Spain Guide
Andalucía
Museo de Bellas Artes
Address: North of the hospital, near the Plaza de Armas bus station
Opening time: Tues 2.30–8.30pm, Wed– Sat 9am–8.30pm, Sun 9am–2.30pm
Price: €1.50, free with EU passport
One of Spain's most impressive art galleries, Seville's Museo de Bellas Artes is housed in a beautiful former convent. The collection is frequently rotated, so not all the works mentioned here may be on show.
Among the highlights is a wonderful late fifteenth-century sculpture in painted terracotta in Room 1, Lamentation over the Dead Christ, by the Andalucian Pedro Millán, the founding father of the Seville school of sculpture. A marriage of Gothic and expressive naturalism, this style was the starting point for the outstanding seventeenth-century period of religious iconography in Seville. A later example, in Room 2, is a magnificent San Jerónimo by the Italian Pietro Torrigiano, who spent the latter years of his life in the city. Room 3 has a retablo of the Redemption (c.1562), with fine woodcarving by Juan Giralte, while a monumental Last Supper by Alonso Vázquez covers an end wall of Room 4.
Beyond a serene patio and cloister, Room 5, in the monastery's former church, holds the nucleus of the collection: Zurbarán's Apotheosis of St Thomas Aquinas, as well as a clutch of works by Murillo in the apse, crowned by the great Immaculate Conception. In an alcove nearby you'll see the same artist's Virgin and Child, popularly known as La Servilleta because it was said to have been painted on a dinner napkin.
Upstairs, Room 6 displays Baroque works including a moving Santa Teresa by Ribera – Spain's master of tenebrismo (darkness penetrated by light) – and a stark Crucifixion by Zurbarán. Room 10 contains more imposing canvases by Zurbarán, including St Hugo visiting the Carthusian Monks at Supper and another almost sculptural Crucifixion.
The collection ends with Romantic and Modern works. Room 11 holds an austere late canvas by Goya of the octogenarian Don José Duaso, while in Room 12, Gonzalo Bilbao's Las Cigarreras is a vivid portrayal of the wretched life of women in the tobacco factory early in the last century. Finally, in Room 14 there's Juan Centeño y su cuadrilla by Huelvan artist Daniel Vásquez Díaz, who worked in Paris and was a friend of Picasso.