Museo de Bellas Artes de Granada, Spain

The Museum of Fine Arts of Granada (Spanish: Museo de Bellas Artes de Granada) is a fine arts museum in Granada, Spain. The Museum of Fine Arts, Granada, has its roots in the confiscation promoted by minister Álvarez Mendizábal in the 19th century. Works of art were taken from abolished convents and monasteries and used to set up the Provincial Museum in the former Dominican convent of Santa Cruz la Real. It was solemnly inaugurated on 11 August 1839, as testified by the local press at the time.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Granada, was inaugurated at its new home on the first floor of the Palace of Carlos V in the Alhambra on 6 October 1958.

The Museum of Fine Arts of Granada is the most important gallery of that city, a city whose fame lies more in its monumental heritage than in the pictorial one. This explains the relative neglect in which this institution has survived until recently.

History
Like many other provincial museums in Spain, this Museum of Fine Arts owes its origin to the confiscation of Mendizabal, which involved the dispersion of numerous works of art that had belonged to religious orders. Thus, the institution was created to guard artistic works, mostly religious, which were in danger.

The museum was inaugurated in the old Dominican convent of Santa Cruz la Real, on August 11, 1839. In 1889, the City Council of Granada adopted the decision to dedicate the building to a Military Institute, so the art collections went through various locations: first to a few rooms of the Town Hall, then to a building on Arandas Street, and finally to the so-called Casa del Castril. They shared space with the Archaeological Museum of Granada and the Academy of Fine Arts.

Already in the nineteenth century, the opportunity was raised to recover as the seat of the Museum the famous Palace of Carlos V, considered the most important building of the Christian Granada and that remained empty, in not optimal conditions. The Board of the Museum formally agreed to transfer the Museum to the premises in 1914, but it was not until 1941 when the Spanish government (the General Directorate of Fine Arts) decided to move it.

The process was long, and the Museum was not inaugurated in the Palace until 1958, coinciding with several events on the occasion of the IV Centenary of the death of Carlos V (Carlos I of Spain). The institution was accommodated on the top floor of the building, with obvious limitations as it was decided not to alter the original layout.

In 1994, the remodeling of the ground floor of the Palace of Carlos V began to locate, among other dependencies, the Museum of the Alhambra. The elimination of the existing mezzanine floor until then necessitated the transfer of part of the premises of the Museum of Fine Arts to the building complex known as New Museums.

The Museum was subjected to a new refurbishment of museographic adaptation, according to modern techniques, which began in 2003 and which was inaugurated in January 2008.

The Museum of Fine Arts of Granada has two venues:

– Exhibition venue. Located on the first floor of the Palace of Carlos V, there are different exhibition spaces for permanent exhibition and temporary exhibitions.

– Administrative headquarters. Located in module two of the New Museums, it brings together functional areas such as management, administration and technicians, as well as the rest of the dependencies: reserve areas, restoration workshop, archive and library.

Collection:
The collections are mostly made up of paintings and sculptures, from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. The richest and richest funds come from religious foundations disintegrated in the nineteenth century. They have subsequently added works deposited by the Prado Museum, as well as shopping, both examples of recent art and old masters.

Among the oldest pieces, the sculpture of Santa María de la Alhambra, from the late 15th century, attributed to Roberto Alemán and presiding over the Door of Justice of the Alhambra. In 1941 it was replaced by a replica to preserve it from deterioration. Of the same time, it emphasizes the Triptych of the Great Captain, elaborated in enamel of Limoges.

Already from the beginning of the sixteenth century, it is the great group of The burial of Christ, the Florentine master Jacopo da Torni (Jacopo Florentino), and later, the relief of The Virgin and Child, sculpted in walnut by Diego de Siloé .

One of the most distinctive sections is that of the early 17th century, with Juan Sánchez Cotán as a great name. His still life with thistle and carrots is perhaps the best work of the Museum, as well as a key piece of his production, along with another of the Prado Museum. From the same artist the Museum houses several works of religious genre from the Carthusian Monastery of Granada in which he professed as a monk, among them a Virgin waking the Child, and of lesser importance, since Sánchez Cotán was rather conservative and antiquated in his religious painting And his current fame lies in his still lifes.

Another representative example of the Spanish still life of the early seventeenth century is Candy Boxes, by John van der Hamen and Leon, from the Archbishop’s Palace.

Alonso Cano, born in Granada, is another great protagonist of the Museum. Here are guarded The Virgin of the Lucero, San Jerónimo penitente in the desert and the sculpture of San Diego de Alcalá. Very numerous is the representation of the followers of Alonso Cano, both sculptors and painters, such as Pedro Atanasio Bocanegra, Juan de Sevilla, Pedro de Mena, from whom a bust of the Dolorosa or the Soledad is conserved, and José de Mora, together To other less well-known teachers, such as the Cieza, Miguel Jerónimo de Cieza and his son Jose, Pedro de Moya, Ambrosio Martínez Bustos and the Gómez de Valencia, Felipe Gómez de Valencia and his son Francisco, closing the payroll with the works of the also painter And sculptor José Risueño.

