On Christmas Eve of 1734, the Alcázar palace caught fire. At midnight the guards were alerted to the blaze and began evacuating the building. The fire persisted for several days, as palace officials did what they could to spare its many treasures from destruction. Trying to save the royal art collection, they cut paintings from their frames, flinging them out of the burning building through the windows.¹ In spite of their efforts, around 500 of the over 1,500 paintings then on view in the royal palace were lost in this fire, in addition to countless art objects of other kinds.² The Alcázar itself was burned nearly to the ground, and what remained was ultimately razed and replaced by the existing Royal Palace of Madrid, on the Plaza de Oriente. The salvaged paintings were taken to convents, churches, and the houses of noblemen for safekeeping. On December 28, the Marquis of Villena, mayordomo mayor (head steward of the royal house) to King Philip V, ordered an inventory of the surviving works, which was undertaken by several court painters, to assess the total damages.³ In the succeeding decades, Philip V oversaw a comprehensive campaign to restore the royal art collection and, at the behest of court painter Jean Ranc, to bring the surviving paintings to an even better state than they had been in before the palace was engulfed in flames.⁴ However successful this campaign, the losses to the Habsburg art collection were unredeemable. What is preserved in the present-day Museo Nacional del Prado—whose founding collection included paintings by Bosch, Titian, Velázquez, Rubens, Dürer, and other early modern masters originally commissioned or collected by the Habsburgs—represents only a fraction of what was once the richest art collection in the Western world.

At the time of the palace fire, the Hall of Mirrors was almost exactly as Velázquez had left it, the hang virtually untouched since Charles II came to power. The destruction of the palace saw the irretrievable disappearance of Velázquez’s project, which can never be properly reconstituted. Although some of the most important paintings on view in the Hall of Mirrors were recovered, the losses to this gallery were too significant to ever bring it back to life. Emperor Charles V at Mühlberg was saved; Rubens’s portrait of Philip IV was not. Titian’s Tityus and Sisyphus were saved; the remaining furias were not. Half the paintings in the gallery, including four out of the five paintings that Velázquez had made for it, were completely destroyed. For all the damage that it inflicted on the historical record, however, the fire had one poetic consequence in that it tethered the Hall of Mirrors to Velázquez’s name. The start of Velázquez’s career as court painter coincided with this gallery’s beginnings, and his transformation of the New Room into the Hall of Mirrors was the apex both of his work as curator to the king and of the lifespan of the gallery that had helped to secure him his fame. Only truly dismantled in the fire of 1734, his hang persisted even past the extinguishing of the Habsburg dynasty in 1700, when Charles II died without an heir. Velázquez’s ghost inhabited this gallery until it met its end, his life at the Spanish court and the first chapter of his afterlife thus roughly coterminous with the existence of this single room.

Between 1660 and 1734, only one change had been made to the decorative program of this gallery, so admired as one of Velázquez’s greatest contributions to the history of art at the Spanish court. Sometime during the last few years of the reign of Charles II, an equestrian portrait made by Luca Giordano was inserted into the gallery hang. It is definitively recorded on the walls of the Hall of Mirrors in the 1701–3 inventory of the palace, where it hung alongside the existing portraits of Charles V, Philip II, Philip III, and Philip IV made by Titian, Rubens, and Velázquez. It is described very simply as “a portrait of our King Charles II on horseback by the hand of Giordano.”⁵ A marginal annotation in a copy of the inventory of the paintings in the Alcázar palace from 1686 indicates that Giordano’s portrait replaced Rubens’s Reconciliation of Jacob and Esau (Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, no. inv. 1302) above the central door of the north wall.⁶ No other change to the decorative program of this gallery between 1686 and 1700 is recorded. Although it would disrupt the careful timeline running across the walls from east to west, the display of Giordano’s equestrian portrait above this door ensured that a portrait of a Habsburg king hung over every door and that the dynasty’s last monarch was finally represented on the gallery walls. In the process, the name of Luca Giordano was also inserted into the gallery hang, the only artist since the death of Velázquez to see his paintings appear in the Hall of Mirrors.

A Neapolitan painter by origin, Luca Giordano was renowned across the Italian peninsula by the time he was invited to the Spanish court in May 1692, where he remained in the service of Charles II until just after the monarch’s death.⁷ Giordano’s biographers wax effusive on the lavish praise and prodigious honors that greeted him in Madrid, as well as the enormous fresco cycles that he executed for royal sites such as the monastery at El Escorial and the Casón del Buen Retiro and the paintings that he made in convincing imitation of the styles of other painters to the delight and amazement of onlookers.⁸ Most importantly, like Titian and Velázquez before him, Giordano was also awarded the exclusive privilege of painting the king’s likeness upon arriving in Spain.⁹ He was therefore the last in a line of painters with a privileged relationship to his Habsburg patron, the final “painter to the king.” In Francesco Saverio Baldinucci’s biography of the artist from sometime between 1710 and 1721, Luca Giordano is said to have met a “Diego Valasco, primo Pittore del Re” at the Spanish court. Baldinucci writes of the astonishment felt by Velázquez and the king of Spain as they watched Giordano paint, even crediting the king with turning to the incredulous Spaniard and saying, “Look, man, this is the best painter in Naples and in Spain and in the whole world, this is a Painter for the King.”¹⁰ Given that Velázquez died thirty years before the arrival of Giordano to the Spanish court, it seems unlikely that the painters ever met. Nevertheless, this fiction perhaps reflects the reality that of all the painters ever to paint for Charles II, Giordano was Velázquez’s readiest match, if not his heir apparent.

