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COPYRIGHT 2001 Texas Monthly, Inc.
THE SPLENDOR OF THE OLD WORLD IS ON VIEW AT A NEW MUSEUM IN DALLAS -- AND AT SAN ANTONIO'S MOST FAMOUS MISSION.
THROUGHOUT THE MORE THAN THREE CENTURIES that Spain ruled much of the New World, no Spanish monarch ever set foot in his vast American empire, much less its far-flung and chronically neglected border outposts in Texas. The king and queen of Spain did drop by, however, for the March opening of the new home of Dallas' Meadows Museum, to inspect a collection of Spanish art so formidable that the museum is often called "the Prado on the Prairie." Sequestered for years in a cramped corner of Southern Methodist University's student arts complex, the Meadows' Velazquezes, Goyas, and Picassos have now moved across the street to palatial digs, where the campus' indigenous Georgian-style architecture has been interpreted with muscular Spanish baroque flair by the Chicago-based firm Hammond Beeby Rupert Ainge.
The climax of this elegant architectural drama is an immense second-floor gallery dedicated to the Siglo de Oro, the Spanish golden age, which spanned most of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There, on sunflower-yellow walls, lit by coffered skylights, hang imposing gold-hued canvases like Bartolome Murillo's monumental baroque icon of the Virgin Mary (The Immaculate Conception, 1655-60), testaments to the explosive fusion of Spain's New World wealth and Old World religious fervor. The gallery is a dazzling-vision of bygone glory, an image of imperial prestige and mystical authority that seems almost entirely alien to twenty-first-century Texas.
But the splendor of imperial Spain is not as remote as we might think. Last year curators at no less a Texas icon than the Alamo were astonished to discover faint remnants of Spanish colonial-era frescoes on the walls of the same sacristy that probably served as a last redoubt for Texan defenders in...
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