Pedro Castillo Maldonado began his essay on ‘Catholics and Arians in Visigothic Spain: The Conformation of a Unified System of Domination’ by referring to the historical painting by José Martí y Monsó, found in the Spanish Senate, which praises Reccared’s conversion to Nicene Catholicism in 589: ‘Due to its iconographic imagery, which was a bit outmoded, quite static and of dubious artistic quality, the spectator gets the impression of watching a historical event, the Third Council of Toledo, solemn and peaceful’. We prefer to remember the work by Antonio Muñoz Degrain on the same subject, also commissioned by the Senate in 1888, and, thanks to its success, according to Tomás Pérez Veo, became the ‘true’ image of the historical event, even displacing that of Martí y Monsó, the traditional painting until that time. However, as Pérez Viejo himself recalls, ‘Reccared’s presence in the symbolic buildings of the State, temples of the nation, was not limited to the Senate. The Visigothic monarch is among those who appear on the decorated ceiling of the sessions hall of the Congress (work of Carlos Luis de Ribera), in the company of – to make the reasons for his presence clear – Saint Isidore of Seville’. Somehow, each of them tried to illustrate the idea of the official historian of the period, Modesto Lafuente, considered to be the most important figure of the liberal and conservative Spanish historiography.