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Luca Giordano, Homage to Velázquez, ca. 1692–1700, oil on canvas, 205.2 × 182.2 cm, National Gallery, London, NG1434

Image © The National Gallery, London

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That Giordano was an admirer of Velázquez is without question. Like so many painters at the Habsburg court in the generation just after Velázquez, Giordano took Las Meninas as the obvious point of departure for at least one of his canvases: his Homage to Velázquez (fig. 7.1).¹¹ In his biography of Velázquez, Palomino describes a scene in which Charles II takes Luca Giordano to the Alcázar’s summer apartments to see Las Meninas and to ask him what he thought of it. His response is now as famous in the secondary literature on this work as it is enigmatic: “Sir, this is the Theology of Painting.” Palomino understood this to mean that insofar as theology is the highest of the sciences, so too could Las Meninas be considered the greatest of paintings.¹² Whatever Giordano’s meaning, his reverence for Las Meninas appears everywhere in his Homage to Velázquez, which, with Giordano’s characteristic virtuosity in the imitation of other artists’ painting styles, immediately evokes Las Meninas in its palette and brushwork. The figures at center have been identified as Francisco de Benavides, the ninth Count of Santisteban del Puerto and enthusiastic collector of Giordano’s work, and his daughter, surrounded by members of their household.¹³ For decades, however, the man in the dark robes with the red cross of the Order of Santiago on his sleeve was thought to be Diego Velázquez, the girl in a red and silvery dress the Infanta Margarita. Just as Las Meninas includes Velázquez’s self-portrait, Giordano’s own self-portrait appears in his Homage at lower right, where the artist seems to gesture in admiration toward the figures just in front of him. Although the title of this painting is not original to the work, it is certainly true.

Luca Giordano’s equestrian portrait of Charles II is an expression of admiration and emulation of Velázquez too, albeit on very different terms. Little is known about the circumstances surrounding the production of this painting or even its final appearance, which seems to go unmentioned in Giordano’s biographies.¹⁴ Nevertheless, its ambitions are clear. From the start of Velázquez’s career, this gallery had functioned as a literal and figurative kingmaker. It was the site where Philip IV constructed his identity as the reigning sovereign in the Habsburg monarchy and where Velázquez, in tandem, was challenged to assert himself as his painter. The painting that Charles II commissioned from Giordano reflects the same conjoined objectives. According to Andrés Úbeda de los Cobos, the relationship established between Charles II and Luca Giordano mirrored that of Philip IV and Velázquez, which in turn had mirrored that of Charles V and Titian.¹⁵ Like those that came before it, this relationship between patron and painter sealed itself with a major painting, and history yet again repeating. That the painting was an equestrian portrait testifies to the continuing power of Emperor Charles V at Mühlberg, still the most overt symbol of Habsburg patronage, but it also testifies to the efficacy of what Velázquez had done with the gallery, uniting the history of Spanish art and the history of Spanish politics so convincingly in a single decorative program.

By the time Giordano arrived at the Spanish court, Velázquez’s own equestrian portrait of Philip IV had long since been removed from this gallery, but what it represented was not totally forgotten. Likely without ever seeing it, Antonio Palomino was able to claim in his biography of Velázquez that his first portrait of Philip IV was an equestrian portrait made on a visit to the court in Madrid, and that the painting won him, like Apelles before him, the exclusive privilege of painting the portrait of his sovereign.¹⁶ In Palomino’s writing, Velázquez’s lost portrait thus found a new life. Perhaps this equestrian portrait by then existed nowhere beyond the pages of Palomino’s text, a mere rhetorical device like so many of the portraits of Charles V chronicled in the biographies of Titian. Either way, it gives form in a single canvas to what Velázquez had built in the Hall of Mirrors with many: For Charles II, the Hall of Mirrors was the space within which to claim his place in a lineage of Spanish kings. For Giordano, it was the site wherein to make his name in the history of Spanish painters, not least because Velázquez had established it as such with its definitive gallery hang.

The New Room was inaugurated with the installation of Titian’s Emperor Charles V at Mühlberg; the Hall of Mirrors closed with the installation of Giordano’s equestrian portrait of Charles II. They were the bookends to the story of the site where Velázquez was tested, stumbled, and eventually triumphed. Velázquez’s own equestrian portrait for the Hall of Mirrors should have fast-tracked his success at the Spanish court, immediately defining him as the Apelles to Philip IV’s Alexander, the Titian to his Charles V. The equestrian portrait was ultimately sidelined, but Velázquez nevertheless found another means entirely by which to use the Hall of Mirrors to stake out his art historical reputation. The history of the Hall of Mirrors, like the story of Velázquez’s career at the Habsburg court, began with an equestrian portrait. How fitting that it would end with another.