Chapel of Ferdinand and Isabella, with the Tombs of Philip I and his Queen, and of Ferdinand and Isabella, Granada

Chapel of Ferdinand and Isabella, with the Tombs of Philip I and his Queen, and of Ferdinand and Isabella, Granada 

Thomas Allom after David Roberts, 1837 

Hand-coloured lithograph 

David Roberts depicts the interior of the Royal Chapel in the Cathedral of Granada, which was constructed between 1506 and 1516 and serves as the mausoleum of the founding figures of Catholic Spain after the fall of Nasrid Granada in 1492. The space is seen at an angle, with light streaming in, focusing attention on the white tombs, sculpted in marble. In the entrance area, a few figures in traditional dress serve to add a sense of the scale of the interior space and the tombs. The altar in the background remains in the shadow. The large tomb on the left represents the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand of Aragon (r. 1470-1516) and Isabella I of Castile (r. 1474-1504), who conquered Granada from the Nasrids in 1492 and ordered the expulsion of the Jewish population in the same year.  The smaller tomb on the right is that of their daughter Joanna of Castile (r. 1504-1555) and her husband, Philip I of Castile, who was proclaimed the first Habsburg monarch in Spain in 1506 but died in the same year.  

Roberts produced a similar view in a large oil painting in 1835, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in London and bought by one of Britain’s wealthiest collectors, William Beckford of Fonthill in 1836. In 1838, Roberts also painted an exterior view of the entrance of the Royal Chapel, which was first owned by Elhanan Bicknell, a London businessman and shipowner, before entering the collection of the 4th Marquess of Hertford (Wallace Collection, London).  

Roberts’s romanticized depiction of the burial place of the Catholic Monarchs resonates with scholarly interests in their reign. The American historian William H. Prescott dedicated three volumes to narrating the History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic (London, 1838), the first scholarly and highly readable account of this subject in English, which reached a wide audience and was translated into Spanish and other languages.   

Title: Chapel of Ferdinand and Isabella, Granada. (The index to the volume gives the title as above, but reads ‘Philip II’ in error.) 

Author/Artist: Thomas Allom (1804-1872, lithographer) after David Roberts (1797-1864). 

Technique and Material: Hand-coloured lithograph, paper. 

Size: 300 x 420 mm (image), 550 x 370 mm (page). 

Published: Plate 16 from David Roberts, Picturesque Sketches in Spain taken during the years 1832 & 1833. London: Hodgson & Graves, 1837. 

Date: 1837. 

Marks and Inscriptions: on the plate, bottom right: ‘Chapel of Ferdinand and Isabella, Granada’. 

Institution: Barry Ife Collection.