January 2009

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Philip III of Spain, who reigned from 1598 to 1621, tends to fare poorly in the pages of history books. Although he presided over a mighty empire, whose territories included the Iberian peninsula, Sicily, Naples, Milan, Burgundy, Flanders, Austria, the Tyrol and most of the New World from the tip of Argentina to the coast of California, he took virtually no interest in governing his far-flung realm. He preferred grouse hunting and colourful religious festivals to the affairs of state, seldom interacted with his subjects, and delegated all practical authority over policy and administration to his valido – or favourite – the avaricious Duke of Lerma, who essentially ruled as king in all but name. Little wonder, then, that when compared to his father, Philip II, the fearsome counter-Reformation warrior, or to his own son, Philip IV, a celebrated patron of the arts, Philip III has generally been considered a second-rate sovereign.

In recent years, however, scholars have begun to challenge at least some of the received wisdom about Philip III’s reign. The American historian Paul C. Allen has argued persuasively, for instance, that the Duke of Lerma’s decision to end the ruinously expensive wars inherited from Philip II did not represent, as is often alleged, a pusillanimous retreat in the face of a better organised enemy, but rather a grand strategy of retrenchment that ushered in a period of relative ease under Philip III and allowed Spain to fight with renewed vigour under Philip IV. Of course, Spain’s military fortunes ultimately went from bad to worse, but it does seem credible that Lerma’s ‘Pax Hispanica’ set the stage for substantial accomplishments in the cultural sphere, with Cervantes publishing Don Quixote and Gongora, Quevedo and Lope de Vega producing an astonishing outpouring of lyric and dramatic verse during this period.

As the Prado’s landmark 1993 exhibition ‘Los pintores del reinado de Felipe III’ beautifully demonstrated, the art of painting also flourished throughout Phillip III’s years in power – which were bookended by the later stages of El Greco’s career and the early part of Velázquez’s – with Francisco Ribalta, Juan Bautista Maino, Pedro Orrente and the still-life masters Juan Sánchez Cotán and Juan van der Hamen at the height of their powers.

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