Museo Nacional de Escultura (National Museum of Sculpture)

Museo Nacional de Escultura (National Museum of Sculpture) Review

At the northernmost point of the old town is the late-15th-century Colegio de San Gregorio building where the Museo Nacional de Escultura is housed. The structure is a masterpiece itself, with playful, naturalistic detail. The facade is especially fantastic, with ribs in the form of cut-back trees, sprouting branches, and—to complete the forest motif—a row of wild men bearing mighty clubs. Across the walkway from the main museum is a Renaissance palace that houses temporary exhibitions. The main museum is arranged in rooms off an elaborate, arcaded courtyard. Its collections do for Spanish sculpture what those in the Prado do for Spanish painting—the only difference is that most people have heard of Velázquez, El Greco, and Goya, but fewer are familiar with Alonso de Berruguete, Juan de Juni, and Gregorio Fernández, the three artists represented here.

Attendants and directional cues encourage you to tour the museum in chronological order. Begin on the ground floor, with Alonso de Berruguete's remarkable sculptures from the dismantled high altar in Valladolid's church of San Benito (1532). Berruguete, who trained in Italy under Michelangelo, is the most widely appreciated of Spain's postmedieval sculptors. He strove for pathos rather than realism, and his works have an extraordinarily expressive quality. The San Benito altar was the most important commission of his life, and the fragments here allow you to scrutinize his powerfully emotional art. In the museum's elegant chapel (which you normally see at the end of the tour) is a Berruguete retable from 1526, his first known work; on either side kneel gilded bronze figures by the Italian-born Pompeo Leoni.

Many critics of Spanish sculpture think that decline set in with the late-16th-century artist Juan de Juni, who used glass for eyes and pearls for tears. Juni's many admirers, however, find his works intensely exciting, and these pieces are, in any case, the highlights of the museum's upper floor. Dominating Castilian sculpture of the 17th century was Galician-born Gregorio Fernández, in whose works the dividing line between sculpture and theater becomes tenuous. Respect for Fernández has been diminished by the number of vulgar imitators his work has spawned, but at Valladolid you can see his art at its best. The enormous, dramatic, and moving sculptural groups assembled in the last series of rooms form a suitably spectacular climax to this fine collection.