Fine Arts School "Ernesto de la Carcova"

Very close to Lola Mora’s Nereids fountain in Buenos Aires southern river promenade, is the Fine Arts School "ERNESTO DE LA CARCOVA". The Imitations Museum inside of it has, among other things, a copy of Michelangelo’s three magnificent sculptures in their natural sizes: the David, the Pietá and the Moses.

Before entering the Museum and observing these amazing sculptures, we recommend you to walk around the school. The school receives its visitors with a mural in relief and Ernesto de la Carcova’s bust. On the left side a series of sculptures blend with the garden’s leafy trees. And on the right side a series of expressive murals will lead you to the back of the school, where Velasquez statue seems to be dominating the garden that is made even more colourful by the beautiful majolicas covering the fountain.

Murals on the side of the School

Once you have completed the circuit, its time to enter the museum and discover the Moses with that strength that only Michelangelo could transmit to his works, and that perfection that made him burst when he finished it and say: allora parla! (now talk!). And the reality is that the only thing this Moses is missing is to speak, and maybe the frame it has in San Pietro in Vincoli’s church, in Rome.

With its head buried in the museum’s dome, in order to keep himself straight, is Michelangelo’s David. A marble that Agustin di Duccion intended to use for sculpting a giant. So bad was his initial attempt that he thought he had ruined the marble, until Michelangelo saw it and got so enthusiastic by it that he transformed it into the David between September 1501 and January 1504.

Finally, the Pietá. For this work, Michelangelo obtained the support of the French cardinal Jean Bilheres de Lagraules; cardinal of Saint Denis who, in August 1498 signed the contract with the “Maestro”, who was then 24 years old, for him to create a Pietá in its natural size in marble. The work, finished one year later, was immediately recognized as an authentic work of art. The youth of the images, the naturalness in the flaccidity of death and the distressed surprise of the Virgin cannot be unnoticed.

These are only three of the important sculptures that can be found in this museum, since the Imitations Museum, inaugurated in 1928 as a learning studio and gallery, has managed to gather an excellent collection of copies of master works that include Egyptian and Chaldean – Assyrian, Greek – Roman, Medieval Romanic, Gothic, Renaissance, Asian, etc. This museum is particularly important because of the fact that the copies are made using the molding process or out of casts made from the original pieces. Therefore, these pieces are exact copies of the original ones, even in the tiniest details.