Organised as part of the Madrid Barroco cultural programme, the exhibition Teatro de grandeza. Arte, arquitectura y ciudad en el Madrid Barroco (Theatre of Grandeur. Art, Architecture and City in Baroque Madrid) is being held at Fernán Gómez Centro Cultural de la Villa in Madrid, the city to which it is devoted. The thesis behind the project is to examine how Madrid became one of the great artistic and political centres of the Baroque during the Habsburg period.

Through a selection of over 150 works from Spanish and international museums, archives and collections, the exhibition follows the urban, cultural and symbolic transformation of Madrid during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The city emerges as a vast theatre in which representations of the monarchy, religious life and popular entertainments coexist. This urban fabric, structured around the Alcázar, Plaza Mayor, Prado de San Jerónimo and Buen Retiro, reflected a complex and vibrant court, memorably depicted in Pedro Teixeira’s seminal map of Madrid from 1656. The exhibition concludes with the arrival of the Bourbons, when Madrid began to embrace new European models in architecture and urban planning.

One of the highlights of the exhibition is Juan Carreño de Miranda’s Portrait of a Lady, on loan from the BBVA Collection. This painting exemplifies the Baroque sensibility in the sitter’s elegance, poise and intense gaze and in the wealth of detail, capturing the spirit of the exhibition as a whole: that of a refined, ceremonial Madrid in which art and power were inextricably bound together.