His mother was Inés Zapata de Calatayud, daughter of the Counts of Real.

[2] In 1772, Juan Pablo left the embassy in Paris, where his father-in-law was ambassador, and went first to London and then to Madrid, from where he was sent abroad for fear of his possible influence in the royal family.

Juan Pablo was a prominent member of the "Aragonese party" around Charles III, a Francophile and Voltairean party, intellectually led by Pedro Pablo Abarca de Bolea, 10th Count of Aranda, the notable military officer and politician who was successor to Pignatelli at the Embassy in Paris, and who was ambassador to France for fourteen years, from 1773 to 1787.

He financially and politically supported, through Benjamin Franklin, the United States Inderpendance, and prior to that was ambassador in Poland and England.

In 1777 there was a real estate sale in Madrid, which opened the doors to real estate reforms and changes by the Dukes of Villahermosa, the Azlor de Aragón-Pignatelli couple towards a conversion to a neoclassical palace which was called Palacio de Villahermosa after 1805, and which today is the current Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, located at Paseo del Prado 8, opposite the Prado museum and the Botanical Garden.