The Relief of Genoa by the 2nd Marquis of Santa Cruz

The room this was made for, the Salón de Reinos in Philip IV's new Buen Retiro palace, was hung with 12 victories, and most of them came from one year, 1625. Velázquez's Surrender of Breda hung in the same hall. By the time the canvases were delivered, in 1634 and 1635, that run was long over and Spain was sliding into open war with France. Genoa held its place on the wall because the republic was where the crown's credit lived. Genoese bankers carried the Spanish war debt, and the city was the Mediterranean end of the route that moved money and soldiers up to Flanders. When French and Savoyard troops closed on it in 1625, a fleet under Álvaro de Bazán, second Marquis of Santa Cruz, broke the siege. Pereda, then in his early twenties, painted the arrival: the Doge of Genoa receiving Bazán, with ships and a celebrating crowd behind them. The canvas later left Spain for Paris and London, and returned to Madrid in 1912 as a gift from the collector Marcel de Nemes.