According to the curators of Spanish Painting from El Greco to Picasso: Time, Truth and History, the dominant themes of Spanish painting can be captured in fifteen categories ranging from art-historical genre (“Bodegones,” or still lifes) to those seemingly made to fit the loans received (“Flyers,” “Landscapes of Fire”). The curators took great—and controversial—license in liberating Spanish painting from the conventions of chronology, school, and patronage that usually provide the foundation for its presentation. However, if the resulting exhibition does not succeed in presenting the masterworks on view in a more memorable way, or in making them somehow more accessible to a museum-going public, then the flaunting of conventions seems to become an end in itself. And this is what appears to have happened here. This is not to criticize the quality of many of the works on view, including Alonso Cano’s Crucifixion (ca. 1640) from St. Petersburg or the portrait of Carlos II (1671) by Juan Carreño de la Miranda from Oviedo. Nor should we underestimate the role that serendipity might play in the organization of exhibitions: key works cannot be borrowed, and loan requests can be denied. Nor can we underestimate the challenges of installing a thematically arranged...