Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: A King Among Scholars - Felipe VI Opens the Royal Academies Academic Year in Madrid

Madrid gave King Felipe VI a very different kind of stage on Monday afternoon, October 26. There was no blue carpet and no awards trophy. Instead there were deep red curtains, a long table covered in crimson, silver inkwells set in a neat row, and, high above the King, a huge gilt-framed portrait of a young ruler in a gold-embroidered coat. Beneath that portrait, Felipe VI presided over the solemn opening of the academic course of the Royal Academies that belong to the Instituto de España, in the Royal Academy of Jurisprudence and Legislation of Spain.

The Casa Real account, @casareal.es, described the academies in words that explain why this ceremony matters so much in Spanish public life. Together, they represent excellence in the sciences, the arts and the humanities in the country. That is not a decorative phrase. It is a job description for institutions that guard the Spanish language, study its history, advance medicine and science, and keep questions of law and learning in careful, expert hands across generations.

Photo: @casareal.es

A ceremony that follows a glittering week in Oviedo

The timing gave the afternoon an extra resonance. Only days earlier, the King had been in Oviedo with Queen Letizia, Princess Leonor and Infanta Sofia for Princess of Asturias Awards week, a celebration readers followed as a song of praise opened awards week in Oviedo. The family then closed that week on the coast, where Felipe, Letizia, Leonor and Sofia honoured six centuries of fishermen in Llanes. Monday in Madrid was the quieter, bookish counterpart to all that public celebration – the moment when the spotlight turned from laureates and fishing boats to scholars, jurists and academicians beginning a new year of work.

That contrast is, in itself, the story. A modern king is expected to be at ease in both registers. At the Campoamor Theatre, as seen when three generations of the family gathered on the blue carpet, the royal role is visible and ceremonial. In the jurisprudence academy, it is institutional and steady. The King sits, listens, and lends the weight of the Crown to people whose work mostly happens far from cameras, in libraries, laboratories, courtrooms of ideas and seminar rooms.

Why the Royal Academies still matter

It is easy, in a fast news cycle, to treat an academic opening as a routine diary entry. That would miss the point. The Royal Academies are among the oldest continuous knowledge institutions in Spain. Their members are elected for a lifetime of achievement, and their dictionaries, reports, editions and opinions shape how the country teaches, heals, builds and argues about itself. When the King opens their shared course, he is not opening a single school term. He is recognising a whole ecosystem of learning that sits above party, fashion and the daily headline.

There is a unique data point hidden in the photograph itself. The portrait above the King shows a ruler from another century, in court dress, holding a baton and resting a hand near a helmet, while below him a 21st-century king in a dark suit and tie does the same essential work in a different idiom – convening, honouring and encouraging. The red of the curtains, the red of the portrait’s drapery and the red of the table cloth line up almost exactly. Whoever arranged the room, intentionally or not, created a visual argument about continuity. Institutions endure because each generation agrees, again, to show up for them.

Felipe VI looked completely at home in that setting. His own formation has always had a strong academic and legal thread, and jurisprudence is a fitting host academy for a head of state whose daily work involves law, language and precedent. Seated at the centre of the table, flanked by senior figures of the academy, he listened with the focused, unsmiling attention that the Casa Real photographs from this event capture so well. This was not a performance of learning. It was a working act of respect for it.

Excellence, in three plain words

Sciences, arts and humanities. The Casa Real caption lists the three fields without ornament, and the breadth is worth pausing on. The academies gathered under the Instituto de España do not represent one discipline competing for attention. They represent the full span of how a country knows things – by experiment, by creation and by reflection. A king who presides over all three at once sends a simple message that none of them is a luxury. A society needs its equations and its poems, its clinical evidence and its legal reasoning, and it needs institutions patient enough to tend all of them for decades at a time.

For international readers, Monday’s ceremony also explains something about the Spanish Crown that awards nights alone cannot. The monarchy’s cultural role is not only to celebrate finished excellence, as it did in Oviedo. It is to stand, at the start of the year, beside the people who will produce the next generation of excellence, most of it slowly and out of sight. That is a less glamorous duty, and in many ways a more important one.

As the new academic course begins, the academicians return to their dictionaries, archives, studies and debates. They do so with a royal opening on the record, a photograph that will sit in their institutional memory, and a reminder that their quiet work is seen at the highest level of the state. In Madrid on Monday, beneath a golden portrait and between red curtains, Felipe VI gave Spain’s scholars the best possible start to their year – he took their work seriously, in public, and on time.

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