Descalzas Reales
It was founded in 1559 by Joanna of Austria — Juana de Austria, daughter of Charles V, sister of Philip II, and for a time regent of Spain — in the palace where she had been born. Older accounts call her simply the daughter of Charles V and leave her unnamed, which undersells a woman who governed the country in her brother's absence and then founded this house to retire into.
The nuns are Poor Clares, of the Franciscan family, and the convent has been enclosed and working for more than four and a half centuries. The "barefoot" of the name is descalzas, the discalced reform.
The collection exists because of how entry worked. Noblewomen taking the veil here brought a dowry, and for a house founded by a Habsburg princess and patronised by her relations, the dowries were paintings, sculpture, silver and relics. Nothing was bought as a museum; it simply accumulated and never left.
What is there:
- The Rubens tapestries. The Triumph of the Eucharist was commissioned from Peter Paul Rubens in 1625 by the Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia, Philip II's daughter and governor of the Spanish Netherlands, specifically for this convent. They are woven from his designs, they are still here, and they are the reason an art historian comes.
- Paintings by Titian, Zurbarán and Bruegel among others.
- Sculpture and tombs, including work by Pompeo Leoni, the sepulchre of the Empress María — Joanna's sister — and figures by Pedro de Mena.
- The building itself, Renaissance, around a cloister, with the grand staircase frescoed from top to bottom.
Access is by guided tour only, about an hour, and there is no other way to see any of it. It charges, it is closed on Mondays, and — the detail worth having — there is a tour in English at midday from Tuesday to Sunday, while tours booked online are otherwise in Spanish.
La Encarnación, which deserves more than a sentence
Older accounts dispose of the second royal convent in one line. It is five minutes from the first, it is run by the same body, and it has something the Descalzas does not.
It was founded by Margaret of Austria, wife of Philip III, early in the seventeenth century, by Juan Gómez de Mora — the architect of the Plaza Mayor — with Fray Alberto de la Madre de Dios, and the church was remodelled in neoclassical style by Ventura Rodríguez after a fire. Ribera and Gregorio Fernández are among the painters and sculptors represented, and the cloister, choir and sacristy are on the route.
The celebrated room is the Relicario, holding some seven hundred reliquaries in bronze, coral, ivory and fine woods, gathered from Italy, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands. Among them is an ampoule said to hold the blood of St Pantaleon, a physician martyred, by tradition, on 27 July 305. It is displayed each year on that date, his feast day, and the contents are said to liquefy. One of the monastery's chaplains has described how this is judged: by the colour of the contents, which look dark brown when coagulated, and by moving the vial — and that the timing varies, being, in his words, not a mathematical question. Thousands come, and screens are set up so the change can be followed. It is a long-standing devotion rather than an officially declared miracle, and it is worth seeing stated as what it is.
Visits here are also guided only, about fifty minutes, closed Mondays, and — unlike the Descalzas — in Spanish only. Both convents charge, both have a free afternoon window midweek for EU and Latin American citizens, and there is no combined ticket covering the two.
San Francisco el Grande
Two corrections before anything else.
It is a basilica, not a cathedral. Older accounts call it a functioning cathedral and one of the most beautiful cathedrals in Europe. A city has one cathedral, the seat of its bishop, and Madrid's is the Almudena, beside the Palacio Real.
And the dome comparison should be dropped. Older accounts claim a dome larger than St Paul's and then give the figure of thirty-three metres, which looks self-contradictory. In fact the two are being measured differently: San Francisco's thirty-three metres is the interior diameter, against St Paul's thirty-one inside and thirty-four outside. The honest claim is the one the Spanish government makes on the basilica's own behalf — that it is the largest dome in Spain.
The dates in older accounts are impossible. "Completed in 1760" precedes the start of work: the first stone was laid on 8 November 1761, to a design attributed to Fray Francisco Antonio Cabezas. Building was suspended between 1768 and 1770 when inspections found structural problems, carried on by Antonio Plo y Comín against the Academy's objections, and taken over by Francesco Sabatini with Miguel Fernández from 1774 to 1784. The church was inaugurated in December 1784. The tradition is that a Franciscan convent stood here from 1217, founded by St Francis of Assisi himself on his way to Santiago — which is a tradition rather than a fact, and is best given as one.
One thing explains the interior to a visitor who finds it unexpectedly Victorian: the decoration is largely nineteenth-century. The dome's stained glass was finished in 1882, the chapels decorated in 1885 and 1886, the organ installed in 1884. An eighteenth-century shell with a nineteenth-century skin.
The Goya, and where to stand
In the third chapel on the right hangs Goya's The Preaching of St Bernardino of Siena, painted between 1781 and 1783 as part of a commission placed by the Count of Floridablanca, who engaged several court painters for the new basilica.
Goya painted himself into it. He is in the crowd, on the right-hand side, looking out. Older accounts split this into two things and say there is a separate self-portrait hanging beside it; there is not. The confusion probably comes from a related self-portrait that ended up in a museum in Agen, in France, repeating the same likeness.
Elsewhere in the chapels are works by Zurbarán, Alonso Cano and Mariano Salvador Maella, with sculpture by Ricardo Bellver — who made the Fallen Angel in El Retiro — and Mariano Benlliure. The Gothic choir stalls were brought from Segovia and are considerably older than the building around them.
The basilica is still administered through a royal foundation under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which is why it is the Spanish state rather than the diocese that runs its museum. It is a working church, visits are guided, and quiet is expected. Metro to La Latina or Puerta de Toledo.
General practicalities for the city are on the Madrid page.