Su Majestad escoja. The Ornamental Rock Sample Collection of the Royal Palace of Madrid

The terms ‘marble’ and ‘jasper’ were used in the eighteenth century to refer to what were also called ‘stones for polishing’ at the time – that is, stones that made a striking impression with their colours we well as their gleaming surfaces when polished. From the point of view of mineralogical and geological accuracy, the varied types of stones contained in the sample collection should be more aptly termed ‘ornamental rocks’. 
Philip V adopted the ‘royal marble policy’ drawn up by his grandfather Louis XIV in France: all the kingdom’s ‘marble’ quarries were, in principle, owned by the Crown, which regulated extraction and gave priority to the king’s works. This conveyed a message of national prestige, emphasising the territory’s natural wealth and the magnificence of the sovereign, who did not need to source the richest materials from outside his dominions. 
Philip V commissioned Filippo Juvarra, the most famous Italian architect of his time, to build the Royal Palace of Madrid. Juvarra’s work was continued from 1737 by his pupil Giovanni Battista Sacchetti and from 1760 by Francesco Sabatini. Juvarra and Sabatini had both trained in Rome, influenced by the school of Bernini, and used ornamental rocks in the Roman fashion. They sent for Roman marble masons specialised in applying coloured stone facings to a base stone, as if coating it in a ‘skin’ – hence the term impellecciato, which was Hispanicised as ‘impelichadores’, the name given to the craftsmen brought by Sabatini: Domenico Galeotti and Nicola Rappa. 

From 1742 to 1747 the ground floor of the Royal Palace was built and the main floor was planned. During those years preparations were made to extract all the ‘marble’ needed for the main floor, where the architecture was expected to create an impression of splendour and magnificence. Sacchetti's final design for the layout of the royal apartments was approved in 1747, and the architect was able to specify the type of stone – and therefore the colour – to be used for each element in the most representative areas.
The most impressive spaces in this regard were to be the Royal Chapel, the Queen's Gallery and several rooms in the ‘King's Apartments’: the guardroom, the ‘function’ room (for celebrations and balls), the antechambers and the audience room, now the Throne Room.
The people in charge of the works made a great effort to locate, explore and bring back samples from all the known quarries and any new ones they had heard about. When Ferdinand VI and Barbara of Braganza approved the chief architect's design for the decoration of the Palace in 1749, Sacchetti was already considering assembling a sample collection of more than a hundred types of stone. In 1766 this sample collection was still arranged in virtually the same way.

The advent of Charles III and the architect Francesco Sabatini led to a complete transformation of the Palace. Not only were the layout of the royal apartments and the designs for their decoration changed, but so was the entire concept of how to utilise the 'jaspers'.
Instead of completely panelling the walls, as Sacchetti had planned in the Throne Room and the Queen's Gallery, Charles III employed the marbles in floors, doors, fireplaces, friezes and cornices, always subordinating the effect to an overall idea. In the rooms designed by Gasparini, the marble floors match the woodwork, the silks and stuccowork on the walls and ceilings. In those decorated under Sabatini's supervision – the majority – there is a carefully calculated balance between the flooring and the wall elements. One of his most outstanding creations was the main staircase with its monolithic steps over four metres wide brought from Robledo de Chavela (Madrid).
Sabatini enlarged the sample collection to its current 301 varieties and sorted them into the still-extant eight chests in the 1790s. Also around this time he produced several impressive designs whose completion was thwarted: his unfinished project for the Throne Room and the oratories of Charles IV and the queen, both of which were dismantled by Alfonso XII, who also disassembled that of Charles III.
 

The sample collection continued to be used and the marble workshop remained active during the reign of Ferdinand VII, who ordered flooring for at least five rooms in his new private apartments in the Palace. His widow, Maria Christina, commissioned floors for another in 1840 – the only one for which the preparatory drawing survives, as the whereabouts of all the other earlier designs are unknown. No major decorative projects were undertaken here during the reign of Isabella II – unlike at El Escorial and La Granja – and the railway revolutionised the marble trade: it was no longer necessary to rely on Spanish quarries, and nor did the Crown have the revenues or prestige it had enjoyed before 1808.
The creation of the new Banqueting Hall and its adjacent rooms in 1880 by dismantling the apartments of Ferdinand VII involved transferring flooring – both eighteenth century and Fernandine – to other parts of the Palace, destroying three magnificent oratories, and redecorating. A large amount of French and Italian marble was used for the latter as well as, for the last time, marble from Spanish quarries represented in the sample collection. For example, a variety from Espejón (Soria), which had been very popular with Philip II but not with the eighteenth-century Bourbons, was extensively employed in the Banqueting Hall. Alfonso XII and Alfonso XIII extended the marble flooring to more rooms on the main floor of the Palace and also to the lower floor, in the new guest quarters and the apartments for the Prince and Princess of Asturias.

