Monument to Alfonso XII, Retiro Park Lake, Madrid, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Monument to Alfonso XII, Retiro Park Lake, Madrid, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Monument to Alfonso XII, Retiro Park Lake, Madrid, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-95D4F8

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A tourist in Franco's Spain stood at the edge of the Retiro's great rectangular lake in the 1950s and framed the Monument to Alfonso XII through a curtain of willow and plane-tree branches, which was the compositional convention of the era — the idea being that nature lending a frame elevated a snapshot into Art. The monument itself, completed in 1922 after decades of argument about what kind of king Alfonso XII had actually been, answered the question by commissioning enough marble colonnades, allegorical lions, and heroic bronzes to settle the matter permanently in his favour. Spain under Franco maintained such royal monuments with pointed enthusiasm, the dead Bourbon being considerably easier to celebrate than most living alternatives. The lake in summer was given over to rented rowboats and Sunday families conducting the timeless ritual of going nowhere very slowly on water, which the monument's equestrian Alfonso surveyed from his plinth with the expression of a man who had expected more.

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