The Spanish Royal Tapestries

by Albert Frederick Calvert

Goya achieved an immediate success. Time after time his cartoons were reproduced by the Spanish weavers. The King, pleased at the distinction with which the artist invested his Court, spent enormous sums upon tapestries, and encouraged his household to do the same. In the four years from 1776 to 1780 the sum of 817,956 reales was expended at the Court on the purchase of tapestries and cartoons. Other well-known artists contributed cartoons to the Madrid workshops, among whom we find the names of Van Loo, Conrado, Giaquinto, Mengs, Jose de Castillo, Antonio Gonzalez, Mariano Nani, Andres Gines, Antonio Barbaza, and Jose de Salas.

The French invasion caused the closing down of the workshops of Santa Barbara in 1808. Some years later they were reopened by the son of St. Ferdinand’s weaver, and once again beautiful fabrics were woven from the designs of Goya. The death of Ferdinand VII in 1833 gave a severe blow to the industry, but there are still looms in Santa Barbara where exquisite tapestries are executed under the direction of a descendant of Jacques Van der Goten.

CHAPTER II
THE FOUNDATION OF THE SPANISH ROYAL COLLECTION

IN order to understand how the finest collection of Renaissance tapestries in the world came to be in the royal palace at Madrid, it is necessary to know something of the complicated history of the Netherlands during the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the Flemish tapestry weaving industry was at the height of its reputation.

During the earlier decades of the fifteenth century the Dukes of Burgundy were employed in the consolidation of their power by the acquisition of province after province in the Low Countries. By 1443 these territories included, in addition to the French duchy of Burgundy, Flanders, Artois, Namur, Holland, Zeeland, Friesland, Brabant, Limbourg, and the duchy of Luxembourg, and Burgundy had to be reckoned with as a great European power. The Court of Philip the Good was, indeed, the most luxurious in Europe, enriched with the finest paintings, the rarest books, and the most beautiful tapestries. Charles the Bold added Liége and Gelderland to the territories inherited from his father. On his death in 1477, Burgundy, Franche Comté, and Artois reverted to France. The rest of Charles’s dominions passed to his daughter Mary, who married Maximilian of Austria. On Maximilian’s election as Emperor, he made his son, Philip the Handsome, ruler of the Netherlands. The marriage of Philip with Joanna of Aragon secured to their son Charles the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile. On Charles’s election as Emperor in 1519, in succession to his grandfather Maximilian, he united the sovereignties of Spain and of the Netherlands.

Margaret of Austria had already been appointed by Maximilian as ruler of the Netherlands. In this position the new Emperor left her, showing therein great wisdom, as Margaret proved a popular ruler. On her death he appointed his widowed sister, Mary of Hungary, as her successor. Under the beneficent rule of these two Burgundian ladies, the industry of tapestry weaving flourished and reached its height. The Netherlands enjoyed a long term of peace and prosperity. Both Margaret of Austria and Mary of Hungary were enthusiastic patrons of the art, and many well-known series of tapestries were woven at their command. These pieces passed, almost without exception, into the hands of Charles V and Philip II on the death of their original owners. During the long and bitter struggle against the Catholic Philip, the industry, as was inevitable, languished and never again recovered its ancient vigour.

It has been asserted that the Spanish kings used their power in the Netherlands to extort from the weavers the finest products of their looms by blackmail, or even torture. There seems to be little foundation, if any, for this charge. With one exception, where the origin of the tapestries is known, they were acquired by inheritance or purchase, or were made, as in the case of the Conquest of Tunis, directly to the royal command.

Besides the tapestries dealt with in the following pages the Spanish royal collection contains an even greater number of pieces of less importance and artistic value, disposed upon the walls of the palace. These also are almost entirely of Flemish origin, except those which were the product, at a later date, of the Spanish looms established by the much persecuted Van der Goten. A large number of the tapestries here described were shown at the Paris Exhibition of 1900, when, for the first time, the world became aware of the artistic wealth so long hidden in the Royal Palace of Madrid.

The accumulated treasures of the Spanish Court had remained for many years neglected and uncatalogued, their history and origin uncertain or unknown. It was King Alfonso XII who first conceived the idea of arranging the royal tapestries, studying their history, discovering, where possible, their designers and makers, and classifying them into groups and series, and making photographs of the whole collection. This work was subsequently completed by the late Queen Isabella of Spain.

In 1903 an excellent series of photographic plates representing the finest of the tapestries was published in book form, accompanied by critical and historical notes from one of the finest art critics of Spain—the Count Valencia de Don Juan. It is to this learned and discerning writer that I am most indebted for the explanatory notes which accompany the reproductions included in this volume. The tapestries are, as far as possible, treated in groups connected by similarity of subject except where several pieces form a continuous series.