Museo de Bellas Artes: A Convent Built Around Its Courtyards
Why is it significant?
Face the long, sober façade on the far side of this leafy square, with its brick, its pale stone and its single grand doorway. In the middle of the square, a bronze Murillo looks on, brush in hand, as if waiting for you to go in and check his work.
Key Facts
| Place | Museo de Bellas Artes: A Convent Built Around Its Courtyards |
|---|---|
| Address | Plaza del Museo 9, 41001 Sevilla, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 37.39240, -6.00000 |
| Part of Walk | From Baroque Domes to Las Setas: Seville's Architecture Between Sierpes and Casa de Pilatos |
| Generated | Generated |
Face the long, sober façade on the far side of this leafy square, with its brick, its pale stone and its single grand doorway. In the middle of the square, a bronze Murillo looks on, brush in hand, as if waiting for you to go in and check his work.
This was the convent of La Merced Calzada, the house of the Mercedarian friars, an order founded in the thirteenth century for one very specific purpose: to ransom Christians held captive across the Mediterranean. The friars settled here soon after the Christian conquest of Seville in 1248, and in the early 1600s the architect Juan de Oviedo rebuilt their convent in the form you see now.
The genius of the building is inside, and it is all about air and light. The rooms wrap around three courtyards, each with arcades, tiles and orange trees, linked by a grand staircase under a decorated dome. In a city where summer can pass forty degrees, a courtyard is not decoration, it is engineering: shade, cross-draughts and the cool sound of water, all designed around the sun.
In 1835 the Spanish state confiscated the property of most religious orders, and the friars were gone. The empty convent became a museum, filled with paintings rescued from closed monasteries all over the province. That is why the old church now hangs with canvases that Murillo painted for the Capuchin friars of Seville, while Zurbarán and Valdés Leal fill the rooms around the courtyards. Many Sevillians will tell you it is the finest collection of Spanish Golden Age painting after the Prado.
On Sunday mornings painters set up their easels in this square and sell their work under the trees, so art spills out of the convent and onto the pavement. Now leave the square and walk south-east for a few minutes, until a church with a big, bright dome rises above the rooftops.