Autodafé sur la Plaza Mayor de Madrid

This records a single day, 30 June 1680, in the main square of Madrid. The young king Carlos II sat through the whole of it, from morning into night, beside his new French wife and his mother, watching an auto de fe, the public ceremony in which the Inquisition read out its sentences against people condemned for offences against the faith. Wooden tiers had been raised all around the Plaza Mayor to seat the court and the crowd, a temporary architecture built for the occasion by a royal official who later published a book describing every stage of it. Rizi painted the scene three years afterward, and it remains the fullest picture we have of one of these events. He fills the square with hundreds of small figures, the accused in their tall pointed caps led out below the watching king.