The Retablo de Isabel la Católica is one of the best-known works of art produced in Castile during the late fifteenth century, notable not only for its exquisite artistic quality but for its reflection of the Castilian landscape, architecture, and multiethnic population as well. The placement of distant biblical narratives within a contemporary Spanish setting is evidence of Queen Isabel's strong identification with the religious models of Christ and the Virgin Mary, which played an undeniable role in her public policy. In this paper, I shall suggest that the paintings' visual relation to contemporary Spanish life goes beyond the popular devotional notion that Christ's living presence is everywhere around us to something much more topical and controversial, a religious issue, specifically, the status of conversos, or New Christians, in fifteenth-century Castile. In this essay, I propose that Hernando de Talavera, the Queen's close religious adviser, was responsible for the choice of visual imagery in two unusual paintings from the altarpiece.

It is well known that of all the ecclesiastical leaders who helped to shape royal priorities during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs, Hernando de Talavera (1428?–1507) had the closest relationship with the Queen. Talavera met Isabel when he was prior of the Monastery of Santa María del Prado near Valladolid, and he became her confessor about the time she assumed the Castilian throne in 1474. In 1485 he became bishop of Ávila and seven years later was named the first archbishop of the newly conquered Granada.