Calderón and the Art of 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). 

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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.