Fundación Casa Ducal de Medinaceli

This House, also known as the House of Alcalá de los Gazules, was created by the Ribera lineage of Galician origin and became established in Seville at the beginning of the 14th century. The true founder of the House and the promotor of the social ascent of the lineage was Per Afan de Ribera "the older", as proclaimed by his great-great grandson, the 1st Marquis of Tarifa, on the stone of his tomb, which is one of those he commissioned from the Aprile workshop in Genoa to honour his ancestors' memory.

Born in 1476, he was the first son of Don Pedro Enríquez's second marriage. The considerable fortune he inherited from his mother in 1506 was substantially increased when he succeeded his stepbrother Francisco in the Ribera dynasty and estate in 1509. In 1514 his seigneurship of Tarifa was raised to the status of marquisate and between 1518 and 1520 he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem via Italy, which brought him into contact with the best of the Renaissance and led him to transform his palace and  city planning in Seville.

The nephew of the 1st Marquis of Tarifa, he inherited the main estate belonging to the House of Alcalá in 1539. He was made Duke of Alcalá in 1558 by King Philip II, who also appointed him successively as viceroy of Catalonia and viceroy of Naples. While serving in the latter post he developed a fondness for collecting marbles of antiquity--so much so that he is hailed in correspondence of the period as a buyer of antiquities along with collectors as highly reputed as Cosimo de'Medici and Cardinal Farnese.

The great-nephew of the 1st Duke of Alcalá, he was born in Seville on 10 May 1583 into a family environment imbued with an awareness of literature. Although his father died when he was seven, he received a thorough education and soon showed a huge fondness for the humanities--which led him to surrounded himself with the city's best humanists at his Sevillian mansion--and above all for painting, of which he amassed an outstanding collection, prominent among which is the oeuvre of José de Ribera, whom he met when serving as viceroy of Naples.

This Neapolitan architect arrived in Seville around 1568, commissioned by the 1st Duke of Alcalá to adapt his Sevillian palace in order to exhibit the sculpture collection he had amassed in Naples in the modern manner--that is, by integrating it into the architecture. Instead of modifying the existing palace, he erected a new adjacent building. Between 1570 and 1572 he was also maestro mayor (chief architect) of the works to build the Hospital de las Cinco Llagas founded by Catalina de Ribera.

He was born in Sanlúcar de Barrameda in 1564 and died in Seville in 1644. He was a key artist in Seville in the first half of the 17th century, not so much for his creative talent--which was middling and retardataire in taste--as for the fact that his status as painter, poet, scholar and art theoretician made him a highly influential figure among painters and intellectuals of the age. Painters of the stature of Alonso Cano and Diego Velázquez joined his workshop as apprentices and he protected and promoted them, even arranging for the latter to marry his daughter Juana.