Francisco Pradilla Ortiz

Transcription

Although it may not appear to be the case from its style and virtuoso technique, the painting Juana La Loca locked away in Tordesillas with her daughter, the Infanta doña Catalina, dates from as late as 1906. It was painted by Francisco Pradilla at the height of his powers, aged 58, after he had been director of the Museo del Prado. It is a work that concentrates all Pradilla’s knowledge and assimilation of the great tradition of Spanish painting. It is one of the most exquisite works by the artist, purchased by the Museum around 1990. As I say, it can be considered a summary and colophon to Pradilla’s entire career as a painter and scholar, and as an individual truly obsessed with a figure from history. Queen Juana of Castile can in herself be seen as representing numerous key concepts for an understanding of the Romantic interpretation of the preeminent genre of history painting undertaken by 19th-century Spanish artists, given that she embodies love, honour, death and madness. She truly fascinated Francisco Pradilla, and from his youth and from the time he won the first prize medal, the Prix d’honneur, at the National Exhibition in 1878 when he presented his great painting Doña Juana "La Loca," she became a figure who pursued the artist in his mind, his brushes and throughout his life. History paintings are generally canvases of enormous size but Pradilla had the remarkable and exquisite ability to transform this museum genre into cabinet paintings. He was capable of reducing them, transforming them and converting them into paintings to decorate the residences of the leading bourgeois and wealthy families of the early 20th century who were his patrons. Pradilla interprets his composition by markedly emphasising the almost claustrophobic and oppressive aspect of the Queen’s captivity. We see a dark room. This is a space in which the Queen is located in the foreground, her gaze absent due to the mental illness that led her to refuse to be separated from her husband’s coffin. She is unable to attend to her daughter, who comes up to her lap to demand her attention but the Queen is far away, thinking of her dead husband. Meanwhile, shrouded in shadow towards the rear of the room we see two ladies-in-waiting. The viewer’s gaze moves around the space before pausing, for example, on the fireplace in the background with a fire that provides some light and also heat to the people in the room in which a small cat is skittering around. As our eye moves around the room across the typically Castilian floor with its terracotta tiles, we pause at the iron grille where there seems to be a chapel with some Romanesque paintings including a Christ Pantocrator. If we look to the left of the room we can make out a half-open door leading into another room in the background, dimly lit from the light entering through a stained glass window. In other words, we have the sense of more and more enclosures, while enclosed in this background room is the coffin of Philip the Fair. What most appeals to me and impresses me at the same time is a detail in which Pradilla also provides all the emotional key to the painting in the form of the small toys in the foreground of the composition, beautifully designed objects that have been thrown onto the ground as they no longer entertain the little girl who is trying to attract her mother’s attention and help. This manner of interpreting history painting with its emphasis on the most emotional elements on the one hand and on its remarkably virtuoso nature on the other is both special and extremely eloquent. Pradilla always made first-hand use of historical sources for the settings of his compositions given that scholarly approach and documentary rigour accounted for much of the prestige enjoyed by history painters. In order to leave us in no doubt as to the rigour with which he approached this composition, Pradilla himself wrote on the back of the canvas with his brush the exact title of the painting, which is the one used by the Museum today: "La reina Doña Juana “la Loca” recluida en Tordesillas con su hija la infanta Catalina (principios del siglo XVI)", so as not to leave any doubt on the matter. He also added “see the historical studies by Antonio Rodríguez Vila of the Royal Academy of History”, emphasising that he had derived the subject from research by Antonio Rodríguez, a scholar who wrote a book entitled "Juana La Loca" in 1892. In addition, when devising the setting in which the figures are located, Pradilla researched visual documentation in order to find a room that could provide a suitable one in which to recreate this space in the castle of Tordesillas. He found it in the pages of "La Ilustración española y americana", one of the most important and most fully illustrated magazines published in Spain in the last quarter of the 19th century. In La Ilustración Pradilla came across an engraving of a drawing by the Sevilian painter Valeriano Domínguez Becquer. In 1886 Becquer had made a drawing of the Duke of Frías’s house in Ocaña, which had a kitchen with a marvellous and very imposing Gothic fireplace. This is exactly the space that Pradilla reproduces in this painting and which can be considered one of the keys to the aptness and exquisite appeal of this painting, in itself the maximum expression of a type of pleasure in painting itself and one in which Pradilla sums up his career, first as a painter, secondly as director of this museum and thirdly and as a student in the galleries of the Prado, like so many other artists throughout the course of the 19th century.