Category: Museums

Velázquez | Murillo |Sevilla

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This year is the 400th anniversary of the birth of Bartolome Murillo, probably Sevilla’s most famous painter, and has been officially declared the Year of Murillo. As part of the commemorations the Fundación Focus-Abengoa, in collaboration with the Prado Museum, London’s National Gallery, and others, has organised a very special exhibition comparing the work of Murillo and Sevilla’s other most famous painter, Diego Velázquez.

velazquez murilloThe two painters, born in Seville a generation apart (Velazquez in 1599 and Murillo in 1617), and having their formative influences there, nevertheless had quite different career trajectories, Velazquez leaving Seville to work at the Spanish court in Madrid in 1623, while Murillo spent his entire working life in Seville. It’s not known whether the two ever actually met in person (though they must have been aware of each others’ work), but while there is no record of a meeting, it’s not impossible as Murillo visited Madrid on several occasions, although art experts think that there was only limited reciprocal influence.

santa rufinaSanta Rufina by Murillo (left) and Velázquez (right)

However, it’s clear from the 19 paintings in the exhibition, 10 by Murillo and 9 by Velázquez, that there were common influences in the cultural world of Sevilla in the 17th century. This shows itself in both the choice (or commissioning) of subjects, especially in religious subjects pertaining to Sevilla such as the Saints Justa and Rufina and the Immaculate Conception, as well as of Saint Peter and the Adoration of the Magi, and the highly naturalistic style of the scenes of everyday life.

day to day lifeEveryday scenes by Velázquez (left) and Murillo (right)

It’s also appropriate that the exhibition is being hosted in the Venerables Hospital, a building that is of the early 17th century, and which has both a historical and current associations with the two painters. Around mid-January the exhibition, which continues until February 28th, surpassed the 50,000 visitor mark.

Velásquez | Murillo | Sevilla
Hospital de los Vernerables
Plaza de los Venerables 8
Open 10.00 – 18.00 (last entrance at 17.30)
General Admission: 8 euros
Free Admission Tuesday 14.00 – 18.00

Seville’s Golden Age

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In fourteen hundred and ninety two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue…

This was the pivotal moment in the history of one of Europe’s oldest cities which would propel it from modest national importance to being the richest city in Europe, a position that it would maintain for the next two centuries thanks to the monopoly of the Americas trade granted to the city by royal decree in 1503.

This monopoly was regulated and enforced by the Casa de Contratación (House of Trade), which collected a 20% tax (the quinto) on all goods entering Spain, as well as other taxes and levies, and had to approve all voyages of trade and exploration, trade routes and the like. This information was updated and preserved in the Padrón Real, the official, and secret, map of the networks of Spanish trade and empire around the world, a major undertaking that employed Spain’s best cartographers. The casa also trained and licensed captains and navigators. From 1543 it worked in conjunction with the Consulado de Mercaderes, the Merchant Guild of Seville, through which most of the wealth from the New World was channelled.

As the money flowed in the city began to acquire the trappings of wealth. The Cathedral, by some reckonings the largest church in the world, was completed in 1526, and the 1560s saw the addition of a belfry and a statue, the Giraldilla, representing Faith, to the Moorish minaret. In the Plaza San Francisco the city’s secular authorities were housed in a new town 1-01-photo 1 (4)hall, the Casa Consistorial (1527-1564), usually known as the Ayuntamiento, with its ornate plateresque decoration and the arcade that gave access to the Franciscan friary which occupied the whole of what is now Plaza Nueva. In the later years of the century the Real Audencia, a court of the Castilian crown, was built on the other side of the Plaza San Francisco, with the Royal Prison on the corner of Sierpes street (the site is now occupied by a bank). Miguel de Cervantes, who wrote Don Quixote, was for a short time “a guest of His Majesty” here. 1-02-photo 2 (4)From the same period are the Archivo General de Indias, built originally as the Casa Lonja or commodities exchange, and now the third of Seville’s World Heritage buildings, the Casa Moneda (Royal Mint), where silver from the New World was minted into coin, and the Hospital de Cinco Llagas (the Five Wounds), which is now the home of the Andalucian Parliament. At the same time many churches, monasteries and convents, as well as private palaces of the aristocracy and merchants all over the city were built or elarged.

With that kind of money came not only lavish building projects, but patronage of the arts. Seville’s Golden Age came to its full fruition in the 17th century Baroque School, among whom were such luminaries as Francisco Herrera, Diego Velazquez, Bartolomé Murillo and Francisco de Zurbarán, as well as sculptors like Pedro Roldán and Juan Martinez Montañes (the God of Wood). Many of their works can be seen in the Fine Arts Museum and other museums around the city.

