From Altamira to Caravaggio: Spain’s uncurated painting anthology

From Altamira to Caravaggio: a pinacotheca pieced together

How much can a painting anthology withstand without a curator and without walls? This is what those who have been building a catalogue from the cave paintings of Altamira to the Ecce Homo exhibited by the Prado Museum between May 28, 2023, and October 2024 have been doing. In between, there is Baroque, Renaissance, Polish symbolism, and Japanese prints. Without anyone's permission.

The start was signed by Vermeer: Girl with a Pearl Earring, 46.5 x 40 centimeters, painted between 1665 and 1667, on display at the Mauritshuis in The Hague. From there, the criterion was what each person brought in their pocket.

What works fit between Altamira and the Great Wave

The breadth of the repertoire is what is hardest to believe. From the paintings of Altamira, with between 36,000 and 13,000 years of age and bisons up to 170 centimeters, one passes without transition to the Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai (1830-32) or to the triptychs by El Bosco. In between, there is the Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand Martyrs by Vittore Carpaccio (1515), measuring 307 x 205 centimeters, now in the Gallery of the Academy of Venice, and the Polska by Jacek Malczewski (1914), 156 x 213 centimeters, in the National Museum of Krakow.

There is no chronological order that explains it. There is an emotional impact logic.

Why chiaroscuro takes up most of the space

If one name dominates the collection, it is Caravaggio. The Ecce Homo arrived with the Prado's endorsement, which described it as "one of the greatest discoveries in the history of art." Next to it appears the Incredulity of Saint Thomas. The trend extends to Rembrandt and his portrait of Jesus from the 1640s, and lands on the darkest Goya: Saturn Devouring One of His Sons and the Duel with Clubs, 123 x 266 centimeters at the Prado Museum. Add Valdés Leal's Finis Gloriae Mundi. Four centuries of gloom in the same imaginary room.

The same repertoire integrates, however, Sorolla and Pissarro.

Portraits, devotions, and a tsar who kills his son

The religious chapter has its own entries: the Virgin Mary by Sassoferrato (1609-1685), at the National Gallery, and the Ecce Homo by Antonio Ciseri (1821-1891), at the Modern Art Gallery of Florence. Outside the sacred, The Rape of Europa by Simon Vouet, at the Thyssen, and The Reader by Fragonard, at the National Gallery of Washington. Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine (1489) hangs in Krakow.

The coup de grâce is given by Ilya Repin with Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan (1885), an oil painting of more than two meters kept at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. Seeing it in person forces one to lower one's voice.

Turner, the volcano, and the price of a frame

William Turner's The Slave Ship holds a special place. A copy presides over a fireplace with a golden frame that cost more than the reproduction itself. The original was seen at the National Gallery in London. The other masterpiece is The Sunset of the Carthaginian Empire (1817), 170 x 239 centimeters, at the Tate Britain.

Here appears the curiosity cited in the thread: the ochres, reds, and yellows of Turner's sunsets may have been influenced by the dust the Krakatoa eruption launched into the atmosphere, dyeing European skies for the trinc two years. Paleoclimatology and art history, suddenly, in the same sentence.

From the museum to one's own canvas and the auction room

Not everything comes from the great museum. Some hang their own production and challenge the rest to do the same without antiestéticar of ridicule. And some trinc the market: two auction houses, Ansorena and Alcalá Subastas, put old paintings up for sale on consecutive days, with bidding notebooks freely accessible on their pages.

The anthology is not signed by a curator. It is signed by a sum of disparate hobbies that, by accumulation, draw something resembling a collective taste.

The soundtrack that named everything

The title of the collection refers, without disguise, to Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. This is no minor detail: someone proposed the piece as musical accompaniment and claimed for it The Great Gate of Kiev. Painting and music share this quirk of turning what one sees into something else.

Without a curator and without a committee, the anthology stands firm. No one has agreed on where the Baroque ends, and that says quite a bit about what foreign taste can withstand.