11 - The King, the Palace, and the Cabinet: Knowledge on Display

Summary

it may be said that in your state, nay, in your most blessed house the arts were born anew, and that through the generosity of your ancestors the world has recovered these most beautiful arts, through which it has been ennobled and embellished.

Giorgio Vasari

Collecting artistic objects was a widespread phenomenon in Renaissance and Baroque Europe. Princes and patricians competed for the rarest and finest artefacts while transforming their private residences into social hubs for artists and men of letters. This chapter examines the phenomenon of collecting in seventeenth-century Spain, in private art collections and cabinets of curiosities. It will focus on two leading protagonists of this collecting culture, who both assembled collections containing a remarkable number of paintings, artefacts and rarities: King Philip IV (1605–1665) and the Aragonese erudite Don Vincencio Juan de Lastanosa (1607–1681). I shall explore two examples of the different ways of collecting objects: on the one hand, the royal art collection in the Palacio del Buen Retiro, and on the other, Lastanosa's cabinet of curiosity – widely regarded as one of Spain's wonders during Philip IV's reign. Both palace and cabinet collections represented spaces where knowledge, leisure, and entertainment designed for an élite audience were closely intertwined. However, although art and patronage became expressions of political agendas involving the exhibition of power, prestige, and control through cultural production, the reasons for this frenzy of collecting remain open for debate. I shall suggest a psychological analysis of collecting behaviours that privileges curiosity (curiositas) rather than melancholy. I emphasise the contribution of active intellectual engagement with collecting practices and I contrast this with an alternative representation of collecting seen as an aristocratic response to boredom, melancholy, and other disaffections of the mind.

Philip IV: The Making of a King

Philip III died suddenly in March 1621, at the age of 42, after a short illness, leaving to his sixteen-year-old son Philip IV the responsibility for overseeing a vast and turbulent empire. Apparently, the young Philip displayed all the qualities needed to become a great king. He had a calm temperament that allowed him to listen to his advisors as well as a level of self-awareness that pushed him to better his education in the hope of developing his full potential as monarch of one of the most powerful nations in the whole world.