Philip of Spain

by Henry Kamen

  Jean Lhermite's contemporary sketch of the site offers an impressive perspective. Five thousand trees were imported from Flanders. Fruit trees were introduced from France.29 Exotic plants came from the Indies and from all over the peninsula. Dutch gardeners were put in charge of the landscaping. Philip lovingly planned and modified every detail of the gardens. He was, to a large extent, their architect.30 ‘What needs to be planted,’ runs a memorandum by him on Aranjuez, ‘is what is listed here, and I would like most of it done this winter.’31 Mulberries were to be planted in order to cultivate silkworms, ‘not for production but as a pastime for the queen’. It was specially important to ‘finish the big lake because if it isn't finished this summer there will be nowhere to put the fish this winter’. Covered with woods, parks and gardens, in which an immense variety of trees, plants, fruits and, above all, flowers flourished, Aranjuez was a source of wonder to visitors and of unremitting pleasure to the monarch. He fled there to escape from his papers and to fish in the lakes.

  These major residences were situated on the outer edges of the area surrounding Madrid. Philip also arranged for the construction of smaller houses which served as stops on the way, or simply as hunting-lodges. They included the sites at Fuenfría, La Fresneda, Galapagar, El Monesterio and Torrelodones. More substantial houses, veritable palaces in themselves, were built at Vaciamadrid and Aceca. Together, the palaces and lodges formed an area of royal residences without equal in Europe.

  The palace or Alcázar at Toledo was not forgotten. The city had been the medieval capital of Castile, and in the 1540s Charles V and Philip had spent money on restoring the Alcázar. Considerable extra work was done until 1560 in preparing the building for the arrival of the king and his French queen. But the decision to change the capital, and even more the decisive change in Philip's architectural tastes, affected the Alcázar, which was thereafter neglected.

  The Residences of Philip II

  The money and effort devoted to the construction programme was impressive. Thousands of workmen were employed for decades and immense quantities of materials were transported into and across the peninsula. Twelve thousand pines, for example, were purchased from the city of Cuenca for use by the carpenters at San Lorenzo; fleets of carts trundled from the port of Cartagena to the site at Aranjuez with tons of marble imported from Italy; shiploads of nails came from Antwerp.32

  The king's personal interest in his architectural programme was absolute. His role has frequently been reduced to the level of the trivial and the dilettante. The reality was different. Since the 1540s he had taken a serious and creative interest in restoring the palaces. His direct experience in northern Europe filled his head with new ideas. His personal contribution was not simply as paymaster: he sent rough sketches and specific instructions to his architects. Broad schematisation and minute detail were equally interesting to him, for these were his palaces and in great measure his ideas. In the middle of a busy session with his papers the building programme would break in on his thoughts. ‘Although I have a hundred papers in front of me,’ runs a note, ‘I thought I would remind you of the following …’33

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  The major cultural enterprise of Philip's reign was the building of the monastery of San Lorenzo near the village of El Escorial. There were two distinct motives for its foundation. The king intended to celebrate the victory over the French at St Quentin, won on the feast-day of St Lawrence, 10 August. Early descriptions of the building refer to it as San Lorenzo de la Victoria,34 but the friars persuaded the king that the title ‘Royal’ would be more appropriate than the warlike ‘Victory’. The name therefore became San Lorenzo el Real. The second motive for the building was the need, strongly felt by Philip, to give his father a worthy tomb. The role of the friars was to offer permanent prayers for the repose of the soul of the emperor and, with him, the other members of the royal family. The combination of monastery and tomb was, in some measure, an imitation of the emperor's resting-place in Yuste.35 There is no evidence that Philip had any plans for such a building before 1558.

  After his return from the Netherlands, the friars of the Jeronimite order, his favourite religious order, helped him choose the site of the proposed foundation. They sought a healthy place, away from towns but close to the royal palaces, with good air and water. After three years of searching, the decision (in November 1561) was made in favour of El Escorial. That July, Juan Bautista was named as architect of the project.