Already from the nineteenth century, stands out a view of the Old Town Hall of Granada (1873), Mariano Fortuny, and 1920, a Sierra Nevada Landscape by Antonio Muñoz Degrain. The Museum has also added a large sample of Manuel Ángeles Ortiz.

It houses objects of religious art, such as the “Allegory of Death” by P. Toma, a 17th-century, oil on canvas and “St. Francis of Assisi” an anonymous 17th century oil on canvas.

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The Museum’s origins have had a profound influence on it as, even today, an essential part of its collections are from the confiscations. They make up the bulk of the fixed collection which is predominated by Granada religiously themed paintings executed between the 16th and 18th centuries. Since 1984, the Museum has received a significant boost in this area with the contribution of the Junta de Andalucía’s Collection which is based on works from the 19th and 20th centuries.

Exhibition:

ROOM I
A new order, a new art.

With the fall of the Nasrid kingdom, Granada enters the orbit of Western Christian art. The new political, social and religious order required images and symbols to identify it. To satisfy them, the new settlers had to resort to the importation of works of art and foreign artists, some of which would be definitively established in Granada, laying the foundations on which emerge the first artists clearly Granada of the next generation.

The first room, from the end of the fifteenth century to the first half of the seventeenth century, concentrates a great diversity of styles and responds with it to the history of the city itself. In it coexist, orderly, imported works, such as the Triptych of the Great Captain and some Hispano-Flemish table, with works made by foreign artists such as Francisco Chacón, German Ruperto, Jacobo Florentino, Diego de Silóe, Juan de Aragón; Juan de Orea and Francisco Sánchez, from which part of the choir stalls of Santa Cruz la Real, Pedro de Raxis, Sánchez Cotán and Vicente Carducho is recovered. Above all, the spectacular sculptural group of the Santo Entierro in polychrome and gilded wood, work of Jacobo Florentino, coming from the Monastery of San Jerónimo el Real.

ROOM II
Alonso Cano, painter and sculptor

This room is dedicated exclusively to Alonso Cano (1601-1667), the artist from Granada by excellence, contemporary and friend of Velázquez and many other greats of his time. His art, characterized by an impeccable drawing and a serene and monumental elegance.

ROOM III
The followers of Alonso Cano

The strong imprint of Alonso Cano marked with the sign of “canesco” all the development of Granada painting of the second half of the seventeenth century. In the room are present his best followers, such as Pedro Atanasio Bocanegra, Juan de Sevilla, Pedro de Mena and José de Mora, along with other less known, such as Pedro de Moya and Felipe Gómez de Valencia. The cycle of the works of the painter and sculptor José Risueño, the last outstanding exponent of the canesco, which brings us into the 18th century, closes the cycle.

ROOM IV
Secular painting of the seventeenth century

The painting of profane character, although being less frequent in the Spain of that one time that the one of religious subject, enjoyed of great esteem in the courtly atmospheres. This thematic parenthesis, invites a brief reflection on another aspect of painting, in which there is room for a great diversity of themes, such as the allegorical, the landscape, the portrait, the genre painting, and, of course, the still lifes .

ROOM V
XIX century

The 18th century is the least interesting time for art in Granada. Since the second half of the nineteenth century begins to recover, with some interesting figures such as Manuel Gómez-Moreno González. Other local artists, such as José Garrocha, Juan Bautista de Guzmán or Ruiz de Almodóvar illustrate with their works the preferences of the bourgeoisie for other themes such as portraiture, landscape or gender scenes, more appropriate for the decoration of the domestic environment.

ROOM VI
Granada as a theme

Granada, like other Andalusian cities, exerted an enormous attraction on a multitude of artists and writers who, preceded by the stories of romantic travelers, fostered the myth created around Granada and its past. This facet gave the city a new splendor. Therefore, this space is dedicated exclusively to those works that have Granada as a theme, covering the period of greatest proliferation: from the arrival of romantic travelers, around 1830, until a century later.

ROOM VIII
The resurgence of the twentieth century

The artists born in the last decades of the nineteenth century will be the architects of the artistic awakening of the city, reaching national and international recognition. The trio formed by José María Rodríguez-Acosta, José Mª López Mezquita and Gabriel Morcillo is joined by the sculptor Juan Cristóbal González Quesada

ROOM IX
Contemporary art

The last room is a prolongation of the previous one, although it is centered mainly in the second half of the 20th century. It brings together artists who, born in the last years of the 19th century, such as Ismael González de la Serna or Manuel Ángeles Ortiz, or in the first decades of the 20th, Manuel Rivera or José Rivera or José Guerrero, decided to open their art to the renewed artistic currents

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