Manuel Bartolomé Cossío (22 February 1857 – 2 September 1935) was a Spanish art historian and Krausist teacher. Born in Haro, La Rioja, he entered the Institución Libre de Enseñanza, where he was the godson and favourite pupil of Francisco Giner de los Ríos as well as his inseparable companion and successor. He also wrote a monumental study of El Greco.[1] He was director of the Museo Pedagógico Nacional and president of the Misiones Pedagógicas, becoming "the most eminent figure in Spanish pedagogy in the period 1882 to 1935", two years after his death.[2] He died at Collado Mediano in Madrid.
He was the son of Natalia Cossío Salinas and Patricio Bartolomé Flores, judge of the first instance in Haro. He spent part of his childhood in Aranda de Duero, Sepúlveda, and Arévalo (places that he will always evoke throughout his life).
After passing through the Institute of Ávila, on September 8, 1868, he entered as a boarding student in the school of secular priests of El Escorial, receiving a rigid religious education; although the one who most impresses him is Father Mountain and his "philosophical-historical ideas". His period in El Escorial ended coinciding with the death of his father in May 1871, and in June he obtained his bachelor's degree from the Avila Institute . That autumn, orphaned and fourteen years old, he moved with his mother to Madrid, entering the Central University to study Philosophy and Letters and History of Fine Arts and Archaeology, where he made friends with a variety of classmates (Menéndez Pelayo, Leopoldo Alasand, especially with Joaquín Costa); On November 6, 1874, he obtained his bachelor's degree with an honors degree in History of Philosophy, without being able to pay the rights to the degree until 1904.
In the Spanish capital they had first settled in the house of their relative Flores Calderón and her husband and future brother-in-law Vicente Viqueira. Before 1877 there are no documents that give news of friendship with Giner (philosopher and Krausist pedagogue who would later become his teacher), although it is evident that Cossío had references and probable contacts with the philosopher when he attended Sunday classes at the University, where Giner also taught classes. Another possible link could be Riaño, also from Granada, and whose History of Fine Arts classes Cossío attended during the 1875-76 academic year.
When the Institución Libre de Enseñanza was founded on October 29, 1876, Cossío was one of its first students. That year, on November 6, his mother, Natalia Cossío, died, and the young institutionalist suddenly disappeared from Madrid, creating a misunderstanding that would take time to clear up. The death of his only sister a short time later forced Cossío to give himself completely to the ILE project, where he would soon join first as an assistant teacher and later as a primary school teacher. Between the summer of 1877 and November 1879 (the date of his departure for Bologna), Cossío and Giner established an intense relationship. After obtaining his doctorate in Philosophy and Letters, Cossío was sent by Giner to the Colegio de San Clemente in Bologna, where his brother had previously been.Hermenegildo Giner de los Rios .
Continuing his intense 'training period', in 1880 he attended courses in History, Art, Pedagogy and Philosophy at the University of Bologna. He was impressed by the Italian literature class of the poet Giosuè Carducci (although like many others he was annoyed to see him always "dirty and disheveled"), and he obtained a certificate in the School of Pedagogy and Anthropology of that University. He also had the opportunity to travel through Italy, Switzerland, France, Holland and Belgium . In Brussels, he participated in the International Congress of Education, where the Free Institution of Education was presented.on the international board. Back in Spain, he was substitute professor in the chair of History of Fine Arts, in the academic year 1881-1882 at the Higher Diplomatic School of Madrid; him continuing his classes at the Institution. That year, 1882, he was awarded the chair of Art History Theory at the Barcelona School of Fine Arts and visited Portugal .
In 1883 he won by opposition the direction of the Pedagogical Museum of First Education, later called the National Pedagogical Museum, founded the previous year, in which he would remain until his retirement in 1929. The initiatives of libraries and material are due to his dynamic conception of this institution. circulating school or school vacation camps. In 1885 he visited the sister Teaching Institution founded by Guillem Cifre de Colonya in Pollensa (Majorca). That same year, after attending Nicolás Salmerón 's Metaphysics course at the Central University, he received a doctorate in Philosophy and Letters.
In 1886 Cossío traveled commissioned by the Government to visit the main schools in France, Belgium, Holland and Great Britain; He was accompanied by Giner de los Ríos and a group of students from the ILE . That year he concluded his History of Spanish painting, which would not see the light of day until later.
In 1887 the National Pedagogical Museum inaugurated the first school colonies in San Vicente de la Barquera (Cantabria). In that same year, Cossío was appointed professor at the School of Higher Studies of the Madrid Athenaeum . In 1891 he obtained the title of Doctor of Philosophy and Letters.
