The Surrender of Granada

The Spanish Senate commissioned this after an earlier triumph by Pradilla, and he delivered a wall of history five and a half meters wide. It freezes 2 January 1492: Boabdil, the last Nasrid ruler of Granada, rides out to hand the city's keys to Ferdinand and Isabella, ending nearly 800 years of Muslim rule in Spain. Pradilla travelled to Granada to study the light and the ground, and he crowds the middle distance with a long procession under the walls of the Alhambra. The Senate paid him 50,000 pesetas, twice the agreed sum, and the king added a knighthood on top. The year it stages, 1492, was also the year Columbus first sailed west and the year Spain expelled its Jews.