Sculpter la couleur - Chefs-d’œuvre du Musée national de sculpture, Valladolid

Organized at the same time and in the same space as the Louvre’s monographic exhibition dedicated to the painter Francisco de Zurbarán (1598–1664), and designed to foster dialogue between the works through a jointly conceived scenography, the exhibition invites visitors to discover seventeenth‑century Spanish sculpture.

It consists largely of polychrome wooden religious sculptures that illuminate the cultural and religious milieu in which the works of the major Spanish painters of the period—led by Zurbarán, Velázquez, and Murillo—were created, at a time when the ties between painting and sculpture were especially close.

The exhibition highlights the loan of a complete paso de procesión, a set of five life-sized figures sculpted and painted dating from the early seventeenth century, by Gregorio Fernández, a sculptor then active in Valladolid, displayed at human height to permit direct observation.

The route continues along several thematic axes: the cult of relics and the role of intercessors saints, the robed statues, the depiction of the sufferings of Christ and the Virgin, private devotion and the Immaculate Conception.

It is thus possible to explore the various uses and meanings of these sculptures, but also to better understand their materiality, regional and stylistic inflections, and the personalities of the principal sculptors of the period, active in Castile or in Andalusia, through other works by Gregorio Fernández, but also by Alonso Cano, Juan de Mesa, José de Mora, Pedro de Mena, Jerónimo Francisco and Miguel Jerónimo García, José de Arce, Pedro Roldán, or Luisa Roldán, one of the few women artists to have had a career at court.

Beyond the Camino del Calvario paso, among the exhibition’s major loans are notably the Cristo de la Luz, also by Gregorio Fernández, a life‑size Christ on the Cross, and Saint John the Baptist by Alonso Cano.

The Virgin and Child with Saint John the Baptist by Luisa Roldán and The Immaculate Conception by Pedro de Mena, dated 1680 and linked to a competition organized by the Bishop of Granada, are also presented as the museum’s two recent acquisitions, restored.