Staging the Spectacle of Majesty

From the sixteenth century onwards the Spanish Habsburg dynasty developed a complex practice of court ceremonial that was implemented across its network of Reales Sitios (royal palaces, residences, and, estates). In parallel, the Spanish Habsburgs amassed a world-renowned collection of sumptuary objects and artworks. Combinations of rituals, spaces and objects were deployed to stage a ceremonial spectacle that foregrounded the monarchy’s power and transmitted an idea of regal magnificence. The purpose of this book is to analyse the representation of this idea of regal grandeur. It brings together a range of studies that focus on court ceremony, the Reales Sitios, collecting, and symbolic language as different facets of one and the same phenomenon. The monarchy’s lavish, visual, and sensory concept of royal power was also transferred to the uppermost tier of the nobility, those closest to the monarch, and, likewise, this phenomenon was susceptible to the influence exerted by other European courts, especially within the peninsular, yet also at the Habsburg viceregal courts.

• Edited by Inmaculada Rodríguez