  The Escorial was in great measure Philip's creation, a projection of his ideas. In the months of consultation in 1561 between Juan Bautista, Pedro de Hoyo and the Jeronimite friars, the king imposed his wishes at every stage. ‘If I am not mistaken,’ Hoyo observed, ‘Your Majesty is quite right to want to do more for San Lorenzo than any other site. Because apart from the service of God one is also dealing with a question of prestige (reputación).’36 The king was determined to create something durable. Because of this in 1562–3 he rejected key features of Juan Bautista's plan, and accepted suggestions by other architects. Construction work began early in 1562 and a foundation stone was formally laid on 20 August 1563. Juan Bautista died in 1567. The work was continued by his disciple Juan de Herrera. Bautista's outline for the building had meanwhile been subjected to the severe (and usually justified) criticisms of the friars, other architects, and the king himself. The master-plan underwent major changes, the most important of which was the decision, in 1564, to construct a further storey in order to house more religious. Through his builders and architects, the king managed to give expression to his concept of the Escorial. The building, though planned in part as a royal residence, was to be pre-eminently religious. It is unlikely that occult ideas played any conscious part in the plans,37 or that the king had any intention of re-creating the ancient temple of Solomon.38

  In the peak building years 1562 and 1563 Philip alternated his political and family duties with visits to all the sites where work was going on. His works secretary Pedro de Hoyo had to handle memos, notes and letters from the king. ‘I shall go tomorrow to sleep in Aranjuez,’ went a typical note in May 1562; ‘go there and make Juan Bautista go there tomorrow with the sketches of the monastery’. Philip's attention to detail was unrelenting.

  He was no dilettante. Nor did he demand the impossible. He spent long hours discussing plans with his architects, trying to adjust what he wished to what was feasible. There were regular site meetings. ‘The weather is so good,’ he scribbled to Hoyo on a fine summer's day in 1565, ‘that we must not waste it, and so I want to go this afternoon to El Pardo and tomorrow to El Escorial … and would like you also to arrive there tomorrow.’ His instructions were based on informed discussions with his architects.

  His relationship with Juan Bautista was close and friendly, but he was careful not to offend as the architect was of touchy disposition. ‘I don't know if he was taken aback by what he was told to do at El Monesterio,’ he confessed to Hoyo in 1563, ‘I mean with the building.’39 Seen in perspective, his demands on the architect seem inordinate. The work may well have contributed to Juan Bautista's early death.

  The next major influence on the style of the Escorial was Juan de Herrera, who followed Juan Bautista as principal architect. Work picked up rapidly under him. By 1567 enough of it had been completed to allow the monks, the king with some of his court, and part of the stables, to take up residence. There was also a small church, with kitchens and other necessary services.

  The next important stage in construction was the building of the basilica, the central feature of the whole edifice, commenced in 1574. The basilica was to be not merely an imposing church, but the resting-place for bodies of the royal family. Its planning and construction was to prove the most problematic aspect of all. Subsequently, other key features of the structure took shape, among them the library, which was completed in 1583.

  The king's permanent apartments were not ready until 1585. Before then, the royal family occupied temporary quarters in the south wing. The apartme
nts, when completed, served not only as a residence but also as a court, with public audience halls. This public role never overwhelmed the private character of the palace as a place for retreat and prayer.40 The private aspect was also foremost in the extensive gardens, no mere background but living space in which the king delighted to walk after the heat of the day.

  San Lorenzo was the apple of Philip's eye. If visitors chanced on him in Madrid rather than in San Lorenzo, he packed them off there immediately. Among such visitors were the four young Japanese nobles who came in November 1584 with their Jesuit guides and expressed their admiration for ‘a thing more magnificent than any we have seen till now or imagined seeing’.41

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  The considerable investment made by the king in art seems to have had a limited impact on Castilian culture. Philip's efforts stand out for their almost solitary splendour. He had enjoyed the close collaboration of Arias Montano and a handful of other intellectuals, but most clergy and nobles seem not to have shared his tastes. A few, such as the duke of Alba or the duke of Villahermosa (who returned to Spain with Philip in 1559 from Brussels), brought with them artworks and tapestries, but the majority remained content with peninsular culture. Antonio Pérez was one of the few advisers who shared in his master's pro-European perspectives. Without the active and intelligent support of an imaginative aristocracy, the king was reduced to producing for himself alone. He tended to become a collector, when he would have preferred to be known as a Maecenas.

