Choir screen from the Cathedral of Valladolid

Choir screen from the Cathedral of Valladolid

Rafal Amezúa

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Spanish ironworkers were provided with numerous commissions for grille work such as window grilles and balcony grilles, but the most important were the grilles, or screens, used to divide certain parts of a church from others. Spanish chapel screens of ambitious proportions were already being made during the last years of the fifteenth century, but early in the sixteenth century the Spanish smiths began to replace the square-sectioned or twisted iron bar with the slender, baluster-shaped iron spindle. Renaissance screens, or rejas, were composed of two or three tiers of spindles hammered from solid iron in the lightest, most symmetrical of forms and cold-chiseled with decorative foliation. These rejas proved so satisfying a solution to the screening of Spanish church choirs and chapels that they long remained models for Spanish ironworkers (rejeros). The Museum's monumental reja, although closely based on Renaissance models, was commissioned by an eighteenth-century patron, Isidro Cosio y Bustamante, bishop of Valladolid, and installed in 1763 in the nave of the Cathedral of Valladolid, where it divided the choir from the high altar. The cresting and the gilding of the ironwork were completed a year later.

European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Choir screen from the Cathedral of ValladolidChoir screen from the Cathedral of ValladolidChoir screen from the Cathedral of ValladolidChoir screen from the Cathedral of ValladolidChoir screen from the Cathedral of Valladolid

The fifty thousand objects in the Museum's comprehensive and historically important collection of European sculpture and decorative arts reflect the development of a number of art forms in Western European countries from the early fifteenth through the early twentieth century. The holdings include sculpture in many sizes and media, woodwork and furniture, ceramics and glass, metalwork and jewelry, horological and mathematical instruments, and tapestries and textiles. Ceramics made in Asia for export to European markets and sculpture and decorative arts produced in Latin America during this period are also included among these works.