Royal spoils Madrid's new mecca for old-world art lovers

A distinctly feminine Archangel Michael brandishes a flaming sword and attempts, as he has for the past 331 years, to trample the living hell out of a forlorn devil

- Sam Jones

Close by, an enormous riderless white horse, corralled on to canvas by Diego Velázquez sometime in the 1630s, rears up as Caravaggio's Salome, swathed in a blood-red cloak, proffers passersby the freshly severed head of John the Baptist.

On 28 June, these works - along with more than 640 other treasures from Spain's vast, state-owned royal collections - will go on show as the Madrid's most ambitious museum project in decades opens its doors.

Although the idea of creating a gallery to showcase the splendid carriages and tapestries of the royal collections was conceived during the Second Republic in the early 1930s, plans for the Museum of Royal Collections were interrupted by the civil war and the subsequent Franco dictatorship.

Despite a green light from the government in 1998, the €162m ($180m) project was then delayed by the discovery of a huge chunk of Madrid's 9th-century Arab wall, then by the 2008 financial crisis and, more recently, the Covid pandemic.