This area includes a set of rooms used by the governing body of the Universitat de València. Royal portraits and other valuable paintings hang on the walls. The area also includes the Boardroom, one of the most representative spaces in the building. It is a large, long room with a Neoclassical design featuring marbled plasterwork and numerous elements gilded in gold leaf, giving the room an inner radiance. On the walls hang a series of portraits of the deans that have held this position from 1845, when the Universitat became a State-run institution following Pedro José Pidal’s Law of Public Education, up to the present day. The room is presided by a magnificent portrait of the honorary life dean Vicente Blasco y García, painted by Mariano Salvador Maella. The dean was largely responsible for modernizing university studies in Valencia with his new proposed curriculum, adopted in 1786. On either side of the painting hang the portraits of Juan Peset Aleixandre, executed by firing squad in 1942 for his political views, and Francisco Moliner y Nicolás, whose initiative led to the founding of the Portaceli Sanatorium in 1899.