Museo de Historia de Madrid: Ribera's Wild Doorway
Why is it significant?
Stop in front of this doorway and try to take it all in: stone curtains, twisting pilasters, flames, garlands, shields and cherubs, all bursting upward from a plain brick wall, with a saint in a niche at the very top.
Key Facts
| Place | Museo de Historia de Madrid: Ribera's Wild Doorway |
|---|---|
| Address | Calle de Fuencarral 78, 28004 Madrid, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 40.42580, -3.70080 |
| Part of Walk | From the Dos de Mayo to La Movida: Malasaña & Chueca, Madrid's Rebel Quarters |
| Generated | Generated |
Stop in front of this doorway and try to take it all in: stone curtains, twisting pilasters, flames, garlands, shields and cherubs, all bursting upward from a plain brick wall, with a saint in a niche at the very top. Next to the sober façades of Calle de Fuencarral, it looks like a firework frozen in granite.
The doorway was designed in the 1720s by Pedro de Ribera, Madrid's most daring Baroque architect, for the Real Hospicio de San Fernando, the Royal Hospice. Behind it lived hundreds of the city's poor, orphans and beggars, who were housed, fed and put to work at looms. The saint at the top is King Ferdinand the Third, San Fernando. Later critics of Neoclassical taste despised this kind of exuberance and mocked Ribera's style for generations, yet the portal outlived its critics.
Since 1929 the old hospice has been the city's history museum. Its star is a painting by Goya from 1810, the Allegory of the City of Madrid, with an oval medallion at its centre that tells the political history of Spain all by itself. It first showed a portrait of Joseph Bonaparte. Then it was painted over with the word Constitution, then Joseph came back, then Ferdinand the Seventh, until finally it was given the words Dos de Mayo. One canvas, repainted every time the regime changed.
Inside there is also a huge scale model of Madrid made in 1830 by León Gil de Palacio, a whole city in miniature. And just around the corner, on Calle de la Palma, a small bar called El Penta opened in the mid-1970s and became one of the meeting places of the Movida's musicians and night owls, one more proof that in this neighbourhood the eighteenth century and the 1980s live wall to wall.
Before you go, notice how tiny the people look beneath Ribera's door. That was the point: charity, made monumental. Now cross Calle de Fuencarral and head east along Calle de Barceló to a white building that looks like an ocean liner.