Built for eternity

The Escorial, as a monastery and a royal palace, was the brain child of Philip II of Spain. Built in the latter half of the 16th century, about 30 miles north-west of Madrid, the huge granite complex with 4,000 rooms, 16 courtyards, a basilica, a library and picture gallery as well as the king’s private apartments, came to be regarded as the creation of a cold-hearted despot cut off from the outside world. For Richard Ford, whose 1850 Handbook for Travellers in Spain is the most learned guidebook ever written, the Escorial ‘was as cold as the grey eye and granite heart of its founder’. For the 19th-century conservative Spanish statesman, Antonio Cánovas, the Escorial, ‘a mountain of stone, uniform, monotonous, built for eternity, was the true reflection of the soul of Philip II’.

Henry Kamen inveighs against this still prevalent gloomy view, and denounces his professional colleagues for ignoring historical sources to suit their polemical purposes. Philip and his sisters, he maintains, played practical jokes on the monks of the Escorial. The king enjoyed hunting, and his love of the countryside was Wordsworthian. On his journey to the Netherlands, Germany and Italy between 1548 and 1550, he was ‘an open-minded young man, eager to learn’. The buildings he saw in Flanders were a major influence on the architecture of the Escorial. He introduced Flemish gardening to Spain; and patronised, among many others,Titian and the Flemish artist Antonis Mor, who painted one of the best of many portraits of the king. The Escorial was to house a collection of 1,600 pictures.