Correos issues a stamp to remember the figure of Mariano Benlliure on the 75th anniversary of his death.
Mariano Benlliure was a Spanish sculptor born in Valencia in 1862. He was Director General of Fine Arts and a member of the Royal Board of Trustees of the Prado Museum.
He soon became interested in sculpture as a self-taught artist. He worked in various artisan workshops, travelling to Rome in 1881 to complete his training.
From there he sent his works to the National Exhibitions of Fine Arts. In 1884 he won a second medal with Accidenti!, the sculpture that made him famous, and in 1887 the first medal with the Statue of the painter José de Ribera. In 1895, the year in which he opened a studio in Madrid, he won the medal of honour with the statue for the Monument to the writer Antonio Trueba.
His wide-ranging and prolific oeuvre encompasses different genres, typologies and techniques. In monumental sculpture alone, he produced more than fifty works for the main Spanish and Hispanic cities.
His facility for modelling and chiselling, and his way of combining materials, generally marble and bronze, became his personal hallmark.
He paid particular attention to detail, which he executed with great skill and was reflected in the harmony of the forms.
One of his best known sculptures is the one dedicated to Goya, commissioned by the Madrid City Council to celebrate the coming of age of Alfonso XIII. Mariano Benlliure made it in bronze on a marble pedestal with carved references to various Caprichos and the Naked Maja. Today, this work serves as a model for the statuette that is presented to the winners of the Goya Awards every year. The current statuette is a reproduction of an original plaster cast of the bust made by Mariano Benlliure, kept by his family.
The stamp reproduces an illustration of the sculptor chiselling another of his most famous works: the Virgen del Carmen with the child in her arms.
