In 2022 Madrid’s Museo Nacional del Prado introduced a new initiative to guide visitors through its vast galleries: “The Female Perspective” (El Prado en femenino), which highlights all the ways in which women have shaped its holdings as collectors and sponsors of art (promotoras artísticas). Curiously, in English we call these promotoras “patronesses” of the arts rather than “matrons,” as if such activities were a fatherly action more naturally suited to men. The Prado’s collection, however, tells quite another story. A short film narrated by Noelia García Pérez, a professor of art history at the University of Murcia and the director of “The Female Perspective,” shows what the museum’s galleries would look like if the works acquired by women were removed: a series of yawning gaps and blank walls (albeit walls recently painted in the strong, striking colors that the Prado’s director, Miguel Falomir Faus, has introduced to complement both the artworks and the lofty spaces). Tellingly, the camera moves to the clack of high heels to show that the film “sees” its subject explicitly through women’s eyes.

Through a series of find-it-yourself maps, “The Female Perspective” has connected promotoras artísticas from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries with the works they bought, inherited, or commissioned—a hunt for treasure that leads visitors to well-known masterpieces but also to gems long buried by lack of attention rather than layers of dirt. These itineraries, clever and unfailingly rewarding, have made the initiative a great success. As a more permanent legacy, the museum has produced companion volumes for each of the three itineraries introduced in 2022, 2024, and 2026. They contain miniature versions of the maps as well as brief accounts of the patronesses and the objects they added to the collection.

The earliest promotoras were all royal; the Museo Nacional del Prado was founded in 1819 as the Royal Museum (shortly thereafter renamed the National Museum of Paintings and Sculptures) to share the Spanish crown’s vast artistic holdings with the public. The women featured in “The Female Perspective,” many of them eventually rulers in their own right, made their way successfully through a system of government that drove other women of their rank to madness, misery, and isolation; they displayed an astonishing ability to adapt to new environments, new languages, and treacherous courts. Their first duty as royal wives—often married in their teens—may have been to bear the next generation of European rulers, but in theory they were also expected to govern their realms in their husbands’ absences. Much to the surprise of the male ministers who surrounded them, the women featured in this series also governed in fact.

The Female Perspective: Women Art Patrons of the Museo del Prado (1451–1633) begins, like the Kingdom of Spain, with Isabella I of Castile, who united two Iberian kingdoms and created the modern Spanish state when at the age of eighteen she married the fifteen-year-old Ferdinand of Aragon in 1469. The last surviving heirs of their respective branches of the Trastámara dynasty, they were also cousins, and hence they required a papal dispensation to marry; when Pope Paul II refused to oblige, a suitable document was simply forged in his name. Isabella continued to rule Castile in her own right, while Ferdinand retained his hold on Aragon; together they were known as Their Most Catholic Majesties. (The two realms were not officially conjoined until the eighteenth century.) To secure their claims to their respective thrones, the couple moved constantly from city to city without ever establishing a single capital.

Castile was the wealthier state, and Isabella in many ways was the dominant partner in the marriage. A portrait from 1490 by an anonymous Flemish painter conveys her majesty—that is, her authority—as regal reserve. Isabella’s wealth and rank show forth in her damask gown and an elaborate pendant, a gift from her father and hence a tangible token of her right as a woman to claim the throne, but other details—the garment’s modest cut, the simple hairstyle, the unobtrusive prayer book she has closed over one finger to mark her place—suggest that she carries out her responsibilities with piety and practicality. She averts her dark-ringed eyes from the viewer, but they are not downcast; Isabella is a queen, after all, subordinate to no one but the God who anointed her.

Isabella’s artistic tastes ran to Flemish masters such as her anonymous portraitist and the equally anonymous, moderately talented painter of The Virgin of the Catholic Monarchs (1491–1493), which shows the royal couple and their two eldest children, Juan and Isabella, kneeling before an enthroned Virgin and Child. Four members of the Dominican Order flank the royal family: Saint Dominic, the theologian Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century Italian inquisitor known as Peter Martyr (Pietro da Verona), identified by his wounded scalp and the sword plunged into his chest, and, behind Ferdinand, the notorious Tomás de Torquemada, the first Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition, an institution established by Their Most Catholic Majesties in 1480 to ensure that converts from Judaism and Islam in formerly multicultural Spain did not fall back into their old faiths. Under their rule, with the devout Isabella as the driving force, Spanish society took an increasingly intolerant turn: in 1492 Ferdinand conquered Granada, the peninsula’s last Islamic city-state, Isabella sent Columbus across the ocean in search of wealth and new converts, and Their Most Catholic Majesties expelled the Jews from Spain.

