A splash of Spanish sun at the Royal Academy
For better or worse, the Catholicism of Spain and her Empire runs through this exhibition like gold – both metaphorically and literally. The show is full of many beautiful, precious and luminous things, and – although it sounds daft – they are all so Spanish. You can almost hear the deafening flourishes of Iberian batalhas breaking out overhead, played on bombastic horizontal silver organ pipes: wondrous, almost but not-quite vulgar, and ever-so-slightly out of tune.
