BBVA’s upcoming exhibition at its historic headquarters in Plaza de San Nicolás, Bilbao, is Classical and Modern. Masterpieces from the BBVA Collection, a cultural project responding to BBVA’s ongoing commitment to give the general public a chance to enjoy the rich artistic heritage it has accrued over the years.

Curated by Pablo González Tornel, the director of the Museum of Fine Arts of Valencia, this exhibition brings together a carefully chosen selection of its most outstanding paintings, ranging in date from the sixteenth century to the early-twentieth. Divided into three sections, it showcases works by such seminal artists as Goya, Pantoja de la Cruz, Murillo, van Dyck, Sorolla and Zuloaga, among many others. Despite the wide time span separating them, the paintings are all grounded in the figurative realism first defined in Flanders and in Italy in the early-sixteenth century.

The Time of Kings and Gods, the opening section of the exhibition, examines how art was used between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries as a means to bolster political power structures and to reflect social hierarchies ― from absolute monarchy to the rise of the bourgeoisie ― as well as to embody Catholic values following the Protestant Reformation. The second section, The Triumph of Genre Painting: Landscapes, Still Lifes and Customs and Manners, takes a look at genre painting during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, associated with the ascendency of the bourgeoisie and the birth of the art market. The third and final section, The Paths of Modernity, shows how the social changes in the wake of the French Revolution were reflected in the steady erosion of the influence of academicism, the appearance of movements like Romanticism and Realism, and the assimilation of new visual languages that led to the emergence of modern art in the changeover from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.