In part because of the confused struggle to establish the successor to Ferdinand and Isabella, the monarchy’s first large-scale collector, male or female, was the remarkable Mary of Hungary, one of six children born in Flanders to Their Most Catholic Majesties’ daughter Juana and her husband, the dashing Habsburg heir Philip, Duke of Burgundy, known as Philip the Fair. Their marriage in 1496 added the Low Countries to the Spanish dominions and the distinctive Habsburg physiognomy to the Trastámara gene pool. Mary, the couple’s fifth child and third daughter, barely saw either of her parents. Philip died in 1506, a year after her birth, and Juana was declared mad and permanently confined in 1509 when Mary was four. Together with three of her five siblings, she grew up with their aunt, the Archduchess Margaret of Austria, Philip’s twice-widowed sister, who served the Holy Roman Empire as regent of the Netherlands from 1507 to 1530.

One of the most respected rulers of early modern Europe and a woman of famously independent spirit, Margaret was also a conscientious guardian of her titled brood, ensuring each child an excellent education (which included the handling of weaponry, economics, and military strategy for the girls as well as the boys) and an advantageous marriage. Mary, destined since birth for Louis II Jagiellon of Hungary as a way of reinforcing the long-standing Habsburg connection to Eastern Europe, was married by proxy in 1515 at the age of ten, but only went to live with her husband in 1521 and was officially crowned queen of Bohemia in 1522. The pair fell deeply in love, but in 1526 Louis died in battle against the Ottoman troops of Suleiman the Magnificent. Devastated, Mary tried to persuade her brother Ferdinand I to take charge of Hungary, but instead, as the newly crowned king of Bohemia (succeeding the slain Louis), he appointed her regent of her adopted country. She was twenty-one. She ruled Hungary until 1531, when her eldest brother, Charles, long since anointed as Holy Roman Emperor (as Charles V) and king of Spain (as Charles I), summoned her to replace their beloved aunt Margaret as governor of the Netherlands.

Mary governed the Low Countries for twenty-four years with a cool head and careful attention to finance, all the while amassing her impressive collection of art. Notably she commissioned works by Italian as well as Flemish masters and thereby exerted a defining influence on subsequent royal taste. In 1555, when Charles resigned his imperial title and withdrew to the Spanish monastery of Yuste, Mary, now fifty, asked to be relieved of her position as well. She retired with some trepidation to Spain to be near her sister Leonor (who had retired to Castile after the death of her second husband, François I of France) and took up residence in the castle of Cigales near Valladolid, staying well clear of her nephew Philip II, the new king of Spain. When Mary died in 1558, her collection passed to the crown. She and Philip may have disagreed on religion (Mary had been in contact with Martin Luther) and politics, but they shared a passion for Titian and the old masters of the German and Netherlandish tradition.

A pair of sixteenth-century marble busts of the two retired widows are displayed in the Prado’s Room 56. Leonor’s bust has been attributed to the Flemish sculptor and architect Jacques Dubroeucq, who designed Mary’s palace in the Belgian city of Binche as a rival to the French royal residence of Fontainebleau (it was vindictively demolished in 1554 by the French king Henri II) and taught the Flemish sculptor Jean de Boulogne, who found fame in Florence as Giambologna. Mary’s bust is ascribed to the Italian sculptor Leone Leoni and his son Pompeo. Both women are dressed in widow’s weeds, with an unflattering white cloth pulled down over their heads, but Leonor’s headgear and robe are far more elaborate than her sister’s, as would have befitted the dowager queen of France. With their half-closed eyes and enveloping garments, they are as unobtrusive as their royal rank will permit and evidently related to each other.

