Iglesia de San Martín

This guide to the Iglesia de San Martin in Valencia opens with Vicent Penarroja, a Valencian knight who in 1494 commissioned a bronze from Flanders showing Saint Martin on horseback slicing his cloak for a beggar, and died before it ever arrived. It was his brothers who unpacked the crate and hoisted the bronze, cast by the Flemish sculptor Pieter de Beckere, above this doorway in 1495. For four centuries it watched the street below change from a Muslim quarter to a Christian parish to a market lane, until the summer of 1936 brought militias with different plans for church bronze.