Although work actually started on it before the discovery of America, Seville’s university, which grew out of the Dominican schools of the previous century, also belongs to this period, with Papal authorisation for its courses being granted in 1505. It was installed in buildings near the Puerta Jerez, where the street named for its founder, Maese Rodrigo, can still be found. All that remains today is the little Mudejar chapel at the end of the Avenida de la Constitución. In 1771 the university moved to another of the important buildings of the time, the College of the Annunciation of the Professed House of the Society of Jesus, and the Church of the Annunciation next door, on the corner of Plaza de la Encarnación, were both built in the 1550s.

This explosion of wealth and culture has left a lasting mark on the modern city, as many of its buildings and artworks are still preserved, and can be seen on a walk around the city. For me, it’s possibly the most beautiful, fascinating, and culturally rich cities in the world.

“Who has not seen Seville has not seen a marvel.”

Roman Wine Tasting

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Text by Peter Tatford
Photos by Shawn Hennessey

As all you erudite folks probably already know, Seville was in antiquity a Roman city, probably the most important in Western Europe outside of Italy itself. It’s official name from the time of Julius Caesar was “Julia Romana”, but as often happens it was the city’s older name, Hispalis, which remained in popular use, and is preserved in altered form in the modern name. It was an important trading, manufacturing and administrative centre with extensive commercial links with Rome, exporting wine, oil and fish products back to the Imperial capital.

baetica wines

But what was daily life like in Hispalis during the six centuries of Roman domination? Recently my friend Shawn @azaharSevilla and I were lucky enough to be invited to a rather special wine tasting event at Gastrosol, atop the Metropol Parasol. It was put on by the people responsible for Cotidiana Vitae (Daily Life) at Italica, the well-preserved Roman residential city at Santiponce, just outside Seville. Roman wines were provided by Baetica, who have done excellent work in recreating the styles of wines that would have been drunk in those far off times, drawing on the knowledge of winemakers, historians and archaeologists to make them as authentic as possible.

First though, it was down into the basement for a tour of the Roman ruins discovered when work to redevelop the site of the old market in Plaza Encarnación began back in the nineties. The ruins are now a well restored and preserved archaeology museum with some fascinating things to see. These include a fish salting plant that must have been a smelly neighbour for the residents, a house with an unusual (to me at least) raised platform for dining set into a semi-circular alcove, restored mosaics, and some crude gaming tables, as well as glimpses of the stratification (new bits built over old bits) of the site as it developed.

antequarium tour

Then it was time to go upstairs for the wine tasting. Our hosts, Manuel León Béjar and Alejandro Vera had chosen four wines for us to sample, Mulsum (fermented with honey), Sanguis (steeped with rose petals), Antinoo (steeped with violets), and Mesalina (flavoured with cinnamon, and named for the wife of the Emperor Claudius), which became very popular in the later Roman Empire. It’s not really known how close these are to the Roman originals, especially as many of the old grape varieties have sadly disappeared, but extensive research into the wine making techniques of the time and descriptions of the grapes that were used gives us considerable confidence, and the use of the various flavourings is well attested to by writers and commentators of the time.

roman wine tasting

Now, I have to admit that I’m not really a wine expert, so for proper tasting notes and pairings I’m going to send you over to these good people (the notes are in Spanish), but I will say that it was a fascinating experience, and that the wines were quite distinctive compared to modern ones. My favourites were the Mulsum, which did have a definite tang of honey without being overly sweet, and the Mesalina, which was the most intensely flavoured, and was apparently mainly used at the end of, or even after, the meal. Maybe next time we’ll get a complete Roman banquet, though I’m still not convinced about the advantages of eating lying down.

For more information about activities at Italica, including tasting events, you can visit the Cotidiana Vitae website.

The Spanish Inquisition

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I bet you didn’t expect that! Okay, so I’m probably showing my age a bit, but I thought I’d start on a light note before delving into one of the darker aspects of the history of Spain and particularly of Seville.

san jorge model

The Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, to give it its proper title, was established in 1480 by the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, whose marriage in 1469 had effectively unified Spain for the first time, shortly before the surrender of the last Moorish stronghold of Granada in 1492. As well as the Islamic Moors, Spain had for a thousand years played host to a large Jewish population, and the primary purpose of the Inquisition was to enforce the unification of the country through a rigid Catholic orthodoxy, although it also conducted investigations into blasphemy, clerical misconduct, and, occasionally, witchcraft. Although the numbers are not precise, it’s thought that between 3,000 and 5,000 people were put to death before the Inquisition was formally disbanded in 1834.

In Seville, the Inquisition almost immediately established it’s headquarters in the Castillo San Jorgé, whose ruins can now be seen below Triana market and house a Museum of Tolerance which is well worth a visit.

