Mariano Benlliure

Mariano Benlliure was a Spanish sculptor, who executed many public monuments and religious sculptures in Spain, working in a heroic realist style.

He was born in El Grau quarter of Valencia. His earliest sculptures featured bullfighting themes, modeled in wax and cast in bronze. At the age of thirteen he showed a wax modello of a picador at the Exposicin Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1876. Pursuing the thought of becoming a painter, he went to Paris his expenses paid by his master, Francisco Domingo Marqus. A trip to Rome in 1879, revealing at first hand the sculptures of Michelangelo convinced him to be a sculptor. In 1887 he established himself permanently in Madrid, where in that years Exposicin Nacional his portrait sculpture of the painter Ribera won him a firstprize.

Source: Wikipedia