The choice of certain ‘marbles’ over others is always a matter of ‘taste’, which changes from one period to another. We will now look at some of the main ‘marbles’ used in the rooms of the Royal Palace of Madrid.
Yellow and purple Espejón marble is one of the most widely employed varieties in the Palace's decoration. Green marble from Granada was Charles III's favourite and was therefore chosen for the most representative rooms in the Palace, such as the Throne Room, his bedchamber, the porcelain room and his no longer extant oratory.
Marbles are often combined to match the furniture to the architecture, creating an overall scheme for a room: for instance, in the Throne Room pink marble from Villamayor de Santiago (Cuenca) is used for both the flooring and the console tables.
The best example of the full integration of marble elements is the Gasparini Room, where alabaster from Consuegra (Toledo) is used for the door jambs, frieze, pilasters, cornice and fireplace, as well for the tops of the chests of drawers located there during Charles III’s reign.
Of Sacchetti's grand decorative project for the Royal Chapel, based on marble, only the sixteen large columns of white-veined black marble, carved from a single piece from Mañaria (Vizcaya), were ever put in place.
Marble from Azpeitia (Gipúzcoa) was used during the reign of Charles IV in several sumptuous floors: not only in the Fine-Woods Room of Maria Luisa, but also in the adjacent room, known as the Stucco Room, and in the San Gil Wing.

Charles IV, who arguably deserves to be called ‘the decorator king’, demonstrated his taste for marbles in his pleasure palaces at El Escorial and El Pardo, especially the latter with its magnificent rotunda room with walls completely faced with ornamental rocks.
After ascending the throne, he set about building a new royal country residence called the ‘Casa del Labrador’ at the far end of his enlarged Prince’s Garden at Aranjuez. Most of the floors, one of the staircases in its entirety, the flights of steps of another and a series of elements in the rooms constitute a sumptuous display of these materials. With greater variety and richness than in the previous reign, the rocks are elegantly combined with finely crafted stuccowork imitating jasper in ensembles such as the king’s Water Closet and the Gallery of Statues. On a smaller scale, these spaces mirror the decorative scheme of the magnificent rooms created in the Royal Palace of Madrid for Queen Maria Luisa – the hall of mirrors and the everyday dining room – and make one regret that Sabatini’s major project to cover the Throne Room in Madrid entirely in marbles and bronze was never completed.
 

The restoration of the samples stemmed from the need to recover the structural and aesthetic integrity of the collection. Thanks to the efforts of the workshops specialising in the restoration of hard stones, graphic documents, textiles and cabinetmaking, and the collaboration of Patrimonio Nacional's restoration laboratories, the deterioration of the collection has been arrested and it has regained its physical integrity and functionality. As a result of a joint action plan, it has been rehabilitated as a useful means of researching, studying and recording decorative rocks and quarries explored.
The aim of this intervention, in addition to stabilising the deterioration processes of each of the materials, was to make them functional again. Treating the entire sample collection made it possible to restore all the chests to a uniform degree.
It was important to guarantee the structural soundness of the chests so that they could be opened and closed again, acting as a support for the samples. It was likewise necessary to ensure that the stone samples were protected by the stability of the wood of the compartments and the textile lining inside the chests. The paper labels and captions associated with the chests were treated to enable them to be interpreted, and work was carried out on fragmented or deteriorated rocks.

More information

These eight chests of ornamental rock samples are part of the Natural Sciences holdings, one of Patrimonio Nacional's most unique collections.
The collection stems from an interest in natural history that emerged in the sixteenth century, during the Renaissance, when so-called ‘chambers of wonders’ or ‘cabinets of curiosities’ were created in Europe: assemblies of unusual objects or items considered exotic at the time in an attempt to understand the known world. From the eighteenth century onwards, this knowledge took a scientific turn, studies in various subjects were encouraged and institutionalised, and numerous scientific expeditions were undertaken to overseas territories, usually sponsored by monarchs. In Spain these efforts were particularly fruitful during the reigns of Charles III and Charles IV. One of the results of this scientific interest was the establishment in 1771 of the Royal Cabinet of Natural History, which brought together a large assortment of specimens from the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms, as well as archaeological and artistic objects that later passed into the collections of numerous scientific and cultural institutions in Spain.
The current Natural Sciences collection consists of nearly 1,200 items, including extremely valuable and highly educational pieces such as the animals preserved by taxidermy for  scientific purposes by José Luis Benedito López for the 28 dioramas of Iberian fauna located in the Royal Palace of Riofrío, a collection of birds’ eggs, the eight chests of ornamental rocks, and more than 300 fossil and mineral specimens assembled between the eighteenth and the early twentieth centuries.