Four centuries of treasure
Four centuries’ worth of Spanish treasures light up the MFAH
“Glory of Spain,” now at MFAH, brings Hispanic culture through a multitude of art forms.
You have to get up close and personal with “The Duchess of Alba.”
Yes, Francisco Goya’s iconic portrait contains a bravura display of painting, with many tones of black that define the lady’s lacy Spanish costume. But there’s also a potentially scandalous story happening.
The year is 1797, and the recently widowed, 35-year-old duchess wears two rings on the fingers of her right hand, one with her name and one with the artist’s. She’s
pointing to the ground, where the phrase “Solo Goya (Only Goya)” is etched into sand.
Scholars don’t know the details of their relationship, but María del Pilar Teresa Cayetana de Silva Álvarez de Toledo y Silva Bazán was one of the Spanish court’s most striking figures in the late-18th century. Many men were smitten by her. She died five years after Goya finished the painting, and he kept the canvas for the rest of his life, never offering it for sale.
“The Duchess of Alba” may be the showstopper of “Glory of Spain,” this spring’s big show in the Upper Brown Pavilion at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, but it’s just one of 220 deliciously ornate treasures that range from large canvases to golden pendants about the size of a thimble.
Displayed chronologically across six color-coded galleries, the show is essentially a museum within-a-museum. Its treasures span 4,000 years of culture, progressing through antiquity, the Medieval era, the Renaissance, Spanish America, the Enlightenment and modern Spain, when religious themes gave way to contemporary, secular subjects.
You’d think some enormous castle and its adjacent cathedral had been raided, with textiles, pottery, metalwork, reliquary, illuminated manuscripts and maps filling out spaces between masterpiece paintings.
That “castle” is the Hispanic Society of America’s Museum and Library, which MFAH director Gary Tinterow calls one of the country’s best-kept secrets. The show represents only a portion of the Society’s cache, on tour while its buildings in Harlem undergo renovations. The show premiered in 2017 at Madrid’s Prado, where it drew 500,000 visitors. Condensing the soul of Spain Founded by philanthropist Archer Milton Huntington, the only son of railroad and transportation magnate Collis P. Huntington, the Society was a lifetime in the making. The young Huntington was born in 1870 and so loved museums as a kid, he wrote that he wanted to live in one. By the age of 16, he was fixed on Spanish art and literature and acquiring manuscripts.
By 1904, he had enough material to establish his library and immediately began collecting decorative arts and paintings for the new institution. Money was apparently no object. His mother, Arabella Huntington, paid $650,000 in 1910 to contribute Diego Velázquez’s 17th-century portrait “Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-Duke of Olivares” — a record at the time.
With many purchases for his museum, Huntington got very lucky, Society director Mitchell Codding says. “It’s always important for a collector to acquire the best works they can early on because they’re only going to get more scarce and valuable.”
Huntington, who died in 1955, did not collect decorative art and paintings from Latin America. The Society has acquired objects from that part of the world during the past 25 years. As a result, Codding says, “There’s a very unique opportunity to see the movement of all the arts and culture that came out of Spain over 4,000 years.”
Huntington envisioned a museum that would “condense the soul of Spain into meanings, through works of the hand and spirit,” he wrote. “If I can make a poem of a museum it will be easy to read.” Even without including Latin America, his enterprise turned epic.
Consider the vinyl mural behind the alabaster effigy of a duchess from 1498, for example. That’s just atmosphere for the traveling show, but the Society owns the entire architectural surround it depicts, from a church in Segovia, which is 30 feet tall and part of a matched pair.
The show opens on a pure note, with a smallish room of antiquities that includes pottery from the Bell Beaker culture of about 2400-1900 BC; the Palencia Hoard, a cache of gold, silver and electrum jewelry that was discovered in 1911; and the graceful marble bust of a handsome young Roman.
Beautifully patterned, colorful ceramics and rare textiles in the next rooms point to the influence of Islam on the Iberian Peninsula in later centuries. The intricate, horizontal patterns of the only surviving, intact Alhambra silk
(ca. 1400) can be appreciated from across a room. But a viewer could easily overlook an equally rare ivory Pyxis, or perfume holder, from about 966, carved with leaves, flowers and flourishes — a treasure Christians later saved and repurposed as a reliquary. A Catholic world
Christianity drove Spanish art for centuries, of course. I felt as if I’d stepped back into the Catholic world of my childhood among so many religious treasures — embellished liturgical vestments, gold and silver chalices, altar pieces, wooden sculptures and too many dreamy paintings to count depicting Mary and pious saints and martyrs.
I know these paintings from the holy cards the nuns gave us as prizes in grade school. They were my first contact with art. Seeing them now, life-size, I appreciate them anew and more than ever.
James Anno, the MFAH’s new associate curator of European art, gets credit for organizing the show so efficiently. He is especially awed by the art in the Golden Age rooms.
“It would be difficult to collect a greater representation of Spanish Baroque art than what we can see here, with Velázquez, Franciso de Zurbarán, Alonso Cano, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Juan Carreño de Miranda and Juan de Valdés Leal,” he says. “If you open up your art-history survey book and want to get the greatest highlights, these are the names you’re going to see.”
The sensational eye candy doesn’t let up. If anything, it gets more luminous toward the end, where the paintings include several important canvases by Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, who was the world’s top-selling contemporary artist in the first decade or so of the 20th century.
You may want to plan for more than one pass, and allow plenty of time.