Mariano Benlliure in Madrid

He was born on September 8, 1862, and his childhood was spent in Valencia where he began in sculpture in a self-taught way.

His first important work was done early with 15 years at 1878 in Zamora. There, the same person for whom his father worked temporarily entrusted him with a processional step, The Descended, for the Royal Brotherhood of the Holy Burial of Zamora. Much later, the Brotherhood of Jesus Nazareno would entrust him with the passage Redemption, being these two steps the only ones totally of your hand.

In 1881 he settled in Rome, where he opened a studio for almost twenty years. He worked as a painter-watercolorist, and with what he got he devoted himself to sculpture. Declared deserted the First Medal of the National Exhibition of Fine Arts of Madrid of 1884, Benlliure received the Second by damn!, a novel subject with an altar boy who burns with the censer, which meant a fundamental step in his career.

He alternated his stays in Rome with trips to Paris and won first medals at the International Exhibitions in Berlin, Munich, Vienna and Paris.

In 1887 he achieved the First Medal in the National Exhibition with the Statue of the painter José Ribera and in 1895 the Medal of Honor with the Statue of Antonio Trueba for his monument in Bilbao. In 1900 he won at the Universal Exhibition in Paris the Medal of Honor in Sculpture for a set of works among which stand out the Mausoleum of Gayarre, the relief Portrait of the Royal Family and the painter's bust Francisco Domingo.

In 1896 he settled in Madrid, he built his house-studio between 1910-1912, which was a meeting point for the most illustrious characters, both to pose and participate in their lively gatherings. Benlliure made in this study exceptional and numerous portraits and monuments.

In 1910 he got the Grand Prize in Sculpture in Buenos Aires. The following year the Spanish Pavilion of the International Exhibition in Rome dedicated a room in which the monumental bullfighting group stood out The Coleus. In Spain he received a Gold Medal from the Círculo Bellas Artes de Madrid in 1924 for the bust The lesson.

The work of Mariano Benlliure is very wide and of great variety, since he dominated all the materials, genres and techniques of the sculpture. It stood out exceptionally in the realization of monuments, that surpass the fifty distributed by Spain and Ibero-America. Madrid is the city that has its most outdoor work, with statues, memorials, plaques and even funerary monuments.

It is noteworthy that, in addition, he was Director of the Academy of Spain in Rome, General Director of Fine Arts and Director of the Museum of Modern Art in Madrid, as well as member of various Academies of Fine Arts in Madrid, Valencia, Zaragoza, Malaga, San Lucas of Rome, Milan, Carrara and Paris, and received innumerable decorations such as the French Legion of Honor, Commander of the Order of the Italian Crown or the Grand Cross of Alfonso X of Spain.

In the last decade of his life, with a weakened health, he could not directly control the execution of the orders, mostly of religious themes, depending on the team of collaborators that concluded the sketched works, so that a great part of these works should be valued as workshop works.

9 died in November of 1947 in Madrid, and his remains were taken to Valencia with all the honors.

We are surrounded by works of Benlliure, but we have them so assimilated with the image of the city of Madrid, that sometimes, we forget. There is no essential district of the capital, or an important cemetery where no trace is found.

On the occasion of the 150 anniversary of his birth, four itineraries were designed that offered a magnificent opportunity to "look at them", not to see them, again. Because it is always possible to discover a different aspect according to the light of day. In addition, the Madrid City Council made a great effort to prioritize in its task of maintenance of public monuments, the restoration of the works of Benlliure. Finally, this great sculptor deserves that his monumental work is valued in the context of the history of art and urban development.

The itinerary brochure for Madrid, whose contents can be expanded on this portal, was published in the 2013 year, in order to help citizens to know the figure of Benlliure through four itineraries that allow the journey through some of its most outstanding works in the capital.

Benlliure, like all the sculptors who made commemorative monuments, had to stick to the bases of the contests or of the commissions, which in general established a historical rigor at the time of representing the honored characters. And the sculptor did it, with the technical mastery of a genius and with the perfection of transmitting the most trustworthy image possible, both in the psychological, the historical and even the anecdotal.

A walk through the center of Madrid leads us to explore his own artistic career, from his most original works as Barbara of Braganza or the exceptional monument to Mª Cristina de Borbón, Fernando VII's fourth wife and mother of Queen Isabel II, located in front of Casón del Buen Retiro.

The first two decades of the twentieth century were memorable years in his sculptural work, as he left us the spectacular equestrian statue of the king Alfonso XII crowning the most important monument of the Retiro Park, going through the introspection of the painter's face Goya - today in front of the Prado although this was not his first destination -, or because of the more realistic expression of General Martinez Campos, declared BIC in November of 2013.

Along with these monuments, Benlliure also worked on commemorative plaques that we passed almost daily, such as the one dedicated to the attack on Canalejas, in the middle of the Puerta del Sol, or Álvarez Quintero brothers on Velázquez Street, together with contributions to decorative sets such as the Metropolis building group on the corner of Alcalá and Gran Vía.

The success of his works was so great that he was called countless times to sculpt pantheons, mausoleums and tombs. In Madrid alone with the contemplation of the three mausoleums to Sagasta, Cánovas and Dato in the pantheon of Illustrious Men next to the basilica of Atocha - a true sculpture museum in Madrid -, or the complex Pantheon of the Dukes of Denia in the Cemetery of San Isidro, so battered during the Civil War, we have an accurate confirmation that Benlliure was a great sculptor, in fact, one of the greatest that Spanish sculpture has given to history.