Plaza del Altozano s/n
Tel 954 332 240
Opening hours: Mon-Fri 11.00-18.30 / Sat-Sun 10.00-15.00
Entrance free

The castle itself is certainly much older than this, and was certainly already there in 1171, when the Moors built the “bridge of boats” where the Puente Isabella II (usually known as Triana Bridge) now stands.

 san jorge museum

The Inquisition’s first victims in Seville are closely connected to a well-known local folk-history, that of Susona ben-Suson (the basic story is history, the embellishments are various and not guaranteed). Susona was the daughter of a wealthy Jewish banker, who, as harrassment of the Jews mounted in the late 1470s, started meeting in secret with other influential local Jews. It’s not known for certain whether actual sedition was being planned, but Susona made the mistake of telling her Christian boyfriend about them, and he in turn reported it to the authorities. The group were duly summoned by the Inquisition and later executed. Overcome with remorse, Susona never again left her house, and when she died her head was hung outside, by her own command, as a warning to others, and in Calle Susona in the Barrio Santa Cruz, the street named after her, you can still find a small tile plaque of a skull on the wall.

Murillo Exhibition at Los Venerables

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Right in the heart of the Barrio Santa Cruz, in a charming little square of the same name, is the Hospital de Los Venerables Sacerdotes (Hospital of the Venerable Priests), founded in 1673 by the dean of Seville Cathedral, Justino de Neve, as a home for sick and retired priests, and used for this purpose until the late 1970s. Apart from being quite big, it’s nothing particularly special from the outside, but like so many buildings in Seville the treasures, both arquitectural and artistic, are on the inside, looking away from the troubles of the world outside.

Today Los Venerables is an important museum of the Barroque period (roughly, the 17th century) in Seville, and brings together some of the works of the most gifted artists and architects of that period. It was designed by Leonardo de Figueroa, who also worked on the San Telmo Palace, the Fine Arts Museum, and the Church of Santa María Magdelena, and features an unusual central patio with elevated arcades and a sunken central fountain. The complex includes a church that is surely one of Seville’s hidden jewels. Although modest in size, with only a single nave, the harmony of the shape of the barrel-vaulted roof and the decorations and other artworks, principally by Juan de Valdés Leal makes this a very special place.

In rooms that were once the home of ageing priests are the museum’s art collections. The permanent collection focuses on the life and times of Diego Velázquez, and includes both works by Velázquez himself, as well as other important artists of the time.

From October 9 until January 20, 2013 there is also a special exhibition of works by Seville’s most famous painter, Bartolomé Murillo, which has been brought together in collaboration with the Prado Museum of Madrid and London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery, and offers a unique opportunity to see them in the city where they were created.

The Judería of Seville

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Seville’s most picturesque and first-destination-for-tourists neighbourhood, the Barrio Santa Cruz, is equally well known as the old Jewish quarter, but the history and importance of the Jews in Spain (the Sephardim) are underestimated or even unknown to a majority of Western Europeans. It’s not known when Jews first came to Spain (it may have been as long as 3,000 years ago), but it was under the Romans in the early centuries AD that their numbers became substantial, and remained so until the late 15th century, when they were finally expelled by the Catholic Kings.

Although they were always second-class citizens, and their relations with the majority populations had many ups and downs, the Spanish Jews generally enjoyed more freedom than Jews elsewhere, and while most were ordinary workers and artisans, a few became wealthy and influential and others were prominent in the intellectual life of society. The interplay of diverse cultures in southern Spain during this time made it the centre of civilisation in Europe, and gave the Sephardic Jews a distinct identity of their own, and for these reasons it is regarded as a “golden age” in their history, and their expulsion is still felt as a great loss and sadness.

After the reconquest of Seville by Ferdinand III in 1248, the Jews here (the second largest Jewish community in Spain after Toledo) had their own quarter in the Santa Cruz, surrounded by a wall with several gates, and for about a hundred years they co-existed peacefully with the Christian population. Then, in the general turmoil and paranoia after the Black Death (1348-1350), persecution of the Jews increased, culminating in the pogrom of 1391. After that many Jews fled, or were forced to convert to Christianity. With the establishment of the Inquisition in 1478, and the formal expulsion of the Jews in 1483, the history of the Jews in Seville came to its tragic end.

The new Centro de Interpretación de la Judería de Sevilla is Seville’s first museum of the history and achievements of Seville’s Jews, telling their story in words (Spanish with English translations) and pictures and other exhibits.

Ximénez de Enciso, 22
Tel: 954 047 089
Daily 10.30-14.00 and 17.30–20.00
Entrance €6.50
Website