Both Philip the Fair and Juana of Castile were regarded as attractive, but their children, especially Charles and Ferdinand, exhibited extreme versions of the Habsburgs’ hereditary long heads, short upper jaws, pendulous lower lip, and protruding mandible; Charles could not close his mouth (which led to the Elizabethan English jeer “jump as Germins’ lips,” in which “jump” meant “aligned”). Their mother’s alleged madness and their odd facial features—both Leonor and Mary are long of face and large of jaw, and Mary, at least, was accused of looking and acting mannish—had no effect on these siblings’ acuity, but their portraits turn that distinctive appearance into a mark of their well-attested personal distinction. The accomplishments of these two well-loved, highly competent women put them beyond conventional standards of beauty, though Mary, certainly, would have welcomed a life of less constant scrutiny, both public and familial.

It was Mary who acquired Hunt at the Castle of Torgau in Honor of Charles V (1544), a detail of which appears on the cover of the first volume of The Female Perspective. It is part of a marvelous series by Lucas Cranach the Elder depicting an imaginary hunting expedition in which Mary’s brother Charles chases down deer and wildfowl along the banks of a turbulent river that wends its roiling way beneath Torgau, the castle home of Elector Johann Friedrich of Saxony and his wife, Sibylle of Cleves. Sibylle had married Johann Friedrich in 1527, having narrowly avoided becoming the fourth wife of Henry VIII; the English king chose her sister Anne instead and then famously rejected her as unattractive. Cranach, always a great painter of women, took many an opportunity to portray Sibylle as a cat-eyed beauty of marked intelligence; here she leads the ladies of her court, all in expensive red livery, in pursuit of pheasant. The Electress of Saxony outdoes them all in a low-cut, daringly backless bodice (saved from scandal by a modest linen undershirt) above a pleated skirt of gold-embroidered velvet, ribbons twined around her silken sleeves, and three coral necklaces piled around her neck. Silk turban and rakishly angled velvet cap firmly in place, Sibylle looks coyly back over her shoulder as she aims a loaded crossbow with feline precision. Not surprisingly, this sixteenth-century pistolera was also an avid chess player, and Mary, an accomplished pistolera in her own right, must have seen in her a kindred soul.

Mary’s collection also contained Titian’s 1548 portrait of Sibylle’s husband after Charles V had defeated him in battle, a painful red sword slash disfiguring his portly face in a rare, raw picture of defeat. The paintings Mary commissioned from the Venetian master were similarly fierce images of punishment: large canvases showing the hellish agonies of the great mythological sinners Sisyphus, Tityus, Tantalus, and Ixion. The paintings of Tantalus and Ixion have disappeared, but Sisyphus, pushing his stone forever uphill, and Tityus, chain-bound with an eagle devouring his liver, still decorate the walls of the Prado. Miguel Falomir has written the entry on these images, noting that large male nudes in contorted positions are, to say the least, an unusual choice of subject for an aristocratic woman intent on commissioning mythological paintings for her castle, but the chatelaine of Binche was not an ordinary aristocratic woman; she was a head of state making an aggressive assertion of her authority. The magnificent equestrian portrait Titian painted of her brother Charles V after the Battle of Mühlberg (in which Johann Friedrich of Saxony came to grief) somehow ended up in Mary’s collection, too.

The second volume of The Female Perspective introduces us to, among other characters, two of the figures in Las Meninas (1656), the monumental painting by Diego Velázquez that dominates one gallery of the Prado today: the tiny Infanta Margarita Teresa and her mother, Mariana of Austria, barely visible as a reflected image in a mirror alongside her husband, King Philip IV.

Both Mariana and her daughter, pawns in the Habsburg dynasty’s perpetual effort to retain control of both Spain and the Holy Roman Empire (i.e., Austria), were married off at fifteen to their respective uncles, Philip IV of Spain and Leopold I of Austria, in hopes of producing heirs of the most refined royal blood, a preoccupation further reinforced by the Spanish obsession, from the time of Isabella of Castile, with limpieza de sangre—the absence of non-Christian ancestry. Rather than purity, of course, that obsession brought on all the problems of inbreeding that contemporaries must have recognized from their experience with dogs and horses but failed to apply to the procreation of human beings. Mariana’s only surviving son, Charles II, was so visibly frail that she acted as his regent; her daughter, Margarita Teresa, worn out by the birth of four children (three of whom died as infants) and two miscarriages in the span of six years, died during her seventh pregnancy at the age of twenty-one.

