Academy of San Carlos

What the Academy holds today is not a painting collection but an architectural and pedagogical one: the courtyard's set of plaster and bronze casts after canonical Greek, Roman and Renaissance sculpture, imported specifically to train students, plus the building itself as the oldest purpose-built art-teaching space in the Americas. The historic painting and further sculpture holdings that once filled the Academy were redistributed across the 20th century to the Museo Universitario de la Academia and, in the largest single transfer, to the Museo Nacional de San Carlos in 1968 - a separate institution in a separate building across the city, not a branch of this one. A visitor coming for a deep Old Master painting collection should look to that museum; a visitor coming to see where Mexican academic art training began, and where Rivera and Orozco were still being taught to copy Michelangelo before they broke from it, should come here.

The institution was founded in 1781 on the order of the Spanish crown, part of Carlos III's programme to remake New Spain along Enlightenment lines. Jeronimo Antonio Gil, chief engraver at Mexico City's royal mint, opened a provisional School of Engraving and Drawing that year, and by 1783 it had grown into a full academy teaching painting, sculpture and architecture alongside engraving. It opened formally to students on 4 November 1785, and its backers were explicit about what it was for: replacing the Baroque idiom that had dominated New Spain's churches and palaces with the classical training being taught in Madrid and Rome. To do that the Academy needed models its students could draw and sculpt from, and it imported plaster casts of Greek, Roman and Renaissance sculpture from Europe for exactly that purpose, casts that survive in the building's courtyard today. The result was the first major art academy, and by the same token the first public art museum, anywhere in the Americas.

The building the Academy occupies predates it by more than two centuries. It began in the 16th century as the Real Hospital del Amor de Dios, founded in 1540 to treat patients with syphilis. When that hospital's patients were moved to a merged facility in 1786, the Academy, short of funds to build anything new, took over the vacated structure in 1791 rather than commission its own. The building visitors see today is substantially a mid-19th-century remaking of that older core: in 1852 the architect Javier Cavallari directed a restoration that gave the facade its rusticated stonework and added six medallions carrying the likenesses of founder Jeronimo Antonio Gil, King Carlos III, the academic Jose Bernardo Couto, the sculptor-architect Manuel Tolsa, and, reaching outside Mexico's own history, Michelangelo and Raphael. In 1913 the courtyard was roofed over with an Art Nouveau dome of iron and glass, built by the workshop of the Ituarte brothers, chiefly to protect the sculpture collection standing beneath it. That dome, the Italianate facade behind it, and the older colonial fabric underneath both are still the building any visitor walks into on Calle Academia today.

Manuel Tolsa personally arranged for major sculptural pieces to travel from Madrid to Mexico City to seed the Academy's teaching collection, and copies after the Doryphoros, the Discobolus, the Venus de Milo, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, Michelangelo's Moses and Donatello's Saint George still stand in the courtyard, used by generations of students exactly as intended: as fixed classical and Renaissance models to draw and sculpt from rather than working from life alone. The Academy's survival was not smooth. It lost its royal subsidy during the War of Independence, was propped up for a time in the mid-19th century by revenue from a state lottery it administered until Benito Juarez's government cut that funding off, and found a further patron briefly in Emperor Maximilian I during the Second Mexican Empire, after which it operated as the National School of Fine Arts. Its most consequential period as a teaching institution came later still: in 1913 a strike by students and younger staff pushed out director Antonio Rivas Mercado in an explicit rejection of the strict European classicism the Academy had taught since 1781, and the classrooms that had drilled generations in casts after Polykleitos and Michelangelo went on, within a few years, to train Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco, both of whom passed through the Academy's ateliers before becoming the central figures of Mexican muralism.

The Academy joined Mexico's National University in 1910 and became, in time, the Facultad de Artes y Diseno (FAD) of UNAM. Its architecture programme split off in 1929 and moved to UNAM's main campus in 1953, and undergraduate art and design teaching later relocated to the university's Xochimilco campus, leaving only graduate programmes and the cultural centre operating out of the original Calle Academia building today. The Academy's collection outgrew what the building could hold, and over the 20th century it was distributed across more than one destination: some pieces stayed in the original building, some moved to the Museo Universitario de la Academia, and a substantial share of the paintings went toward founding an entirely separate institution in 1968, the Museo Nacional de San Carlos, which the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura built out in the Palacio de Buenavista, a different neoclassical building at Puente de Alvarado 50 in the Tabacalera district, several kilometres from the Centro Historico. That museum, attributed to the architect Manuel Tolsa himself, now holds European paintings and sculpture from the Renaissance to the 19th century, by artists including Lucas Cranach the Elder, Parmigianino, Frans Hals, Anthony van Dyck and Auguste Rodin, charges its own separate admission of 70 pesos, and keeps its own separate Tuesday-to-Sunday hours; it is not the venue described on this page, and a visitor planning a trip to the original Academy building on Calle Academia should not expect the Museo Nacional de San Carlos's ticketed European collection to be waiting there. What remains inside the Academy itself is the plaster-cast courtyard, the architecture, the graduate school and library, and a temporary-exhibition programme, not the historic painting collection that moved across town.

The building's public face today operates under the name San Carlos Centro Cultural, a project run by UNAM's Facultad de Artes y Diseno that reopened the ground-floor galleries of the old Academy to the public free of charge. The Green and Pink galleries host a changing programme of temporary exhibitions, workshops and cultural events rather than a fixed permanent display, and the specialised art and design library continues to serve the graduate students who study in the building, alongside the wider administrative and academic offices UNAM still runs out of the same address. Entry to the courtyard, the cast collection and the galleries carries no admission charge on any of the days the centre is open, Monday to Friday, and neither the faculty's own site nor the cultural centre's programme describes any weekend opening. The result is a public art space that functions simultaneously as a working graduate faculty of a major university, a free exhibition venue in the heart of the Centro Historico, and the single physical remnant of the institution that trained Mexico's first generation of academically schooled artists and, a century and a half later, the muralists who broke with everything it had taught them.

Visitors treat the Academia de San Carlos less as a single must-see sight than as a quick, free detour a few minutes from the Zocalo: worthwhile chiefly for the courtyard's classical and Renaissance casts and for whatever temporary exhibition happens to be up, rather than for one unmissable object.