Calle de Antonio Palomino

Antonio Acisclo Palomino arrived in Madrid around 1678, barely twenty years old and with a talent that soon opened the doors of the court. Born in Bujalance, in the province of Córdoba, he mixed in the capital with Lucas Jordán, Claudio Coello and Carreño de Miranda. In 1688 he earned the title of painter to King Charles II, and from then on signed vaults and frescoes across half of Spain. His fame, however, rests less on his brushes than on his pen. Between 1715 and 1724 he published El museo pictórico y escala óptica, three volumes gathering the theory, practice and lives of Spanish painters. That inventory made him the country’s first art historian. The street is very short, barely a stretch between Calvo Asensio and Guzmán el Bueno. It belonged to the vanished Marconell district, filled with workers' housing from 1880. Some of those low dwellings still survive.