A new look at the baroque painting of the Prado through Calderón

2023-05-09 16:57:36

The dramatist Pedro Calderon de la Barca, who also worked as a set designer, was a great lover of art, and in particular the art of Velázquez. In addition to cultivating this taste as a collector, at the end of his career he theorized about this form of artistic expression in a tax lawsuit between the Madrid attorney general and the city’s painters, who asked Calderón to testify on their behalf for the inclination that the writer had always had towards pictorial creation. Few authors knew how to imbricate beauty and thought so closely as Calderón. Several of his works show painters in action, such as ‘The painter of his dishonor’ or ‘Give it all and give nothing’, which portrays the relationship between Philip IV and Velázquez through the characters of Alexander the Great and the great painter Apelles.

Room 12 of the Prado. ‘Calderón and painting’

Prado Museum

The Museo del Prado proposes to rediscover its collection of baroque painting through the texts of Calderón de la Barca. Organized jointly by the Prado and the Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico, the itinerary ‘Calderón and painting’ aims to invite the public to contemplate the baroque painting of the permanent collection through Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-1681). The itinerary, created by Albert Arribas and Xavier Albertí, covers 17 rooms on the first floor of the Villanueva building in which they exhibit essential works of the Baroque such as ‘Las Meninas’ by Velazquez‘Achilles discovered by Ulysses and Diomedes’ by Rubens, ‘Hercules fights against the hydra of Lerna’ by Zurbarán, ‘Isaac and Jacob’ by Ribera or ‘Saint Jerome’ by Francisco de Herrera the Elder.

Conceived as an intervention in different rooms on the first floor of the Villanueva building, the itinerary consists of three exhibition levels that complement each other: a selection of Calderonian quotes, hung on the walls, proposes a suggestive dialogue between the lucidity of the writer and the language of the baroque painters; a series of paintings, commented on in relation to the Calderonian theater, allow us to go through some of the most significant concerns for the writer and his time, both thematic and formal; and several texts contextualize the author’s thought in relation to painting.

In the context of the itinerary, they have recorded six audiovisual piecesstarring Lluís Homar and Beatriz Argüello among other interpreters, in which Calderón’s texts interact with a selection of paintings to appreciate thematic similarities and even pictorial influences. These pieces are projected daily, with a total duration of 30 minutes, in the conference room of the Jerónimos building until September 10.

In them, Beatriz Argüello plays Medea in ‘The Three Greatest Wonders’ together with ‘Judit at Holofernes’ Banquet’ by Rembrandt; Rafa Castejón plays Ludovico in ‘El purgatorio de san Patricio’ together with ‘El jardín de las delicias’ by Bosch; Lluís Homar plays Fernando in ‘The Constant Prince’ together with Velázquez’s ‘San Antonio Abad y san Pablo, primer hermitaño’; Natalia Huarte plays Semiramis in ‘La hija del aire’ together with ‘Combate de mujeres’ by Ribera; Arturo Querejeta plays Aristobolus in ‘The World’s Greatest Monster’ together with Tintoretto’s ‘El rapto de Helena’; e, Isabel Rodes plays Circe in ‘The greatest charm, love’ together with ‘Rapto de Europa’ by Rubens.