page_title: Colegio de San Gregorio
section_title: Facade
hierarchical_section_title: Colegio de San Gregorio / Description / Facade
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Fassade des Colegio de San Gregorio, heute Museo Nacional de Escultura, in Valladolid(Kastilien und León/Spanien), Figuren am Portal
context_page_description: The Colegio de San Gregorio is an Isabelline style building located in the city of Valladolid, in Castile and León, Spain, it was formerly a college and now is housing the Museo Nacional de Escultura museum. This building is one of the best examples of the architectural style known as Isabelline, which is the characteristic architectural style of the Crown of Castile region during the Catholic Monarchs' reign.
  Among other sections highlights its courtyard and its facade for its refined decoration, elegant proportions and the number of symbologies. It was founded as a teaching institution. Aimed at College of Theology for Dominican friars, it has acquired a doctrinal authority and acted as a spiritual and political hotbed in the Central region of Spain's Renaissance and Baroque periods.
context_section_description: The facade, plain facing and topped with a crest, stands out above all for its spectacular main facade, which by its stylistic features it sets regarding the workshop of Gil de Siloé, a Flemish origin artist, who was at that time in Burgos dealing with the royal sepulchers of the Miraflores Charterhouse and is known to have been commissioned to make the defunct altarpiece of the chapel, very in connection with which the sculptor had made in the Conception's chapel or of Bishop Acuña in the Cathedral of Burgos and has obvious similarities to the upper of the main facade of San Gregorio.
  Perhaps evoking the triumphal arches of the architectures at that time were developing in Central Europe, or perhaps the Islamic Madrasas, architects of this building applying an individually decorated of the Castilian late-Gothic (Isabelline), it has a complex symbolic significance in that mix contemporary figures, saints, allegories, wild men, abundant symbolic of power, etc.
  It has two bodies framed by two buttresses. The lower hosts a vain lintel decorated with fleur-de-lys, the founder's symbol repeated often enough, covered with three-centered arch in turn covered by another ogee trefoil.
  It draw attention to the "savage men" of the jambs and buttresses, a total of sixteen. Theories about the significance of these figures, present in many buildings of 15th-century, are varied and should be put in relation to the context in which these appear. One of its functions would be simple heraldry sculptures. It is also said that, dressed with shield and mace, were the guardians of the building, beastmen guaranteeing security. Or these could allude to the custom of disguising the squires and lackeys in Court (nobility) festivities in which it presented the "savage" as inferior, in relation, for example, the chivalric romances, which mentions hair covered wild men, degraded men, estranged from the civilized world, not Christianized, and could here be in visual confrontation with the knights who also appear on the main facade, with armor, spears and shields, that would be interpreted as allegories of Virtue. On the contrary, these could also be a positive allusion, the mythical image of man in nature, unpolluted, symbol of purity that evokes the time in a perfect and happy world, with prototype to John the Baptist.
  Those on the lower part, flanking the main facade, are completely covered with long hair, carrying weapons and the shields are decorated with demonic figures except in one, which has a Knight order of Calatrava's cross, the same motifs of the soldiers' shields of the second floor, the same iconography already seen for over a century.
  However, in the top of the main facade are completely different, with the same attributes but without hair on the body and even two hairless, with a more human aspect, and there are authors who consider the oldest representation in Castile of an American Native, reflecting the effect of the Americas's arrival in the European imagination.
  The tympanum, on a lintel, seems to represent the offering of the college by Friar Alonso de Burgos to Saint Gregory the Great in the presence of Saints Dominic and Paul, patrons of the neighboring Dominican convent, a somewhat disconcerting scene, unbalanced, with disproportion between the figures and Saint Paul with a cruciferous nimbus, an exclusive attribute of Christ. It seems to be earlier work than the rest, or even reused from other site.
  The upper body is divided into three sections, with the center occupied by a hexagonal pylon which starts a pomegranate tree, referring to the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada's conquest in 1492, swirling around putti playing and jumping. It could be a Fountain of Eternal Youth's representation, hence the children, of the Tree of Knowledge, in relation to the building dedicated to the study, an allegory of the Paradise, the place to which men aspire to reach through the knowledge, an allegory of the Golden Age, in relation to the historical moment that was occurring to the Spanish monarchy.
  The pomegranate tree is topped by a big shield
caption: Savage men detail
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