The story
On the fine arts floor of the Museo de Málaga, an old doctor sits beside a dissecting table, holding the heart of the young woman who lies there. Enrique Simonet, a painter from Málaga, made it in 1890 while he was a scholarship student at the Spanish Academy in Rome. Its formal title is Anatomy of the Heart, but the city knows it by its popular name, And She Had a Heart.
For almost twenty years the painting had nowhere to hang. Málaga's fine arts museum, opened in 1916, had moved in 1961 into the Buenavista palace, and in 1997 the regional government gave that palace to the new Picasso museum. The pictures went into storage, and soon the archaeology collection, which had been shown in the Moorish fortress of the Alcazaba, followed them. From 1998 a citizens' campaign pressed for one building, the old customs house by the port. The Palacio de la Aduana is a neoclassical block built between 1788 and 1826, and in December 2016 both collections reopened inside it as a single museum.
Archaeology fills the top floor, drawn from more than 15,000 pieces. The floor below shows art from a collection of about 2,000 works, much of it 19th-century painting by Málaga artists. Simonet's Judgement of Paris is here, along with José Moreno Carbonero's huge Gladiators after the Combat, and A Slave for Sale by the Sevillian José Jiménez Aranda, lent by the Prado.
