The just over a hundred years between the accession of Philip II as King of Spain in 1556 and the death of his grandson, Philip IV, in 1665 saw momentous changes within the Spanish Habsburg Empire. Whilst remaining geographically almost intact, the religious wars of the period wrought unimaginable havoc and untold suffering, much of it stemming from the faults of a gifted, if intolerant king, Philip II. This second series of webinars on the Habsburgs will chronicle an extraordinary period, Spain's 'Golden Age' as it fought its enemies including the rebellious 'Dutch' within the Spanish Netherlands, the French, the English and the Ottoman Turks. When a temporary peace was achieved, much of this was due to the intelligence of a remarkable woman, the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia, an achievement more or less squandered by her brother and nephew, respectively Philip III and Philip IV, until true peace (and ignominious defeat) came with the end of the 'Thirty Years War' in 1648.

The visual arts offer their own commentary on these events, from the gaunt and chilly beauty of Philip II's 'monastery-palace', the Escorial, to the extraordinary collection of paintings which the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs accumulated, now the core collections of the Prado in Madrid and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Titian painted his most visually arresting series of allegories, the 'Poesie' for Philip II while the king also collected Flemish art, above all the work of Bosch. His daughter, Isabella Clara Eugenia, was no less perspicacious in her choice of artists as she was the great patron of both Rubens and the young Van Dyck, not to mention sundry members of the Brueghel family. Philip IV, his family and court, were immortalised by one of the greatest painters of any period, Velazquez, arguably the finest master of the colour black? Both branches of the family reaped the unlikely harvest that was the forced dispersal of England's amazing collections built up by Charles I and his courtiers.