The pair of paintings by Genaro Pérez Villaamil in the Banco Santander Collection is an eloquent testament to the fascinating allure of Seville's cathedral for Romantic travellers who visited the city, chief among them the British vedute painter David Roberts (1796–1854), whose decisive influence on Pérez Villaamil's work ultimately made him the grand master of the Spanish Romantic landscape, also noted for his urban vistas of Spain's most monumental cities. He captured these cities in paintings, drawings and lithographs, assembling the loveliest repertoire of picturesque visions of these monuments, which he generally studied from life, making detailed notes and sketches with his pencil and later transforming them in his boundless romantic imagination in the comfort of his Madrid studio.

The first piece offers an impressive vision of the cathedral's main facade, viewed at a sharp angle from the street, with the open Door of Baptism in the foreground where a group of bystanders are chatting on the porch. Villaamil's fantasy magnified the already slender proportions of its splendid Gothic architecture, topped by a forest of crests, pinnacles and flying buttresses. The houses across the street are fronted by porticoes with imposing columns, before which a merchant hawks his wares. The picturesque flavour of the houses, with corbels, chimneys and masts sprouting from the eaves and rooftops, is accompanied by Villaamil's exquisitely detailed genre scenes featuring the different popular types that frequented the area around the church, reproducing their clothing and trappings from the notes he often made in his sketchbook, using his keen powers of observation.

Meanwhile, the pendant piece shows the interior of the cathedral's main nave during the Corpus Christi procession rites performed beside the altar, which has been raised for the occasion to the retrochoir and sheltered under a lavish baldachin. Making their way through the crowd gathered in the temple, several priests in pontifical vestments followed by a processional canopy accompany the retinue's leader, who carries a solar monstrance. Across the nave is Juan de Arfe's monumental tabernacle, with the Seises performing their traditional dance before it. On the floor we can see the inscription marking the former resting place of Christopher Columbus's mortal remains.

The dazzling spectacle of the Corpus Christi celebration in the impressive Gothic naves of Seville's cathedral also beguiled many of Villaamil's artistic contemporaries, including Roberts and Seville's native son Joaquín Domínguez Bécquer (1817–1879). The grand Gothic church was one of Villaamil's favourite monuments, and he produced two very similar views of the building—though markedly more schematic than these—in a spectacular diptych entitled Monumental Views of Spanish Cities (1833–1839), acquired by the Museo del Prado in 2011. [José Luis Díez]