Pedro Kuntz, a painter who specialised in indoor scenes, worked in El Escorial on different occasions. This piece depicts the main hall of the library at El Escorial (also known as the Salón de los Impresos due to the books of old authors arranged with their gilt fore edges facing out, or as Salón de los Frescos, due to the paintings that adorn the ceilings and cornices) in a north-to-south perspective, with the seven windows that open to the Lonja on the west in the right-hand side of the composition facing the five balconies that open to the Patio de los Reyes.

The composition, illuminated with the afternoon light, faithfully reflects the arrangement of the different elements of the room, including the mural paintings. The set of steps in the foreground, the two figures to the left—one of them a priest—and the figure that appears at the right (originally placed in the centre, with visible pentimento), give us an idea of the dimensions of this vast room (59 x 9 x 10 m) and emphasise its depth.

The books are represented with precision on their shelves—even the old ones arranged with their gilt fore edges facing out—as are all the elements set along the longitudinal axis of the room: the two octagonal pedestal tables made of porphyry, the five brown marble tables with bronze rims, the globes, and the armillary sphere, in the foreground, resting on a stand formed by four mermaids. This sphere, which represents the solar system according to the theories of Ptolemy, was built by Antonio Santucci in Florence circa 1582 for Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici, who that same year sent it as a diplomatic gift to Philip II. It was originally in the Alcázar of Madrid, and it first appears in the inventory of the furniture of the Escorial library in 1593.

The warm tones of the wood and the books contrast with the cool hues of the marble floor and the paintings on the ceiling. The frescoes were made by Pellegrino Tibaldi (1527-1596) and his collaborators, among whom were Bartolomé Carducho (1560-1608), and their iconographic imagery was probably based on the work of Juan de Herrera (1530-1597) and José de Sigüenza (1544-1606).

The barrel vault ceiling is divided in seven stretches, which coincide with the openings of the west-side windows The objects of the main theme, the Liberal Arts, were painted in the central section represented as matrons: Grammar, Rhetoric, and Logic (the Trivium), and Arithmetic, Music, Geometry and Astronomy (the Quadrivium). Each liberal art is accompanied by four sages and secondary scenes. In the end walls are represented Philosophy (north) and Theology (south), which is the fresco that we can see in the background of the composition. At any rate, even though Kuntz had experience as a copyist, he chose to just sketch out these images in the composition, seeking to convey the overall effect of the whole.

The painting, which received an honourable mention in the National Exposition of Fine Arts of 1862, comes from the private collection of the Marques of La Foronda.