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.
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