On August 9, 1893, Bartolomé Cossío, thirty-six years old, married Carmen López Viqueira, twenty-seven years old, in the temple of Bom Jesús in Braga (Portugal). The marriage settled in the house on the Paseo del Obelisco very close to Giner and the 'third in discord', the inseparable common friend Ricardo Rubio, who very shortly after would unite civilly with Isabel Sama, sister of the also friend Joaquin Sama. Natalia, his first daughter, was born on September 1, 1894, in the house of San Victorio. In the fall of 1900, on November 27, their second daughter, Julia, was born; the joy of the fact would be clouded by the symptoms of mental disturbance, apparently of paternal inheritance, that Carmen, his wife, began to show and that worsened years later when a brain attack left their little daughter paralyzed the left half of her brain. Body.
In 1901 Cossío was entrusted with the chair of General Pedagogy at the National Pedagogical Museum . In 1904 he received the appointments of full professor of Superior Pedagogy of the Doctorate of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Madrid and delegate of Spain in the International Congress of Education of San Luis (United States). In 1905 he would give an important conference in Bilbao on "The teacher, the school and the teaching material", which laid the foundations for a renewal of the school in Spain.
In 1908 El Greco was published, a biography and artistic study which, in addition to providing new data and ordering its catalogue, led to a discovery of the figure and personality of the Greek-Spanish painter and its revaluation in the 20th century based on a different interpretation and innovative. Since then it has become the obligatory reference for any study on this painter.
That same year his friend, Joaquín Sorolla painted the two known portraits of Cossío. He also traveled to Pau (France), where his admired teacher Nicolás Salmerón had died .
In 1909 he was pensioned by the Board for Further Studies and Scientific Research and visited the most important educational centers in Germany and Switzerland. During this period, his daughters attend German schools, including the Pestalozzi-Fröebel-Haus in Berlin . In 1910 he traveled through Europe and in 1913 King Alfonso XIII interviewed Cossío as director of the National Pedagogical Museum. In 1914 he published What is known about the life of El Greco, on the occasion of the painter's centenary.
In 1915, after the death of his teacher, he fell ill. To recover, he settled first in El Escorial and then in Pozuelo de Alarcón . Carmen, his wife, had to be admitted to a psychiatric clinic. On August 4, 1917, Natalia, Cossío's eldest daughter, entered into a civil marriage with another active institutionist, Alberto Jiménez Fraud, who ran the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid.
In 1926, during the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza, Cossío, who had been appointed Minister of Public Instruction five years earlier, wrote (without signing it) the pedagogical program of the Institution. Finally in 1929 he retired and in tribute, his disciples published the book of his journey, with a compilation of his writings. On March 20, 1930, he was named honorary director of the National Pedagogical Museum .
One of his last satisfactions was the creation in Valencia of the " Cossío School ", 89 directed by José Navarro Alcácer and installed on Avenida 14 de Abril, a and whose classrooms were open from 1930 until the end of the war . Spanish civilian .
In that year Cossío fell ill and the following year he moved to Geneva (Switzerland) to undergo medical treatment, returning to Spain when the Republic was proclaimed, but in June he returned to Geneva. However, at that time (1931), the old teacher saw the old dream come true that Giner and he himself had matured over almost half a century: the start-up of the Pedagogical Missions, of whose patronage the Government would appoint him president. on May 29; and in June he is elected deputy to the General Constituent Courts by the Republican-Socialist coalition, but he cannot take office due to his advanced age and illness.
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He spent the summer of 1932 sick in Collado Mediano (Madrid). In 1934 he named Cossío, without consulting him, "Citizen of Honor" of the Republic. He died at two in the morning on September 2, 1935, at the age of seventy-eight. After his transfer to Madrid, he was buried in the Eastern Civil Cemetery and in the same grave as Julián Sanz del Río, Francisco Giner de los Ríos, Fernando de Castro y Pajares and Gumersindo de Azcárate.. After the burial, and following his express wish, a delegation composed of a crowd made up of recognized intellectuals and politicians, mixed with workers and students, among whom were the participants in the Pedagogical Missions, was dissolved without making any speeches.
Of the incomprehensible task carried out by Bartolomé Cossío, we should list, as a guide, some of the reforms —of different magnitude and repercussion— that became a reality thanks to his efforts:
The psychological and human profile that Cossío drew with his own intellectual and vital work, is completed with innumerable portraits of his personality made by many of those who knew and treated him. As samples can be collected two of those portraits of very different literary style, the poetic one of Juan Ramón Jiménez, and the emotional memory of one of his students, the politician Julián Besteiro .
(For a more complete bibliography consult: Otero Urtaza, Eugenio M. (1994). Ministry of Education and Science, ed. Bartolomé Cossío. Pedagogical thought and educational action . Madrid. pp. 312–318 . .)
(in addition to those included in the references)