Art: Peripatetic Patio

At the dawn of the Spanish Renaissance, an elaborately carved and colonnaded patio was the pet and pride of Don Pedro Fajardo, first Marquis of Vélez and fifth governor of the Kingdom of Murcia. At the turn of the 20th century, the patio became the proud possession of Financial Baron George Blumenthal, onetime president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When his Park Avenue mansion was razed in 1945, the 2,000 numbered marble blocks of the patio were tucked away in the Met’s attic. Last week its pearly facades were dedicated as part of the museum’s vast expansion.

When such finishing touches as a red marble floor are installed, the two-story interior patio will open to the public this fall, serving as a skylit forecourt to the new Thomas J. Watson art library and a gateway to the Renaissance galleries. To enhance the outdoorsy effect, Met Director James Rorimer promises that the thermostats will be set a few degrees below the rest of the museum’s.

When the Marquis of Vélez, a man of magnificence, brought in a handful of Italian stonemasons to work on his patio, he was bringing the Renaissance to the feudal, long-Moorish plains of Andalusia. He was only 28 when he ordered the work begun in 1506, but the marquis was a Latin scholar and an eager follower of Columbus’ early voyages to the “Western antipodes.” His patronage made the patio a triumph of transition from darkness to light.

Though the patio has Gothic gargoyles and segmented arches typically Spanish, there is an overall order and clarity that reaches back to Greco-Roman architecture. Even the marble ornamentation bespeaks the Renaissance virtues of knowledge and diversity. Military trophies, helmets and maces share the stone with musical instruments; there is a sculptural bestiary of basilisks and griffins, scrolled foliage and fruits. Proudly, the young grandee could not resist a final fillip: carved in the marble is a continuous frieze in Latin which proclaims that he “erected this castle as the castle of his title.”