An exhibition at the Gallery of the Royal Collections in Madrid, open until 12 October, is dedicated to Fernando Brambila, an Italian-born artist whose views of Spain’s royal palaces helped shape the way the country pictures its monarchy’s heritage.
Training in Italy
Brambila was born in 1763 in Cassano d’Adda, near Milan. He trained in perspective and architecture — skills that allowed him to turn cities and landscapes into precise visual records.
The Malaspina expedition
In the late 18th century, Brambila joined the great Spanish scientific expedition led by Alejandro Malaspina, which sailed around the Spanish empire in the Americas and the Pacific. His task was to draw ports, forts, monuments and townscapes in places such as Guam, Manila, Macau, Sydney, Lima and Montevideo. These drawings were more than decoration: they gave the Spanish navy valuable information about defences and urban layouts at the end of the Enlightenment.
Court painter
After his return to Spain, Brambila was appointed painter to the royal chamber by Charles IV in 1799, with responsibilities as an architect and decorator. His interest, however, lay more in places than in people.
The royal sites
Between 1821 and 1833, Ferdinand VII commissioned him to paint a series of views of the royal sites: Aranjuez, La Granja, El Escorial and the Royal Palace in Madrid. Painted in oil to hang in the palaces, they reached a much wider public through engravings, creating a shared image of these places for generations of Spaniards.
He also recorded the ruins of Zaragoza after the sieges of the Napoleonic War, turning destruction into a sober testimony.
Between science and stage
Brambila’s work sits between two worlds. As a surveyor, he recorded streets, façades, gardens and canals with scientific accuracy. As a designer, he arranged them with a sense of theatre, as if setting the stage for a royal procession.
The exhibition’s curator, Isabel María Rodríguez Marco, argues that he is essential to understanding how Spain’s visual identity was built. In a time of fleeting images, his patient, detailed views invite visitors to look slowly — and to ask how much of what we “remember” about a place actually comes from the pictures we have inherited.