The infanta’s legacy to the Prado consists mostly of the stream of portraits her formidable mother commissioned at every stage of the girl’s short life; she was identifiable from the age of three by the smooth shock of blonde hair that swept across her forehead from a side part and was secured by a barrette above the opposite ear. The part changed sides, but the hairdo was immutable, the essence of her identity among legions of long-faced Habsburg women. Most of her portraits were sent to Vienna as a reminder of her eligibility as a potential consort to her uncle Leopold, but some remained in Spain to reinforce the image of an attractive young woman with a pronounced talent for music.

Mariana, on the other hand, was a force to be reckoned with from the day she arrived in Madrid as a teenager. Las Meninas may portray her through a glass, darkly, but Velázquez also painted the queen consort around 1665 in full regalia, immobilized beneath a broad beribboned wig and a hoop-skirted gown so wide that she cannot bring her arms down to her sides. The face that looks out from under all the finery is alert, wary, and acutely human. A scarlet satin drape has been drawn aside to unveil her like a mystery or a dramatic spectacle, while in the background stands, in splendid isolation, a mechanical clock. Mariana was a woman who knew how to bide her time. Her marriage to Philip, despite the thirty-year difference in their ages, lasted nearly a quarter-century, and it was Philip who secured her right to act as regent for their three-year-old son, Charles II, much against the wishes of other figures at court.

As a widow, Mariana exchanged her wigs and farthingales for a nunlike ensemble of white robe and black veil and ruled on her son’s behalf for ten years. A portrait from circa 1670 by Velázquez’s student Juan Carreño de Miranda shows how cleverly she uses the royal art collections to advance her claims to rule and the price of defiance: Jacopo Tintoretto’s Judith and Holofernes (1577), with its implicit threat—“Mess with me and I’ll have your head”—hangs in the Prado next to Titian’s cringeworthy Philip II Offering the Infante Fernando to Victory (1573–1575), almost certainly the product of the great Venetian’s workshop rather than his own, by then arthritic, hands. A palace revolt displaced Mariana and the infante from Madrid for two years, but in 1679 Charles returned at eighteen to assume the kingship until his death in 1700, and Mariana, until her own death in 1696, remained a power behind the throne.

Characteristically she chose to mark her return with an auto-da-fé in Madrid’s Plaza Mayor in 1680. Francisco Rizi’s painting of the event, completed in 1683, now hangs in the Prado, a grim reminder of Mariana’s noted “Austrian” piety. Seated next to her son and his consort, Marie-Louise of Orléans, she holds a prayer book as the Inquisition immolates heretics. It was also she, apparently, who decided that lying in a coffin next to the exhumed remains of her late husband would help poor Charles to conceive a child, despite his physical inability to do so. (His autopsy revealed a single shriveled testicle.)

It is a great relief to move from the Dowager Queen Mariana to an older contemporary who flatly refused to become the mother of kings: Christina of Sweden, who converted to Catholicism in Lutheran Uppsala, abdicated, and moved to Italy with the hope of becoming queen of Naples. To that end she sent a series of paintings and sculptures to Philip IV that now grace the Prado: an equestrian portrait by Sebastien Bourdon keeps comparatively modest company with Titian’s splendid equestrian image of Charles V, Velázquez’s equestrian portrait of the Count-Duke Olivares, and an Adam and Eve by Albrecht Dürer.

The most impressive legacy to the Prado, however, came a generation later, through the offices of another consort from another dynasty: Isabella Farnese, the sole, and fascinating, protagonist of The Female Perspective’s third volume. Isabella was the second wife of Philip V, crowned king of Spain in 1700 after Charles II named him as his successor in his will. The Bourbon prince—the grandson of Louis XIV and his Spanish wife, Maria Teresa, the daughter of Philip IV—had an excellent claim to the vacant throne. The seventeen-year-old Philip V then faced another fourteen years of bitter warfare as the Sun King and the Habsburgs of Austria, who also claimed the Kingdom of Spain, fought the War of the Spanish Succession; Philip finally retained his crown by renouncing any right to rule France. His first wife, the popular Maria Luisa Gabriella of Savoy, died in February 1714, a month before the war ended. A search went out immediately for a new consort.

