Poema de Córdoba

This is not one picture but seven, a polyptych in which Julio Romero de Torres set out to paint the whole history of his native Cordoba at once. Each panel stands for a layer of the city, Roman, Jewish, Christian, the Cordoba of warriors, of the Baroque, of bullfighting, personified mostly by the dark-eyed local women he painted all his life. He began it around 1913 and showed it in Madrid at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts in 1915, calling the work the reincarnation of the past in the present. It stayed in the city it describes. Today it hangs in the museum that carries his name, in the house by the Guadalquivir where he was born and died.