cycle.