It was this fraught political situation and the vast expenses incurred by years of war that turned the daughter of a provincial grand duke into a possible candidate for the next royal alliance. As the sole heiress to the family of the Dukes of Parma and Piacenza, Isabella Farnese was, as Jane Austen might say, possessed of a large fortune. Smallpox had left her face slightly scarred (but also eliminated the threat of that deadly disease), and at eighteen she was healthy and energetic, in contrast to the frail Maria Luisa. Furthermore, as the heiress to a minor if prosperous Italian state, with a pope in her lineage and a Habsburg connection (her great-great-grandfather Ottavio was married to Margaret of Parma, known as “Madama,” the spirited illegitimate daughter of Charles V), the grandees of the Spanish court would have regarded her as respectable but definitely of lower rank than themselves, and thus someone who could be held in check without much difficulty. The influential Cardinal Giulio Alberoni, a longtime agent for the Farnese family, reported that she was an obedient girl of limited intelligence.

The Farnese family’s view of itself was rather different. The fifteenth-century chronicler Annius of Viterbo traced their lineage back to the Etruscans and ancient Egypt, and they continued to boast of that Etruscan identity long after Annius had been exposed as a forger. As far as the Farnese were concerned, they had been civilized long before the Romans conquered the barbarian tribesmen of the Iberian peninsula. Local archives in their ancestral haunts just north of Rome recorded the family’s presence since the tenth century. They could boast only one pope, Paul III, but he had strutted across the same historical stage as Charles V and rubbed elbows with Titian and Michelangelo. The Farnese built palazzi as big as their own self-image and amassed collections of art and antiquities extensive enough to fill them. Four generations after Ottavio Farnese and his Habsburg wife went off to make their home in Parma, something of Madama’s brio was still detectable in the Archduchess Isabella.

Isabella Farnese married Philip V by proxy in 1714 before undertaking a long, unhurried journey overland to Madrid. For a full three weeks she stopped in Pau, at the foot of the Pyrenees just short of the Spanish border, where Cardinal Alberoni instructed her in the ways of the Spanish court. Above all he warned her about Marie-Anne de la Trémoille, Princesse des Ursins, the late queen’s camarera mayor de palacio (chief lady-in-waiting) and reputedly the chief power behind the throne. The Princesse had hoped at first to succeed her mistress as queen; when that outcome looked impossible, she encouraged the choice of Isabella, sure that the young woman would prove as malleable as the thirteen-year-old Maria Luisa had proven in her day. When the two finally met, the Princesse lost no time in asserting her fearsome authority. “You’re late,” she scolded. (The queen had taken three months to join her husband.) “You’re banished,” Isabella replied. The Princesse protested. The king backed his wife. His support for his queen never wavered. Indeed, he took up residence in her apartments for the rest of his life.

Philip had always been subject to bouts of melancholy; fourteen years on a wobbly throne amid a raging war might erode a person’s confidence. Isabella eventually hired the famous Italian castrato Farinelli to sing to him as a form of music therapy, and she quickly learned to take over whenever he felt out of sorts, which was much of the time. She bore him seven children in addition to the four he had already sired with Maria Luisa, including the two sons who came before her own firstborn, Charles, in the line of succession. The first of these princely heirs, Louis, was crowned king in 1724 when Philip briefly abdicated but died seven months later. The second, Ferdinand, ascended to the throne when Philip died in 1746 and spent the next thirteen years in constant conflict with his potent stepmother.

Isabella’s son Charles, in the meantime, had secured the Spanish hold on Italy, reigning as Duke of Parma and Piacenza from 1731 and as king of Naples and Sicily from 1735. A great patron of art in his own right, he began the excavations at Pompeii (1748) and Herculaneum (1738) and in 1731 he initiated the transfer of the immense Farnese collection of antique statues to Naples from Rome (a process completed by his son and successor, Ferdinand IV). In 1759 Charles was finally crowned king of Spain, with his mother acting as regent for the three months it took to tear him away from Naples and pack him off to Spain in October of the same year. The dowager queen died in 1766 at the age of seventy-three.

