It would seem to be by the aid of Manuel Pereyra that the influence of Gregorio Hernandez was carried to Madrid. But in this work he was supported by Alonso de los Rios, a carver of intelligence, taste, and skill, who was born in Valladolid about 1650, and who early went to Madrid. In his studio worked Juan de Villanueva and his two sons Juan and Alfonso Rios, who directed the art of carving in the capital during the first years of the eighteenth century. Afterwards in the studio of Rios worked Luis Salvador Carmona, whose talent was so marked that on the death of his master he became its director. Under his guidance the Madrid school became so famous that Ferdinand VI. in 1752 transformed it into the Royal Academy of San Fernando. The greater number of Carmona’s carvings are at Madrid. They are single statues and bas-reliefs. He does not appear to have carved an altar-screen. For altar-screens, that had been required by the churches, had now fallen in the popular esteem, due to a weakening of the strong religious impulses that for so long had directed the expression of art. Carmona also executed forty-two small statues for the parish of Seguro in Biscay. But his finest works are his two statues at Salamanca. Both are in the cathedral--one, a Pietà, known as La Dolorosa, in the Capilla de San José (Plate 131); the other, a Flagellation of the Christ (Plate 132), is in the sacristy. These realistic and emotional groups are the works by which Carmona must be judged. They witness that he had through his masters inherited the traditions of Gregorio Hernandez, though his work is less sincere and without the Galician master’s fine truth to nature. In Spain Carmona is accounted a master, but this praise is too high. This much may be granted to him: his works have great, even surprising, merit when we take into consideration the period at which they were executed.