  Expanding on the material already to be found in the palaces, Philip from the 1560s built up collections in every known branch of the arts. At the Escorial, the centrepiece was the library, housed in a special wing. Its nucleus was the king's own gift, in 1565–75, of 4,000 volumes. He persuaded various prelates and nobles to bequeath their books to the collection, and sent agents throughout western Europe in search of rare editions. In addition to books the collection eventually included precious Latin, Greek and Arab manuscripts. From an early date it also had a special collection of books confiscated by the Inquisition. These could be consulted only by special permission.

  The library, as conceived by the king, was meant to have readers and not be a mere deposit. Arias Montano, its first librarian, left his stamp of universal learning on the growing collection. The king explained his project as ‘one of the outstanding memorials that I could leave behind for the benefit of all men of letters who might wish to come and study’.42 But the library also came in for some criticism. Critics applauded the idea but thought it was too far from anywhere, and therefore impossible to consult. They questioned the intellectual capacity of the monks entrusted with the books. As the precious volumes piled up, even the secretary in charge, Gracián, had to admit that ‘the whole thing is a worse confusion than the classical Chaos of Hesiod’.43

  Philip's ambition to do great things in the world of books was continually frustrated by the backward state of both printing and learning in the peninsula. Authors who wished to have their books well printed were as a rule driven to look for publishers abroad. The king himself had to have books printed in Flanders or Italy. There was considerable opposition from within the Spanish Church when Philip decided in the 1560s that the new mass-books sanctioned by the council of Trent could be adequately printed only in Antwerp, by the firm of Plantin. In the same way he decided that the new Royal Bible, whose preparation he entrusted to Arias Montano, could be produced only in Antwerp.

  Of other items housed in the Escorial, the most striking was the collection of relics. Philip's search for them was methodical. A typical mission was that entrusted to his annalist Ambrosio de Morales in 1572, to look for relics (and, in passing, rare books) in the north-eastern provinces of Spain. Morales came back with the sensible advice that the king should not, on the whole, take away relics from their sites since ‘it would be unjust and cause dissatisfaction and possibly even disturbance’.44 Philip had long been fascinated by relics, particularly by those he saw in Cologne in 1550. Thereafter he always considered Germany the ideal place to look for them. He brought back from Augsburg relics which the cardinal of that city gave him. At the end of his life, in 1597, he was still financing searches in Germany. The collecting went on until his dying day: in April 1598 four large boxes arrived from Cologne.45 His final collection amounted to over 7,000 items, among them ten whole bodies, 144 heads, 306 arms and legs, thousands of bones of various parts of holy bodies, as well as hairs of Christ and the Virgin, and fragments of the True Cross and the Crown of Thorns. Relics were usually encased in a rich setting, normally silver, so the collection for this reason did not have the ghoulish aspect a listing of its contents might suggest.

  Philip's total faith in relics sustained him in his last days, and relics are given an important mention in his testament. He was much more sceptical about the occult,46 although his collection of books on magic and the occult was substantial; through the years he continued to add to it. In common with his contemporaries, he treated the unknown with respect. He made use of several astrological advisers (such as the Neapolitan Gesio); was keen to know what comets, eclipses and other unusual phenomena might signify; and consulted horoscopes. When he was in London he had his horoscope drawn up by John Dee, the well-known English magus. But when informed that the Romans had paid attention to the significance of comets, he retorted that ‘the Romans were not Christians’. In 1579 he scolded himself for not ordering the archbishop of Toledo to discipline astrologer-priests. ‘I am shocked that they believe in these things, and they certainly do wrong, besides it being a mortal sin’.47 In matters of magic, as in matters of politics, he collected information without necessarily committing himself. He laid great stress, for example, on searching for the works of the medieval Mallorcan occult philosopher Ramon Llull, for whose doctrines many Spaniards, among them Juan de Herrera, had long shared an admiration. From at least 1577 the king began collecting Llull's works for his library in the Escorial. Translations of the two principal works were made, ‘in accordance with Your Majesty's wish [noted the translator] to facilitate the teaching of all sciences’. Llull, for Philip, was an important example of the informal and exotic aspects of knowledge.