With “The Female Perspective,” the Prado is rewriting the history of this enterprising woman who purchased a thousand paintings for the royal collection, marking them as hers with a discreet white stylized lily in the corner—not a French royal fleur-de-lis (although that was also hers by right of marriage) but a Farnese giglio. Three hundred and fifty-eight paintings and a large number of sculptures make up her contribution to the Prado’s collection and to “The Female Perspective.” The volume dedicated to this strong-willed, fearless queen emphasizes all the ways in which she used works of art to enhance her claims to her throne and to create an image of herself for the Spanish public. Noelia García Pérez’s opening essay provides a trenchant contrast to the account of the queen that we find in the authoritative Treccani Dictionary of Italian Biography, an entry written, moreover, by a woman scholar:

As for the young Isabella Farnese’s education, we know nothing definite; the later letters of her stepfather to Cardinal Alberoni enumerate her great intellectual gifts: she was taught to read and write in Latin, French, and German, and to dedicate hours of study to books on religion and history. But one has the impression that the portrait has been overdrawn and that the pitiless, albeit biased, image of her that emerges from the pages of Saint-Simon may be somewhat more accurate: a mediocre, if notably sly, intelligence, the lack of any real intellectual tastes, the absence of any capacity to acquire them in the face of a temperament as wilful as that wilfulness was well concealed.

García Pérez seems to be writing about an entirely different person:

During her stay in the principality of Monaco, she made a profound impression on Antonio I Grimaldi, who wrote a description of the young princess that was both accurate and revealing…. What most caught the prince’s attention was the natural grace of her presence, with a friendly smile, charming voice, and the use of the most exquisitely courteous phrases. Grimaldi saw something unusual in the queen for a young woman of her age: a resolute will and calm confidence that did not require gestures to be imposed. He also astutely noted that “due to her character, one would take her for a Florentine.” He concluded his description by emphasizing that Isabella possessed a great heart and that what above all distinguished her from other princesses was the attitude with which she faced the world.

At the Prado, we can see how she presented herself in her 1739 state portrait by Louis-Michel van Loo: clad in golden brocade, ermine tails dripping from her bodice and the lining of her mantle, a pearl bracelet with a cameo portrait of her husband on her left wrist, and her right hand pointing to her crown resting temporarily on a red velvet pillow. Her scarlet mantle and the throne behind her are embroidered in gold with lions, castles, and fleurs-de-lis—French, of course, but also Farnese. Her hair is fashionably powdered, her aspect that of a mature woman, and distinctly maternal. After more than a decade of marriage, her position as the mother of her family and her adopted nation are beyond dispute.

Without Isabella Farnese the Prado would have no paintings by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, the seventeenth-century artist whose sensitive images of the Madonna and Child rank among its most beloved works. It is she who sought out and snapped up the portrait Diego Velázquez painted of his wife, Juana Pacheco, as a Sibyl, two country scenes by Watteau, a John the Baptist inspired by Caravaggio and painted by the eighteenth-century Neapolitan master Francesco Solimena, a full complement of works by Rubens and Van Dyck, and rarities by masters she knew from the Farnese family collections that are now housed in Naples: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Correggio, Parmigianino. It was she who wrested Queen Christina of Sweden’s collection of antique statues in Rome from their last heir, Baldassarre Odescalchi, obtained a papal waiver to take them out of the Papal States, and arranged their shipment from the Roman port of Ripa Grande to Civitavecchia, across the sea to Alicante, and onward, via “covered waggons pulled by oxen,” to Segovia.

The hunt for the treasures she bequeathed to the Prado takes visitors all over the museum, and not surprisingly it was her son, Charles III, who commissioned the building itself in 1785, to house a new royal museum of natural history. Between them they were instrumental in bringing the eighteenth-century Enlightenment to both Naples and Madrid, inspired, in stark contrast to the last Habsburg rulers, by a passionate vision of a more universal idea of the common good and public service.

A similar vision stands behind the successive installments of “The Female Perspective” at the Prado. By seeing the women who contributed to its history as more complete characters, we also see their contemporaries, both female and male, in greater depth. (The sympathetic presentation of the hapless Charles II in Volume II is one example, emphasizing his human dignity rather than his physical defects—there was a sensitive person inside that beleaguered body and ungainly face.) The Female Perspective is really a universal perspective, just as Spain’s national collection really belongs to all of humanity. .