The creatures that inhabit Fine Arts

The Palace of Fine Arts turns 90 this Sunday, and we celebrate it with this report, the first version of which was published in the University Magazine a decade ago. Here is the gift of everyday beauty foreign to the unsuspecting eyes of passers-by and visitors who miss the detail, the close-up, the nook and cranny. Here are the secrets of the marbles that scream, sweat, kiss and shed tears of acid rain in the highly contaminated city. Here is the beauty of mythology, the symbols, the marble gestures of the eagle knight, the coyote, the dog, the scream, the clamor, the tumult, the dream towards its first century of existence.

The light of the different hours devours them.

The pegasus that had been planted on the esplanade of the Palace of Fine Arts flies and cracks the rust into hurtful particles that hurt the retina of the afternoon.

The marble monkey, carved on the second level of the upper façade, howls in its sleep. Two enormous marbles seem to slide from his closed eyelids, hirsute in their marble perfection of spheres and end up perched on his earlobes. Bow. Knew.

Next to her, a dog also made of marble settles into a stalking position, ready to jump on its prey, a greyhound at seventy kilometers per hour, motionless for ninety years and will continue floating like this until the end of time.

Ninety years. All of these beings were born nine decades ago to adorn the interiors and exteriors of the Palace of Fine Arts.

In 2024, that strange, beautiful and mausolent ship celebrates its first 90 years since, during many dreams, the Italian architect Adamo Boari saw how the ocean flow ran through his dreams to end up turning into marble.

Ninety years of the Palace of Fine Arts.

To build it, Adamo Boari followed the teachings of the great nineteenth-century master Viollet-le-Duc, who in turn influenced the great masters of the Art Nouveau: Victor Horta and Louis Sullivan.

Art Nouveau. Adamo Boari dreamed of watery fluids. And so he designed the plans for the palace where fantastic beings would live, made of marble or metal, manufactured by the best artists of the time.

Boari traveled many times to Europe to visit these craftsmen in their workshops, such as Leonardo Bistolfi, the most famous sculptor in Italy, who made three thematic groups on the main façade for Fine Arts: Harmony, Music and Inspiration. Sculptural portents visible to everyone, but few turn to see them, despite the fact that all those beings shout out to us, lick us with kisses.

Harmony, music, inspiration. That is felt every time we pass by, in front of, or better yet: we enter Bellas Artes. Harmony, music, inspiration.

At the top of the building there are four winged women surrounding a central motif crowned with an eagle. Photo of the photographic collection of the Palace of Fine Arts

Behold The Harmony: a beautiful naked woman walks forward, the phalanges of her feet sinking into flos fields, Her face explodes in ecstasy so that a flock of wingless angels crown her.

She, at the center of a chorus of women, also naked, who sing, shout, moan, throw sparkles from the empty sockets of their marble eyes, screams of a valkyrie in love from their dying lips.

A man lies to the right of La Armonía, muscles tensed with beauty, and bows his head as a sign of reverence, while a marble couple kisses each other with ardour, a rocking kiss to the sinuous rhythm of the melopeas that a young man sings in a fife of glory. at the feet of the couple so lubricious, so innocent, so lustful and pure of all purity. Ah, the kiss! Thousands of kilometers away, a painter in Vienna, Gustav Klimt, puts that same kiss but in oil, lubricious and golden in sublime music.

The Pain. The Sadness. The Kiss. Happiness. Components of La Armonía, sculptural composition of the tympanum of the main façade.

What you hear when you walk in front of the main façade of Bellas Artes is not the clamor of horns or the din of voices of silent crowds or the dense neurotic chirping of the traffic officer’s whistle, or the chirping of birds or the gong of the raindrop on the floor: it is the choir of La Armonía that sends out screams of fear, whispers of shelter, murmurs of harmony, from the eardrum of the main façade of Bellas Artes.

And so La Música, the other sculptural group that Leonardo Bistolfi sculpted: a great angel holds himself in the air with his wings in the manner of a hummingbird, to incline his body towards the violin that gives birth to sleeping music that awakens as soon as the man comes down. The angel, concentrated on his writing, puts those notes on marble paper, for posterity.

That other set is related to The Inspiration: the hirsute breasts, a lady with angel wings gently, sensually lifts the hair on the back of her neck with her left hand while her right makes a sign of letting invisible marble petals fall on the hair of a woman. woman, also bare breasts, who rests a lyre on her left while the right sinks into her temple, her face possessed by Inspiration. Ah, a detail completes such brilliant dramaturgy: the feet of the maiden who receives the inspiration are fractured, at the ankle, as if Cronus had tortured her with a Dead Line: Deliver your text on time.

