With sweeping views over the sea stands the wonderful Finca Sa Bassa Blanca, designed by Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy in 1978 for sculptors Yannick and Ben Jakober, and home to the Nins collection

Infanta Margarita Teresa of Spain (1651-1673). The princess was the daughter of Felipe IV and his wife, who happened to be his niece, Mariana of Austria. Her brother was Carlos II, famous for his Habsburg jaw–the result of intermarriage among the royal families of Europe. The Infanta herself was to marry her own uncle and cousin, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I

The English sisters Mary and Catherine Bassett painted in 1603 by a follower of Hieronimo Custodis
 

The orphaned future Louis XV of France (1710-1774) painted here by Pierre Gobert in 1712

The Princes of Savoy, the future Duke, Vittorio Amedeo (1587-1637), Emanuele Filiberto (1588-1624), who was to become the Spanish Viceroy of Sicily, and Filippo Emanuele (1586-1605), early to mid 1590s, by Jan Kracck.
 

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Step down into the astonishing underground gallery at the Yannick and Ben Jakober Foundation and you’ll find yourself surrounded by an extraordinary collection of portraits of extraordinary children. For many of the paintings here show little princes and princesses foreordained to govern the
destinies of their European subjects.

The king called for his Inquisitor General and Confessor. And they all called for the chaplain of a convent packed with possessed nuns. And he called on the Devil himself to reveal why Carlos II, despite his best efforts, could not father an heir. Twenty three years earlier on April 3 1675, the Devil growled with admirable precision, the king's own mother, the Dowager Queen Mariana, in a bid to continue her regency, had mixed into his chocolate the brains of an executed prisoner to deprive him of his reason, the guts to deprive him of health and the kidneys to corrupt his seed. That seemed to explain everything, then.

Feeble-minded Carlos II was indeed an unfortunate king.  His misshapen head housed a tongue so large that his speech could barely be understood. He frequently drooled from his heavy Habsburg jaw–his mandible so big that the two rows of teeth could not meet. He suffered from ulcers, diseased bones and teeth and nervous disorders. But, though the old queen bears some of the blame, the reasons are more natural than supernatural. Take a trip to the Yannick and Ben Jakober Foundation and its astonishing collection of portraits of children near Alcúdia and you'll see why. Standing by the portrait of Carlos II, aged just four, you'll find yourself at the centre of a family reunion.

Nearby is Carlos’s brother-in-law, baby Louis XIV of France, wrapped in swaddling. Louis’s mother and Carlos’s aunt, Anne of Austria is nearby, aged 13. Her other son, Philippe I Duc d’Orleans appears aged two and his English wife Henrietta is joined by her siblings James and the future King Charles. All three were orphaned by the axe at the fall of their father Charles I, who poses as a confident adolescent.

Carlos’s condition, called mandibular prognathism, was the result of the very high degree of intermarriage between the various branches of the Habsburgs. There were multiple marriages of uncles and nieces, first cousins, nephews and aunts and, in the case of Spain’s Felipe II, all three. Interesting as paediatric genetics are, though, there are plenty of other reasons to make your way to the Foundation. Down a bumpy dirt track in the hilly country past Alcúdia, it’s hard to get to. But you’ll find it’s even harder to leave.

With sweeping views over the sea stands the wonderful Finca Sa Bassa Blanca. Designed by Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy in 1978 for sculptors Yannick and Ben Jakober, it’s part S’Estaca villa–co-owned by actor Michael Douglas and his ex-wife Diandra–and part ribat, with exquisite latticed windows, delicate panelled ceilings and sturdy vaults and domes built around a fragrant Granadan-style courtyard. Originally a small Mallorcan farm, the property was a rundown military base until the 1970s and the new owners asked Fathy, then aged 78, to design a new building retaining only the outer walls.

The first portrait of what was to develop into an extraordinary collection had arrived on the scene a number of years before the house was finished, when in 1972, the couple acquired Girl with Cherries, a 19th-century painting by Mallorcan artist Juan Mestre. Gradually, over the decades, she was joined by 132 more portraits, with the focus of the collection shifting to 16th and 17th century portraiture.

“This selection enables us to follow the evolution of a certain way of depicting children as well as reflecting the metamorphosis of clothing,” says Ben Jakober of the collection, which is housed in a startling underground space, El Aljibe, a former water tank next to the house.

“There’s a slow evolution from an elegant austerity towards a frivolous exuberance. From the 19th century we can perceive a greater degree of expressiveness in the
painting, a loosening-up which reflects the onset of a warmer, more tender, approach to infancy as a separate and vulnerable state.”

Indeed in the earlier portraits childhood doesn’t look like much fun at all. Dwarfed by their surroundings, standing stiffly and rigidly poised rather than at play, these are small adults mirroring future adult roles; they are the means to dynastic continuity.

“Since so few examples of early children’s clothing have survived intact, these portraits are also of great documentary value,” says Ben. There are children in swaddling or in adult clothes, the boys wearing ankle-length dresses till around six years old when they were ‘breeched’, or dressed in trousers.

The portraits, Ben adds, “were often used as we might use photographs, dispatched from one court to another in order to foster a marriage–frequently blood-related–between the children of the most powerful royal houses of Europe.”

You can see that these infants are destined for great things–they pose immobile, surrounded by symbols and props: sceptres, crowns, thrones and extravagant,
luxurious fabrics.

In the mid-18th century, though, there’s a shift in how children are viewed. Post Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Enlightenment child is seen as a distinct social category, as inhabiting a world of extreme innocence. Visual representations of childhood reflect these changing views. Increasingly, spontaneous, realistic-looking children are shown outdoors, often at play, close to animals and part of a larger natural world.

And the great outdoors is something you emerge into after an hour or so in the subterranean gallery. The landscaped grounds of the finca are dotted with monumental sculptures by Ben, who’s of Hungarian descent, and his French-born wife Yannick. It was Yannick who designed the rose garden, planted over the years with more than one hundred varieties of old and English roses and conceived as a medieval walled garden where the flowers grow alongside a herbarium of aromatic plants. You can enjoy a bracing walk down to the sea and visit the house’s library, staked with 5,000 art books, and which is currently being catalogued online in a project with the University of the Illes Balears. But long after you have left the Finca Sa Bassa Blanca behind, it is the collection of children’s portraits that remains with you.

“It’s obvious that these princes and princesses experienced a childhood utterly different from what we understand today by that term,” says Ben. “But nevertheless, these faces, gazing out from the distant past, express perfectly the enigma and all-too fleeting nature of childhood.”

When:	Closed Sundays, Mondays and public holidays Tuesdays are open days with no entry fee for NINS and Sculpture Park From Wednesday to Saturday Guided tours by appointment only.
Where:	Fnca Sa Bassa Blanca Es Mal Pas - Alcudia
Phone:	971 549 880
Price:	€9 one exhibition, €12two exhibitions and €15 whole day voucher. Children up to 10 free. Seniors €7 / €9  / €12
Web:	www.fundacionjakober.org	Where