My first night in Madrid, despite a full day of exploring, I was still energized to keep walking the streets and taking in as many sights as I could. At one point, I was in the Cortes neighborhood, which is just south of the famous Calle Gran Via, and walking along Calle de Alcala. This street is one of the longest streets in Madrid, starting at Puerta del Sol and continuing for over 6 miles to the northeastern outskirts of the city. There was plenty of impressive architecture, and at one point my attention was pulled upwards to see these horses charging through the sky.
I wanted a better look at these horses, so I continued down Calle de Alcala a little further to find a better angle to see more. As you can see in the picture below, the four horses are pulling a man riding in a chariot. So what do we have here? The building is home to the Banco de Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA), a global financial services group founded in Spain in 1857. The sculpture on top is referred to as a “quadriga,” a Latin-based term that is defined as a chariot drawn specifically by four horses and used for chariot racing in classical antiquity and the Roman Empire. It’s been suggested that this sculptural theme was desired by the bank’s founders as a symbol of strength and power, values that Banco de Bilbao wanted to convey when they opened their headquarters here in Madrid on Calle de Alcala in the early 20th Century.
This particular quadriga is by the Spanish sculptor Higinio de Basterra (1876-1957), who was the son of the sculptor Serafín Basterra, and so it is said that he began his career “in the family business.” He showed artistic promise at a young age and studied at art schools, both in Bilbao and in Paris before launching his own career. I learned that this BBVA building was designed in 1919 by architect Ricardo Bastida y Bilbao and built between 1920 and 1923, and Higinio de Basterra’s crowning quadriga sculpture was placed on top in 1922, when he was 65 years old.
Here’s one more look at this building and sculpture from a distance so that you can get a fuller picture of this architectural and sculptural presence on Calle de Alcala and why it grabbed my attention. One little historical footnote I found interesting was that de Basterra used multiple tons of copper, bronze, lead and iron to create the quadriga, which was finished with gilded brass with gold leaf for full dramatic effect. But during the Spanish Civil War (1936 to 1939), they were painted black to prevent them from reflecting light and serving as a visual reference for General Franco’s planes that bombarded Madrid. After the Civil War, the paint was removed, and the quadrigas were restored, although I wonder if there’s more to the story as the sculpture doesn’t appear to have gold leaf now, at least in what I could see here at night. Nevertheless, they still have a dramatic presence, especially lit up this way at night.