If we focus the binoculars towards the top of the building, we will observe the crying of four winged women surrounding a central motif crowned with an eagle. Crying drips from their transparent cloaks. A few drops stop on her nipples. The fluids become garlands, roses, two masks that howl at the sides of the hips of one of the ladies. Technicians call this whitish and greenish drip: patina. I only see tears.

And jets of blood, from which Pegasus was born, when Perseus cut off Medusa’s head. This is the only one of the four pegasi that originally occupied the four corners of the plaza in front of the portico. Perseus rides on Pegasus while a beautiful woman smiles to guide his gallop, his spirited flight. Babieca, Bucephalus, a skinny horse ridden by the scrawny Quixote, a horse stuck in Troy, in the middle of traffic, in the madness of rush hour in the largest city on the planet, the farthest city from Olympus.

That’s why all the marble women who live in Bellas Artes are naked. To alleviate the pain of the world with its beauty.

That’s why, for the gift of everyday beauty, that figurehead laughs like a fool, showing his teeth above a white beard, marble and ridiculous, like the tassels that pearl his forehead. At his side, another figurehead prefers that the winged cap of his tunic covers more than half of his face, who smiles embarrassedly and next to them a crowned nun also laughs, amused by the pity of the one who grieves the one who laughs shamelessly, to May the winged figurehead next to him cry impiously, impudently, brown tears, like his eyes. They also scientifically call this patina. I only see tears.

Ah! Stop! Pallas Athena stares at us!

Detail of The Symphony, a sculpture that crowns the main entrance to the palace. Photo of the photographic collection of the Palace of Fine Arts

On the parapets of the first level of the main façade, a woman observes us behind a mask that highlights her fierceness. Serene fierceness. Thousands of kilometers away, in Austria, a brilliant painter, Gustav Klimt, puts in oil the same effigy, feared, reckless, warrior in blood-red, life-gold. The one who looks at us from the marble is about to smile. Her thin lips clearly pronounce: Pallas Athena.

And then, from the chorus of The Harmony, The Joy laughs with hearty laughter and The Sadness wets drop by drop, tears of acid and mold, the marble until it holes it and the muses dance in a circle while Apollo does not peel them because he has seen, from the luminous circular ceiling that crowns the interior of the central dome of the Theater of Fine Arts, a strange glow in the volcanoes drawn by Adamo Boari, the architect who dreamed of this palace, and ordered the construction of those igneous colossi in opalescent glass and mosaics on a curtain of laminated iron and reinforced concrete built by the Tiffany House of New York.

Adamo Boari brought his countryman Fiorenzo Gianetti from Italy to sculpt the ornamentation that represents the flora and fauna of the country. Alberto Boni was in charge of the reliefs on the side facades.

There is a Jaguar Knight, the Summer Figurehead (the one who cries brown tears), an Eagle Knight, a beautiful Jaguar, a Goat, a Coyote, the Dog, the Monkey, flowers, plants on the parapets. Onyx from Oaxaca.

Attention is drawn to a figure of the god Tláloc, referring to Teotihuacan, another of Chaac and an impressive red-gold mask that screams and that in the book The Palace of Fine Arts, by photographer Mark Mogilner, is erroneously described as decorative motif on the main door of the performance hall, representing the Mexica god of rain Tláloc.

The truth is that all these characters moan, chew, mutter, scream, and launch firecrackers of voices in unintelligible languages. They dance. When no one is watching, that is, when crowds walk in front of the façade, all those fantastic marble beings dance. They sing. Their screams are marble lightning, their stony flowers recesses of beauty among the mist, the masks, parapets, friezes, parapets, cornices, the portentous marble buttocks, the beautiful breasts of hirsute stone, the laughter, the smiles, petrified laughter, the finishes of the copula that the Hungarian Géza Maróti sculpted, the Pegasus that Agustín Querol made, the green tears of the beautiful sculptures, pristine because they are so beautiful. All that is shouting, clamor, tumult, dream.

A female figure stands voluptuous, the folds of her marble curves throwing notes of beauty and harmony into the chaos of the city. The balance that these naked and exposed women provide to the city is that of calm breathing. Marble clepsydras ground by the passage of time.

In the hollow of the palace the statues live their life of stone and time without passing.

These fantastic beings shout at us, call us, urge us, they know us perfectly.

For 90 years they have owned that space and allow us to inhabit it from time to time, when music crowns the beauty of life.

Beautiful naked women, fierce warriors, warm winged angels, beings without time, without flesh or blood or emotions. With tears, yes, tears of acid rain, watery eyes of mist, transparent tulle dripping with what scientists call patina. But I only see tears.

The light of the different hours devours them.