Museum of Fine Arts

Paintings of Spanish women across the centuries

I visited the magnificent Museum of Fine Arts in Valencia to see the current show, which consists of master works from the BBVA Collection. This is a vast art collection belonging to the BBVA bank. In Spain banks and financial institutions are major supporters of the arts.

I saw many things here as the Museum is vast and boasts a huge range of works as well as the BBVA show.

I liked one quote from the exhibition text that really made me think:

“Over the last five hundred years, the spoken and written languages were many, but during this first globalization, the arts in Europe communicated using the same language that allows us to define a common culture from Sicily to Norway and from Poland to Portugal. This great period in our history, which gave the world the geniuses of Descartes, Teresa de Jesús, Shakespeare and Leibniz and saw the development of principles such as humanism, democracy and the social state, can be narrated, to a large extent, through the masterpieces of the BBVA Collection. Its paintings and canvases, populated by kings, gods, peasants, landscapes and bourgeois, narrate the construction of Europe with more clarity than any history book.”

I believe this to be largely true. In fancy I wrote a whole book on the subject, about painting carries but also shapes historical narratives across western history. This is largely due to its fascination with what Aristotle called Mimesis, or imitation nature – which we also call realism. But it’s never simply realism it’s always something extra something a bit thrilling which finds its way into so much a western art and that is the thrilling feeling we get when we look at something actually at magnificent that is so overwhelming and this we call the sublime.

When is the things interested me in the museum was a whole range of paintings – by male artists – of Spanish women. according to these painting we can see a particular flair, a look, a manner and. a style that is markedly different from the women subjects of English or French painting for example.