On a high stone pedestal, surrounded by a landscaped space, at the beginning of Gran Via de Ramón y Cajal, next to the so-called Plaza de España, in front of the old “hermitage” of La Roqueta, today a parish church, just away from the spare monument to San Vicente Mártir, this other del Cid Campeador, work of the American sculptor Anna Hyatt Hungtinton, widow of the great Hispanist Archer Milton Hungtinton, having that artist, participated in the love in Spain of her husband, also given the expensive casting of the equestrian statue, worth about three million pesetas. The work is an exact version, fused by the sculptor Joan d’Avalos, of the one before the Hispanic Society of New York founded by Mister Hungtinton, the translator of the Poem del Cid, friend of Sorolla, whom he commissioned the immortal series of the Spanish regions and creator of a wonderful Museum in the vicinity of the turbulent New York Harlem of which it is admirable counterpoint. The statue arrived in Valencia on March 3, 1964. This put an end to a series of attempts, which, as in the cases of Sorolla, Serrano and Llorente, were vain or very late, since already in 1888 they were formulated in favor of a monumental memory of Valencia, to the Castilian leader who made it -with the Aragonese San Vicente martyr- famous in the world, proliferating memories of El Cid in literature, and to the Holy Levite Huesca in the immortal poetry of the Peristephanon.

The work of Anna Hyat, who was not a fortunate and prolific creator of animalistic sculptures – as much as Barye, pompom, or Mateu Hernández – is, above all, a splendid figure of "Babieca", the bridón of the Poema del Cid, which in turn is a living pedestal of the Campeador, challenger or rather triumphant who raises with the axe the grimpolon or motto of his children. The monument to El Cid in Valencia and New York contrasts with that of Burgos, by Juan Cristóbal, to Rodrigo de Vivar himself, inaugurated in 1955 by the then Head of State, a compelling and expressionist work full of unstoppable dynamism.

The neighboring monument to San Vicente Mártir was inaugurated on February 17, 1960, resting in a public and urbanized place the baroque and incomplete statue that, like that of his namesake the San Ferrer, was in the municipal warehouses and, later until its reconstruction and replacement, in the patio of the Renaissance-Mannerist cloister of Carmen. at that time the deposit of the Commission of Monuments, as the whole building was the School of Fine Arts of San Carlos. Both came from the Puerta de San Vicente (the first great portal of the wall since Pere IV) on the painful road of the martyrdom of the Saint Levite and in the vicinity of La Roqueta, the first seat of his remains in the early Christian basilica of his name. In this door were placed at the beginning of the eighteenth century the statues of both Saints Vincent, that of the Holy Dominican facing outside the walls, that of the Levite towards the City, where they remained until the demolition of the walls and all the gates except that of Quart and Serranos to be prisons.

When resting on a corpulent pedestal it had to be completed, for a segment of the figure was missing.


Dades bàsiques

Direcció:

Gran Via de Ramón y Cajal, 19
46007 Valencia