La púrpura de la rosa

The performance history of La púrpura de la rosa (“The Color of the Rose” or “The Blood of the Rose”) begins in Madrid in 1659 with a treaty and a betrothal, and leads to Lima in 1701 with a French king and his birthday. The libretto, a one-act mythological comedia in polymetric verse by Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-1681), presents the dramatist's adaptation of the Ovidian story of the loves of Venus and Adonis as a fiesta cantada whose erotic content and elaborately ornate poetics were inspired, most likely, by Paolo Veronese's painting, Venus and Adonis. The court painter and decorator, Diego Velázquez hung this painting and its pendant, Cephalus and Procris, in the South Gallery of King Philip IV's Alcázar palace, as part of the iconography of the reception given the French diplomats who visited Philip in 1659 on behalf of Louis…