the major exhibitions that the Seville Museum of Fine Arts has organized over the last decade

The Bellas Artes inaugurated this last decade in March 2015 with the exhibition “Landscapes”which explores landscape painting of the Renaissance, Baroque and later centuries through the museum’s collection, publishing a catalog and with studies on the evolution of the genre and the representation of Seville. The same year, in October, he inaugurated “La main au crayon”, a compilation of 20th century drawings belonging to the collections of the Mapfre Foundation. For the occasion, a selection of 59 works by artists as notable as Gustav Klimt, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí either Eduardo Chillidaamong others.

In 2016, the former convent of La Merced presented one of the most important exhibitions of the decade, ‘Francisco Pacheco. Theoretician, artist and teacherwhich included 58 works, 24 of which came from the Seville Museum’s own funds, thus highlighting the great value of its collections. “We want to claim the figure of someone who transcends much more than just being a modest painter or the father-in-law of Velázquez”commented the Director of Fine Arts on the day of its inauguration, Valme Munoz. Out of curiosity, in the exhibition, we could see the “Portrait of Cristóbal Suárez de Ribera” (1620), painted by the young Velázquez and which could be compared to the drawing that Pacheco had made twenty years earlier of the same character, discovered a few months earlier in the RAE library.

The Museum of Fine Arts has been experiencing a period of splendor since the end of 2017, since in November of the same year the art gallery began to celebrate the Murillo Year -the artist was born on January 1, 1618- with a first exhibition which commemorated the 4th centenary of the birth of the Sevillian painter and which prepared the major exhibition which would come the following year. It was about “Murillo and the Capuchins of Seville”. The altarpiece that the artist created for the Capuchin convent in the capital of Seville has been reconstructed there. In addition, it benefited from the collaboration of the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, which lent the main canvas of the main altarpiece, “The Jubilee of the Porziuncula”a large format canvas preserved in its collections and which left Seville in the middle of the 19th century. This work arrived at the Beaux-Arts in 2016, where it was restored for public exhibition and was loaned for a total of ten years. The exhibition could be seen until March 2018 and reached a record with a total of 267,767 visitors.

Exactly one year later, in November 2018, the Museum of Fine Arts inaugurated what was its main exhibition of the decade: ‘Murillo. 4th centenary. With a budget of just over a million euros, it constitutes the first anthology on the painter organized in his city and brings together a selection of works 55 images from around thirty national and international institutions. This great exhibition This made it possible to leave behind the old cliché of the painter coated in saints and immaculate women and to present him as one of the great masters of painting.a condition that he had among his contemporaries -being a more sought-after artist than Velázquez and Zurbarán-, but also until the beginning of the 20th century, as evidenced by the Napoleonic looting of his work in Seville. This is one of the most ambitious exhibitions, both in terms of number of loans and thematic scope, organized in Spain since that organized by the Prado Museum, with around a hundred works, in 1982. Likewise, for the first time in two centuries, around twenty paintings from Spain were seen. The exhibition brought together masterpieces such as “The Virgin and Child,” from Galleria Corsini; “The Holy Family (The Two Trinities)”, from the National Gallery; “The Wedding at Cana”, from the University of Birmingham, or the “Portrait of Íñigo by Melchor Fernández de Velasco”, from the Louvre. The exhibition, open until March 2019, exceeded 125,000 visitorswhile all the activities of the Murillo Year attracted almost three million people.

The golden age of Fine Arts continued from November 2019, the opening date of the exhibition “Mountain, teacher of teachers”. This is the first monographic exhibition dedicated to this great sculptor and brings together 48 sculptures and 10 paintings. The exhibition showed, through San Jerónimo de Torrigiano, the origin of this iconography in the work of the sculptor from Alcalá la Real and how it influenced the representation of other saints, such as Santo Domingo de Guzmánwhich is the property of the Beaux-Arts. Likewise, the creative freedom of Martínez Montañés was visible in the iconography of the Inmaculada, with different details compared to the canonical representation of Pacheco, also included in the exhibition, and where “La Cieguecita” stood out. Visitors were also delighted with three magnificent crucifixes: that of the altarpiece of the convent of Santa Clara, that of Clemency of the Cathedral and that of the Abandoned.

In 2020 the pandemic arrived, but despite this, the Ministry of Culture made great efforts to celebrate the so-called ‘Laffón Semester’. In addition to the exhibitions dedicated to the Sevillian painter at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo and at the Cajasol Foundation, the Bellas Artes inaugurated the exhibition in October of the same year. ‘Carmen Laffón. The study of Bolsa Street in Sanlúcar de Barrameda’. Under the guardianship of Juan Bosco Díaz-Urmenetaa series of works – painting, drawing and sculpture – from the Sanlúcar workshop of the Sevillian creator with a strong artistic and sentimental unity were exhibited. The design was also done by the artist. Juan Suarezlong-time collaborator of Laffón in projects such as the scenography of “The Marriage of Figaro” of the Maestranza Theater. In it we could see 21 works of different formats, focusing on urban landscapes, which Carmen Laffón painted from her studio, and still lifes, the latter fixed both in sculpture and through large format drawings and mixed techniques.

In December 2021, another of the major exhibitions of the last decade of Fine Arts was inaugurated: “Valdès Leal (1622-1690)”. The objective was to celebrate the 4th centenary of the birth of this master, going beyond the label of “painter of the dead” which was attributed to him in the 19th century following his two paintings of “Postrimerías”. In addition, He was rediscovered as the great dramatist of Baroque painting. The exhibition showed the great versatility of Valdés Leal’s work, with stages ranging from drawing – he mastered this discipline – and engraving to painting and large-format sculpture. 88 pieces were selected for the exhibition, 65 of them come from national and international collections and 23 from the museum itself.

On the other hand, Bellas Artes presented a total of 34 masterpieces of the Seville Renaissance in the exhibition “Renaissance Art of Seville” which opened in December 2022. This brought together exceptional paintings, sculptures, ceramics and other pieces by great artists such as Roque de Balduque, Torrigiano, Alejo Fernández either Juan Bautista Vázquez the Elderamong others. The paintings created for the decoration of the hall of the house were also exhibited for the first time after its restoration. Arguijo House.

The 4th centenary of the birth of Pedro Roldán was also celebrated as it deserved from November 2023 with the inauguration of the exhibition “Pedro Roldán, sculptor (1624-1699)”which brought together 44 works, of which 36 were his sculptures. One of the main attractions of this exhibition was that ninety percent of the works on display were seen for the first time by the public. Masterpieces such as “Holy Christ of Charity” (1673-74), of the Hospital de la Caridad, or of “The Christ of Sorrows” (attribution, 1681), which came from another charitable order still in force in Seville, that of Pozo Santo. Another of the most striking images is that of “The Christ of forgiveness” (1672), brought especially for this exhibition by the parish of Santa María Coronada in the Cádiz town of Medina Sidonia.

In December 2024, another major exhibition arrives at Bellas Artes: ‘Del Greco to Zuloaga. Masterpieces of Spanish art at the Bilbao Museum of Fine Arts. A selection of 26 paintings and two sculptures representative of the quality of the collection of works from the Spanish school preserved by the Bilbao museum space, which maintains excellent relations with the Seville museum, was selected. The exhibition tour included such notable painters as El GrecoFrancisco de Zurbarán, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Luis Paret, Francis de Goya either Ignacio Zuloaga.