Calderón and Painting

Organised jointly by the Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico and the Museo Nacional del Prado, the route Calderón and Painting aims to invite the public to contemplate the Baroque painting of the permanent collection from the conceptual and aesthetic subtlety of Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681). Designed as an intervention in thirteen rooms on the first floor of the Villanueva Building and in the Central Gallery, the route is structured in three levels that complement each other. A selection of quotes from Calderón, hung on the walls, suggest a dialogue between the lucidity of the author and the language of Baroque painters. At the same time, a series of paintings, commented upon Calderón’s theatre, enable the analysis of several remarkable concerns of the author and his time, both thematically and formally. In order to explore them in greater depth, the tour is completed by several texts that contextualise his thinking in relation to painting.

Plan first floor

Selected works:

1. Rooms 11, 12, 27, 28 | Calderón and the Art of Painting
2. Rooms 12, 14, 15, 15A, 28, 29 | Translating and Rethinking
3. Rooms 9, 10, 26 | Critical Complicities
4. Rooms 7, 7A, 8, 8A | Identity Tolls
5. Rooms 9A, 10A | The Emergence of Contemporary Thought

1. Calderón and the Art of Painting

Pedro Calderón de la Barca was a renowned Spanish playwright. He occasionally worked as a set designer and was an art enthusiast, in particular the art of Velázquez. In addition to nurturing this fondness of his as a collector, at the end of his career he theorised on this artistic expression when, during a tax lawsuit between Madrid’s Attorney General and the city’s painters, Calderón was asked to testify on their behalf, on account of the inclination that the author had always had towards pictorial creation. Furthermore, his theatre abounds in reflections on our way of apprehending reality and “encoding” it into mythological, philosophical, theological, artistic or scientific mutable discourses.

2. Translating and Rethinking

In that sense, Calderón’s theatre never ceases to remind us that translation was a cultural phenomenon of enormous significance in his time, not only because it contributed to the revision of classical postulates by critically re-reading the sources, but also because it demonstrated the influence that interpretative processes have over reality. In a certain way, mythological fables, religious dogmas, craft techniques or pictorial practices, as well as the capture of stimuli through the senses and the nervous system, translate reality on the basis of human limitations.

3. Critical Complicities

If Calderón’s theatre has had an enormous impact on later great artists, it is largely due to the importance that the author grants to reflection upon perception and communication. Although Calderón’s plays are sometimes dogmatic or propagandistic, there is always a critique of conventions and language. This critique subtly anticipates the profound changes that would shake the regimes that the author seems to defend.

4. Identity Tolls

In Calderón de la Barca’s theatre, the world is understood as the projection of a wider reality. Thus, life consists of a perpetual the atricalisation. Such an approach highlights the enormous influence that creators can exert on collective imaginary. In order to access reality, our intelligence must pay the toll of the senses and the representational forms. So as to construct collective memory, artistic mediation is unavoidable.

5. The Emergence of Contemporary Thought

To acknowledge the intellectual complexity of Calderón’s works, we should consider that the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation were neither homogeneous nor exactly antagonistic phenomena. In fact, syncretism with classical culture and the rediscovery of Early Christianity encouraged theological debates across Europe, creating a common ground for the development of contemporary scientific thought.

The curators are Albert Arribas and Xavier Albertí.