Sculpture
The Prado's sculpture collection numbers more than 900 works, in addition to around 200 fragments. Most are classical, Renaissance and Baroque sculptures and works from the 18th and 19th centuries, but the Museum also possesses some Oriental and Medieval pieces.
The first group derives from the royal collection and principally comprises Greco-Roman sculptures in addition to Renaissance bronzes by artists such as the Leoni, who executed sculpted portraits of the Spanish monarchs in the 16th century. With the importation of sculptures from Italy, the taste for the classical revived in 17th-century Spain. This was in fact one of the main reasons for Velázquez's second trip to Italy, and during his stay in Rome he was involved in the selection of works on behalf of Philip IV. Particularly important were the acquisitions made in the 18th century by Philip V and his queen, Isabella Farnese, who purchased the collection of Queen Christina of Sweden, to which that of José Nicolás de Azara was later added.
With regard to more recent acquisitions, an important addition was the small but significant group of archaic Greek sculpture donated by Mario Zayas in 1944, an area not represented by a single work in the Spanish royal collection. Two sculptures of Epimetheus and Pandora by El Greco are also recent acquisitions for the collection.
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Famous quotes containing the word sculpture:
“Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.”
—Elie Wiesel (b. 1928)
“You should go to picture-galleries and museums of sculpture to be acted upon, and not to express or try to form your own perfectly futile opinion. It makes no difference to you or the world what you may think of any work of art. That is not the question; the point is how it affects you. The picture is the judge of your capacity, not you of its excellence; the world has long ago passed its judgment upon it, and now it is for the work to estimate you.”
—Anna C. Brackett (1836–1911)
“What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to an human soul.”
—Joseph Addison (1672–1719)