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When visitors stroll through the Nasher Museum of Art's first blockbuster exhibition,"El Greco to Velázquez: Art During the Reign of Philip III," this fall, they'll see exquisitely rendered still lifes, opulent portraits of royalty, and stirring religious images, all produced in Spain during the early part of the seventeenth century. What won't be apparent is the show's unexpected starting point: the dark, dank attic of a former hospital in Toledo, Spain.
Twenty-one years ago, in the winter of 1987, Sarah Schroth was holed up in that musty attic poring over neglected parchment folders that had accumulated centuries' worth of dust, hoping to find something-anything-about the subject of her doctoral dissertation.
Schroth, then a graduate student at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, was curious about the collecting habits of King Philip III and his court. Conventional thinking among art historians was that work produced during Philip's reign was barely worth noting, particularly compared with the rich and extensive collections assembled by his father, Philip II, and son, Philip IV. Art historians scornfully referred to him as, in the words of one, "the Philip in between."
But Schroth had a hunch there was more to the story. It made no sense, for example, that this period would have been so stagnant in the visual arts-a chasm between the remarkably vibrant production under Philips II and IV-especially considering the epochal flowering of Spanish literature: Miguel Cervantes wrote Don Quixote; playwright Lope de Vega produced his most significant body of work, including Fuente Ovejuna; and poet Luis de Góngora redefined Baroque verse through complex works such as the Soledads.
And she knew that the powerful and influential Duke of Lerma, Philip III's chief minister and favorite, had commissioned a portrait from Peter Paul Rubens and collected El Greco, whose work Philip's father had disliked. So when she was unable to find much on the collecting habits of the king himself, she turned to the Duke of Lerma. After spending five fruitless months searching all of Spain's well-known historic archives, she took a gamble on one last out-of-the-way depository: the private Medinaceli archive in Toledo (one of Lerma's daughters had married into the family).
It was a long shot. The Duke of Lerma's last male heir died in 1636, so the family archives could have been dispersed in bits and pieces to any number of subsequent generations, or destroyed. Other scholars who'd conducted research there told her she was wasting her time-they'd seen only documents from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Every morning for a week, Schroth caught the bus from Madrid to Toledo to go through page after page of meticulously recorded manuscripts, written with methodical precision in Castilian Spanish cursive. In the cramped room that originally had been used as a servant's bedroom, lit only by the sunshine that came through a small arched window, Schroth leafed through hundreds of pages listing Medinaceli family possessions. Each night, she came home empty-handed, no mention of Lerma's collections to be found.
It was in her second week, after scrutinizing several dozen of the hundreds of uncatalogued bundles that lined one wall of the attic, that Schroth found what she was looking for: an inventory of paintings owned or commissioned by the Duke of Lerma-448 in all. "My heart soared," she says.
"These papers were filthy, and somewhat hard to read, because the ink from the back of pages had bled through to the front," she recalls. "They had probably gone undisturbed since the nineteenth century. But I realized that I had found proof of Lerma's influence and patronage."
With this document alone, she had enough for her dissertation, but still she kept looking. In the weeks that followed, she uncovered twelve more household inventories, never before published, virtually unknown, and telling a remarkable tale. Not only was the Duke of Lerma, Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas, a prolific collector-estimates of his painting collection alone range from 1,500 to more than 2,700 works-he was a gifted connoisseur with a discerning eye. His holdings included works by Italians Tiziano Vecelli (Titian), Paolo Veronese, and Antonio da Correggio; Flemish painters Peter Paul Rubens and Frans Pourbus the Younger; the great Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch; and the Spaniards Francisco Ribalta and Juan Pantoja de la Cruz. Thousands more of the works were unattributed.
As Schroth began to comprehend the breadth and depth of Lerma's collections, she began to grasp-slowly at first, and then with a giddy mixture of disbelief and excitement-that Philip III's reign, from 1598 to 1621, produced a breathtaking array of innovative and highly accomplished artistic achievements.
"I knew that what I found was big," recalls Schroth, now a curator at the Nasher. "But I also knew that I was working against the grain of what was accepted in art history about that time."
When she reported her findings to her dissertation adviser, Jonathan Brown, he recalls being "bowled over."
"No one had suspected that the Duke of Lerma was such a major collector of art," he says. "This was a huge find, not only for Spanish art but for European art in general. Discoveries like this almost never happen."
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