Doña Isabel la Católica dictando su testamento

When Rosales showed this in Madrid in 1864, Spain was a diminished country looking hard at its own past, and he handed it a scene from the height of its power: Queen Isabella, the ruler who backed Columbus and unified Castile and Aragon, dictating her will at Medina del Campo in the autumn of 1504, a few days before she died. He painted it in Rome, a young man not yet 30, and worked the whole canvas in muted greys and browns so that a single note of colour carries the room, the red mantle of her husband, King Ferdinand, standing among the mourners. The scribe waits. The queen is still giving orders. It won the first medal that year and made Rosales the leading Spanish painter of his generation, though he had barely a decade left to live.