  He took the same attitude towards all experimental sciences, notably alchemy, and kept an open mind about several attempts which were made in the 1570s, with his approval, to transmute base metals into gold. ‘Although I don't believe in these things,’ he commented on one experiment, ‘I am not so doubting about this one.’48 The repeated failure of the experiments strengthened his scepticism. When in 1574 Juan de Zúñiga in Rome offered to send him an alchemist, Philip commented that the matter could be ‘a hoax like all the other results of this science’.49 He was more tolerant of other aspects of experimental science, particularly those connected with medicine. His large collection of animal horns, mainly rhinoceros but also including six ‘unicorn’ horns,50 may have been connected with their alleged medicinal value. His curiosity for scientific instruments gave rise to the rich collection which he transferred to the library of the Escorial in 1597.

  Philip never developed along the lines intended by his tutors, as a humanist and scholar. But he had an insatiable curiosity about everything. He wanted, quite simply, to know. Those who spoke with him were always impressed by his interest in all aspects of art, science and culture. The age in which he lived favoured the spirit of enquiry; not only in traditional branches of learning but also in the sciences and pseudosciences, new frontiers were being explored. Within the king's own generation, the New World had been the greatest stimulus to the imagination. As Spain came into contact with America and with the lands beyond the Mediterranean, the exotic began to form part of everyday reality. From America the bean, the tomato, and later maize, entered peninsular diet; tobacco took its first fatal hold on addicts.51 As king of a universal empire, Philip was in a unique position to obtain information and specimens. He became, inevitably, a collector par excellence.

  Collecting was more than a personal hobb
y. It was also an attempt to give dignity to the monarchy, by furnishing his palaces. He had clear preferences in taste. Sculpture, for example, played only a small part in his interests, even though he managed to obtain the services of excellent sculptors such as Leone and Pompeio Leoni.52 His partiality was for books and, above all, painting.

  He entrusted Arias Montano with (among other things) the collection of Arabic books. The Escorial ended up with one of the finest western collections of works in Arabic. The language was dying in Spain: among a section of the Moriscos it was largely a spoken rather than written tongue, while among the Christians, ‘it is no longer understood or used among scholars’, according to Montano.53 For the king his books still had some use. In 1573 he summoned the Morisco scholar and physician Alonso del Castillo to help catalogue the Escorial collection, and let him develop medicines based on the Arab sources.54 In the subsequent generation, however, the social position of Moriscos in Castile worsened, and Morisco medicine fell into disrepute.

  The king's interest in medicine and medicinal plants was well known.55 From 1557 he encouraged the import and cultivation of ginger and other spices of possible medicinal value. From 1564 a Fleming was ‘royal distiller of essences’ at the herbarium in Aranjuez. Royal pharmacies were set up in Madrid and San Lorenzo. The most ambitious of all the king's collection schemes was his commission in 1570 to the royal physician Francisco Hernández to go to the New World for information and specimens of the plant life there. Hernández's expedition, which lasted five years, constituted the greatest scientific enterprise of the reign. When he returned, laden with drawings, seeds and live plants, there was no money to publish all his findings and the material was stored in the Escorial.

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  Philip II was Europe's leading patron of artists.56 His tastes, though nurtured in a Castilian background, were shaped and matured by extensive travelling. Observers of the time, and his own surviving papers, testify that his interest in art was positive, personal and discriminating. At one time he himself had taken up painting.57 Artists were not, for him, mere artisans. He had a profound but critical respect for them. He wrote to them directly, argued with them personally, and bullied them mercilessly. He cast his eye all over Europe in search of the best.