Joana, a Louca

Pradilla painted this enormous canvas in 1877 from Rome, where he held a fellowship, and it made his name almost overnight. It shows Joanna of Castile, remembered as Joanna the Mad, standing widowed and pregnant beside the coffin of her husband, Philip the Handsome. After his sudden death she refused to be parted from the body and had it carried across Castile, and Pradilla catches the funeral halted on a cold, windswept plain, torches guttering, her retinue huddled and waiting on her while she stares at the casket. It won the top medal at the National Exhibition in Madrid and again at the Paris Universal Exposition in 1878, and copies of it spread everywhere. What Pradilla gives her is not raving madness but a fixed, exhausted grief, one still figure the whole cortège cannot move.