The story
Visitors to this chapel look first at two white marble tombs with carved effigies lying side by side. The bodies themselves are below, down a narrow stair, in a crypt holding five plain lead coffins marked with initials. Two of them belong to Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, the Catholic Monarchs, who took Granada, the last Muslim kingdom in Spain, in 1492 and chose the conquered city as their burial place.
The chapel went up between 1505 and 1517 under the architect Enrique Egas, in the late Gothic style that Spain names after Isabella herself. The Florentine sculptor Domenico Fancelli carved the monarchs' tomb in Carrara marble, finished in 1517. Beside it stands a second monument, by the Spanish sculptor Bartolomé Ordóñez, for their daughter Joanna, remembered as Joanna the Mad, and her husband Philip the Handsome.
The surprise is in the sacristy, now a small museum. Isabella's will asked that devotional paintings from her own collection be brought here, and more than 30 of them remain, mostly small panels from Flanders. There are works by Rogier van der Weyden, Dieric Bouts and Hans Memling, the painter of Bruges, among them Memling's diptych of the Deposition. One Italian picture stands apart, an Agony in the Garden by the Florentine master Sandro Botticelli. The same room keeps the queen's crown and sceptre, and King Ferdinand's sword.
