Zaragoza, Patio de la Casa Conocida con el Nombre de los Infantes

This print is from an album of fifty-six plates entitled "Photographic Memories of the Trip of Their Majesties and Highnesses to the Balearic Islands, Catalonia and Aragon," which originally belonged to Antoine d'Orléans, duc de Montpensier, a great collector and patron of photographers and the brother-in-law of Queen Isabella II.
The photograph represents the patio balcony in the house where the infante Luis Antonio, a son of the eighteenth-century king of Spain, Philip V, was forced to retire after marrying a woman beneath his station. Not long after Clifford's visit, many pieces of the extraordinary plateresque decoration were removed and sold abroad. While the photograph documents the deteriorated state of the house, its unsettling quality emanates less from desuetude than from the mysterious curtain at the right, which in effect decapitates the knight in the cartouche below. In the work of a photographer whose ideal was complete and generalized description, the curtain in the dark-cornered vignette might be considered a mistake. But as Clifford consistently constructed telling images from selected details, the eccentric picture may well be a poignant commentary on the demise of the noble arts and on the personal obscurity of the banished infante.