Mariano Benlliure made a large number of memorials throughout his life, which coincided with the period of greatest development of this sculptural typology, parallel to the urban expansion of the main urban centers. Its cosmopolitan character opened the doors to the orders of more than thirty Spanish cities, including the two archipelagos.

In addition to its extreme historical rigor in the characterization of the characters or the events that had to evoke in each of them, gave great importance to the location where they had to erect and its urban context, which studied in situ, as it greatly conditioned the orientation, proportions and composition of the project.

After Madrid, it is Valencia, his hometown, for which more monuments would be made and from which he received at 1885 the first institutional commission, the Monument to the Marquis de Campo, a set of large dimensions and with a complex allegorical program.

Just one year later, the Valencian artistic world commissioned the second, dedicated to the painter José Ribera. With some of the allegories of the first and the statue of the second reached the most significant national awards and its first international triumphs. Among the commissions that followed each other, we should highlight the last two erected in memory of their great friends and countrymen, Joaquín Sorolla y Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, the latter of a funerary nature.

It worked almost practically for all the Spanish geography. After the aforementioned Madrid and Valencia, the Basque Country and Andalusia are the richest communities in Benlliure monuments, among which we can highlight those devoted to the poet Antonio Trueba (Bilbao) and the Joselito's Mausoleum (Seville), because each one of its kind was a novel contribution and marked both milestones both in the sculptor's personal trajectory and in the general evolution of the typologies.

Barcelona, ​​Cuenca, Las Palmas, Palma de Mallorca, Santander, Santiago de Compostela, Toledo, Valladolid or Zaragoza, are just some of those 33 cities to which he contributed to enrich with his work Mariano Benlliure.

Along with these, we can not fail to remember that secluded corner in the Navarre Pyrenees, Roncal, in whose small but suggestive cemetery stands what is perhaps its most celebrated funerary monument and that brought it the most important international recognition in the Universal Exhibition of Paris of 1900, the Julián Gayarre's Mausoleum. Benlliure had turned with enthusiasm in his execution, squeezing to the maximum his creativity and technical knowledge to remember the great Navarrese tenor, who was joined by a close friendship that arose during his visits to Rome to interpret his most memorable operatic characters.

His long career dedicated to the commemorative sculpture closes at 1946, a few months before his death, with the Monument to Mariano Fortuny for Reus. The painter had exerted a great influence on several generations of artists, including that of Benlliure himself, who, although he finally opted for sculpture, had taken his first steps in the art world with brushes.

Among the large set of monuments that he made throughout his long artistic career, "El Picapedrero", the nickname he used to sign letters addressed to family and friends, always remembered with special affection those dedicated to Agustina de Aragón in Zaragoza and Antonio Trueba in Bilbao, already mentioned, for having made them with the utmost love by being modeled on his beloved ones: his second wife, the lyrical singer Lucrecia Arana, and his father, Juan Antonio Benlliure Tomás.

In 1881 Mariano Benlliure travels to Italy and takes up residence in Rome, where he comes into contact with the international artistic scene and begins his participation in the Fine Arts Exhibitions of the main European capitals, winning several first medals.

However, the true international recognition would be obtained at the Universal Exhibition of Paris of 1900, in which he was awarded the Medal of Honor, the Grand Prix, in sculpture. Among the numerous set of works presented, was the bronze bust of the researcher and marine biologist Lacaze Duthiers, which he had commissioned from the University of the Sorbonne. Shortly after, after the death of the scientist, the institution also entrusted him with the execution of his funeral monument, the first to be carried out outside Spanish territory.

The monumental footprint of Benlliure in Europe is not as well known or extensive as in America, although with it it helped to perpetuate the memory of two of our most praised painters: El Greek in his native Crete and Goya in Bordeaux.

Benlliure began to publicize his work in Latin America in the Artal rooms, exhibitions of Spanish painting and sculpture that the Catalan art dealer based in Argentina, José Artal, periodically organized in Buenos Aires between 1897 and 1913, but it was as a result of the celebrations of the independence centenaries of several Spanish-American countries around 1910, when its presence in America became more relevant.

For this reason, large international exhibitions were organized in Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile or Mexico, in which Mariano Benlliure had an important and award-winning participation. In Buenos Aires he presented the Monument to Velázquez, which had sculpted without responding to any commission and was acquired by the Argentine government.

Some countries also wanted to erect large monuments in homage to their heroes, liberators or the rulers who had played a greater role in the dawn of the new republics, and the equestrian statue became the preferred typology. Benlliure already had in his possession the Alfonso XII and Monument to Martínez Campos in Madrid and was, undoubtedly, the sculptor who received a greater number of commissions, among which stands out for its great scenographic display on Monument to General San Martín in Lima.

Apart from the equestrian statues, but always conceived as great staging, he made other monuments such as those dedicated to Vasco Nunez de Balboa, in collaboration with Miguel Blay, a Irigoyen and Simon Bolivar. The latter, erected in Panama, was considered by the sculptor as his most internationally relevant work.

Also stand out the balanced composition of Pantheon of the Falla and Bonet family in the Colon Cemetery of Havana, within the funerary genre, and the magnificent monumental piece, although on the margin of any established typology, of the imposing bullfighting group The coleo, that currently presides over an old sugar mill a few kilometers south of the Cuban capital.

The imprint of Mariano Benlliure reached two distant cities, Manila in the Philippines and Punta Arena in the Strait of Magellan, which denotes the relevance and transnational character of an artist who embodies a key figure in the world of sculpture.