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Choir screen from the Cathedral of Valladolid

Attributed to Rafal Amezúa
completed ca. 1763
On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 305
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.

Artwork Details

Object Information
  • Title: Choir screen from the Cathedral of Valladolid
  • Maker: Attributed to Rafal Amezúa from Elorrio
  • Date: completed ca. 1763
  • Culture: Spanish
  • Medium: Iron: gilded and painted; limestone (base)
  • Dimensions: 52 × 42 ft. (15.85 × 12.8)
  • Classification: Metalwork-Iron
  • Credit Line: Gift of The Hearst Foundation, 1956
  • Object Number: 56.234.1
  • Curatorial Department: European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

Audio

Cover Image for 851. Kids: Choir Screen from the Cathedral of Valladolid

851. Kids: Choir Screen from the Cathedral of Valladolid

Gallery 305

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[Choir singing]

Feel free to sing along if you like! A church choir once sang behind this gigantic screen. If you tilt your head back, you’ll see large, pointed ornaments at the top of the screen. You may even want to take a few steps back to get a better look, but remember to look behind you first! Now try something—hold out your finger and follow one of the bars all the way up to the top. Do you see the beautiful shapes they make? You might be able to make out the gold that covers the metal in places. Now, go right up to the iron bars. The Spanish word for this kind of screen is reja. The ironworkers who made them were called rejeros. Imagine how they used hammers and chisels to create these slender shapes and decorate them with leaves.

Walk back now to the label for this work and the photograph there. This shows the metal screen in its original home—inside a majestic church in Spain called the Cathedral of Valladolid. This reja stood in the middle of the church at the entrance to the choir—the enclosed area where the singers gathered for church services.

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