As well as the diptych of King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia, the exhibition The Tyranny of Chronos, has also been the setting for the presentation of Annie Leibovitz’s portrait of Pablo Hernández de Cos, who served as the bank’s governor from 2018 to 2024. The show is open to the public at the exhibition hall in the Plaza Cibeles offices of the Banco de España until 29 March 2025.

The portrait of Hernández de Cos is an example of Leibovitz’s distinct visual language. As art historian Clara Derrac puts it, her photography, ‘blurs the boundaries between popular and high culture, glamour and vulnerability, the public and private spheres’. Many of her pictures have become icons of contemporary culture. In her portraits, the American photographer tries to bring out her sitters’ psychology. As Yolanda Romero, chief conservator at the Banco de España and curator of the exhibition, explains, she achieves this ‘through a meticulous control of light, staging and composition’.

^{Annie Leibovitz: Portrait of Pablo Hernández de Cos. Banco de España Collection}

The setting chosen for the portrait of Hernández de Cos is the board room at the Banco de España’s head offices, a key site in the institution’s history. The building, designed by Eduardo de Adaro, opened in 1891, and since then it has witnessed many of the key decisions made in the Bank’s history.

Leibovitz has incorporated a series of symbolic and iconographic features that link this portrait to the tradition of Spanish institutional portraiture. These include a longcase regulator clock by Maple & Co., dating from the late nineteenth century, which stands at the back of the room, in the area lit by the large windows. Combining the artistic and the technological, timepieces have played a crucial role in the way time has come to be perceived, represented and organised in Western culture. The clock in this portrait serves to highlight this functional and representative quality; it is also an icon of the institution’s governance, as embodied in its most senior representative.

^{Maple & Co: Longcase regulator. Banco de España Collection}

At the same time, Leibovitz eschews the gravity evident in some of the other historical portraits. The governor is depicted in a relaxed pose seated on the tabletop, looking directly at the viewer, one hand in his pocket. In this way, the photographer breaks with what Yolanda Romero calls the ‘stiffness common to these images of power’, remaining ‘true to her style, which seeks, despite all the ancillary features, to create a portrait that is accessible to the viewer’.

Leibovitz’ photographs of Pablo Hernández de Cos and King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia mark a new departure in the Banco de España portrait collection; the institution had previously commissioned all its portraits from prominent Spanish painters. Not only is this the first time that the medium of photography — so central to modern and contemporary portraiture — has been used. Leibovitz is also the first foreign artist and only the third woman (after Isabel Quintanilla and Carmen Laffón) to receive a commission. Romero notes that the choice ‘underscores the gallery’s openness to new artistic practices and internationally renowned contemporary voices, while also highlighting the aim to refresh and bring a different perspective to this section of the collection’.

Nonetheless, this is not the first time that the idea has been raised of using photography for the Banco de España’s institutional portraits. In the first volume of the Catalogue Raisonné of the Banco de España Collection, Javier Portús writes that as early as 1856, Tomás Varela, the Bank’s senior officer, suggested using the still fledgling medium as part of an initiative to revive the tradition of commissioning portraits, which had lapsed since the 1830s. The proposal came to naught, but in 1881 the bank did resume the practice of having portraits painted of its governors when they completed their term of office.

In The Tyranny of Chronos, the portraits of King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia and Pablo Hernández de Cos can be found in the Portraits in the Course of Time section, one of three into which the exhibition is divided. This section documents the central role played by clocks — so fundamental to any understanding of the way in which time has been perceived and represented in modern times — in the history of the Banco de España, since its foundation in the late eighteenth century by an incipient financial bourgeoisie that saw timepieces as a symbol of progress and social distinction. Evidence of this can be seen in the large collection of timepieces held by the Bank, a selection of which is included in the exhibition. It is also obvious in some of the portraits on display here, including two by Francisco de Goya of key figures in the creation of the Banco de San Carlos: José Moñino y Redondo, the First Count of Floridablanca and Francisco de Cabarrús y Lalanne. The former is portrayed standing next to a large clock marking half past ten, the time at which Floridablanca, his morning business concluded, was preparing for his daily meeting with King Charles III. For his part, Francisco de Cabarrús was responsible for acquiring the first clocks that decorated the original headquarters of the Banco de San Carlos on Calle Luna, a bracket mantel clock by Windmill and a longcase clock by English clockmaker Diego Evans. Both pieces are also on display in the exhibition.

In Goya’s portrait, Cabarrús is shown wearing a gold suit and sporting a fob — an accessory that was secured to a buttonhole to hold a pocket watch. A similar item is worn by Miguel de Torres y Ruiz de Rivera, Third Marquis of Matallana, who briefly served as the manager of the Bank of San Carlos before he was appointed minister plenipotentiary to the Court of Parma, in a portrait by Italian painter Pietro Melchiorre Ferrari painted in 1785, which is also in the exhibition. Two centuries later, in 1985, Madrid artist Isabel Quintanilla painted the governor José Ramón Álvarez Rendueles, with a wristwatch visible on his left hand. In our times, accessories such as the châtelaine and the fob watch have been superseded by models that fit neatly around the wrist, reflecting a style of life and work in which functionality is more important than ostentation.

Also included in this section of the exhibition is a portrait by José Gutiérrez de la Vega y Bocanegra of Ramón de Santillán González, the key figure behind the merger between the Banco de San Fernando and the Banco de Isabel II in 1856, which led to the creation of the Banco de España, of which Santillán was the first governor. The exhibition also features the mantel clock by Irish clockmaker James French Moore that decorated his office.