The lower gallery of statues were painted _al fresco_ by Bartolomé Ruscha, and with them were placed, under the direction of Don Domingo Sanni, and by order of the royal founders, the statues of the collection formed by Queen Christina of Sweden and acquired by them in Rome. The sculptors Fremin and Thierri, who at the time were doing work for the gardens, restored many of them and added some others by themselves, but the majority of the best statues were removed in 1829 to the sculpture room in the Madrid Museum, where they are still preserved and constitute almost its only statuary wealth. At present there are in these rooms very few marble statues, and nearly all those forming their decoration are copies in plaster of the original ones, and they have therefore lost the great artistic value which the pure Greek sculpture in the collection of Queen Christina of Sweden conferred on them. Among them the most valuable pieces to be seen here are the group of Castor and Pollux; two colossal statues of Julius Cæsar and Augustus in alabaster, with heads, arms, and legs of gilded bronze; a fine urn which it is believed contained the ashes of Caius Caligula; the representations of Day and Night; a very handsome Apollo; a Daphne; a Venus coming out of the bath; a Faun leaning on the trunk of a tree; another Venus with her knee on a tortoise; many handsome busts of deities and Roman emperors; the nine Muses; two superb heads of Antinous and Alexander; the recumbent statue of Ariadne, a replica of the one in the Museum of the Vatican; a copy of the Venus de Medici; an excellent small statue representing Seneca; Leda with the swan; a head of Homer; a colossal head, in bronze, of Queen Christina of Sweden; and Ganymede attacked by the eagle. With this array of sculpture and antiquities, the Palace of Ildefonso may be said to be more like a museum than a home; and in truth, apart from the Royal Chapel which contains the tomb of Philip V. and his queen, Elizabeth Farnese, and boasts some superbly embroidered vestments and mantles of the Virgin, the visitor must seek the beauties of the palace in its church and in its gardens and fountains.
In order to enhance the splendour of the worship that should be conducted in the Palace Chapel, Philip V. obtained from Pope Benedict XIII. a bull, _Dum Infatigabilem_, dated 20th December 1724, making it a collegiate church. Among other provisions in this bull it conceded that the new collegiate church should be the mother-church of all the churches and chapels of the town and its abbey; that it should have a chapter composed of an abbot, four officiating prebendaries, eight canons, six prebendaries, and four chaplain-acolytes; that the abbots should be a royal appointment with exclusive ecclesiastical jurisdiction throughout the district to be marked out by the Pope’s Nuncio, and at liberty to use the pontifical insignia and dress; that the abbot and canons should devote half the masses celebrated to the royal founders during their lifetime, and for their souls after their death, and that the canons should wear the choral dress of those of St. Peter’s in Rome. The same bull contained the king’s promise to endow the new collegiate church with the sum of 8625 gold ducats (276,000 reals of present Spanish money), to be distributed as follows: 5764 ducats for the fabric and its dependents, and the remainder, 2861, for the abbot and prebendaries.