Currently, two monolithic baby heads flank the Huntington Avenue entrance of the Museum of Fine Arts like a pair of cherubs. Do they herald a coming baby oligarchy? Or spring? In fact, neither. The cherubs bring news of two Spanish painting exhibitions: "Antonio López García" (April 11 - July 27) and "El Greco to Velázquez: Art During the Reign of Philip III" (April 20 - July 27).

Antonio López García, the Spanish artist who made the baby heads, is not well known in the United States. The MFA's current retrospective, his first in this country, aims to change that. It's a sprawling affair, comprising 55 works, that demonstrates the expanse of his talent and the wealth of his preoccupations.

Scholars know López as a hyper-realist, but his early work was actually quite weird. The Apparition (1963), a mixed media diorama, depicts a scene straight from a Japanese horror movie. A couple sleeps entwined in bed while a ghostly boy, dressed in shorts, coat, and tie, floats toward them down a hallway. An anxious woman surveys the scene from around a corner. It's a kinetic piece that drags the viewer's attention from one perspective to the next, building dread.

The painting Atocha (1964) has the same ghastly quality. A grey skinned couple lays naked, in coitus, on an abandoned Madrid street, the dark pinks in the sky giving the illusion of dusk or dawn. The buildings behind the lovers were painted with a haunting abandon, more suggested than figured. It could be another ghost story -- straight up zombie sex -- but, in the context of Franco's Spain, it conjures ideas about privacy and public space.

López would return both to the human figure and to the cityscape after Atocha, and his best work comes from the latter genre. One painting in particular, View of Madrid from Capitán Haya (1987-94) demonstrates his mastery. López depicts Madrid from above, the city's buildings extending into the horizon. From afar, the painting looks photorealistic, the buildings arranged in fussy grids, but a closer inspection reveals an impressionist's hand. Each element in the painting is slightly, organically imprecise, but, when combined, offer a gripping visual harmony.

The cityscape was new to El Greco (1541-1614) during his late period, and View of Toledo is his most heralded example of the genre. It's the first painting you see when entering "El Greco to Velázquez," and it provides a subtle consonance with the López exhibition. As painters go, however, El Greco and López couldn't be more different.

View of Toledo is a violent swabbing of color, the city wrenching itself from a bosom of hill, the sky behind it a roiling of greys and blues, threatening to swallow the painting whole. Laocoön, a similar work depicting the famous death of Trojan heroes by snakes, springs off the canvas in wrenching vortices of color. The closer one inspects the image, the more unstable it becomes, impressionist swaths of paint spilling into illegibility. Those paintings, and their close companion The Vision of St. John, look startlingly modern.

The exhibit's curators Ronni Baer (from the MFA) and Sarah Schroth (from Duke University's Nasher Museum) aimed to put El Greco and Velázquez, two painters often seen as solitary geniuses, into historical context. The work of the two masters mixes with paintings by their lesser known contemporaries in a series of gallery rooms arranged thematically.

It's an approach that works more often than it doesn't. El Greco's striking Fray Hortensio Félix Paravicino, a portrait of a poet-friar, assumes a new grandeur when shown next to similar works. A portrait by El Greco's pupil Luis Tristán De Escamilla takes clear inspiration from the friar painting, but Tristán's shorter, sharper, and more naturalistic brushstrokes lack the psychological nuance that gives Fray Hortensio his air of nervous melancholy.

Sometimes, the gambit suffers from its own cleverness. In a curatorial flourish, El Greco's St. Martin and the Beggar sits across the gallery from Peter Paul Rubens's well-known depiction of the Duke of Lerma. Curatorial notes suggest that Rubens had seen and been inspired by the Greco work, which is fine, if unsubstantiated, but the Rubens, with its riotous color palette, overwhelms the other paintings in the room. Likewise, a wall of glass and ceramics from the Duke of Lerma's curiosity collection feels pasted on.

Nonetheless, the exhibition offers many sublime moments. A lovely Velázquez depiction of the Immaculate Conception looks stunning when flanked by other examples of the scene. Velázquez's Virgin is a fairly straightforward portrait of a young girl, lost in pious thought: a realist counterpoint to the paintings that surround it. He uses the conventions of the scene (a cloudy patina surrounding the Virgin, a crescent moon for a pedestal) to compose the image itself. The clouds, for example, bring the figure forward from the murky background. It's a painterly approach to allegory that keeps the image intriguing.

In contrast, the Juan Sánchez Cotán version has an allegorical bluntness that is tough to swallow (one museum-goer called Cotán's version "Buddha-faced"), and the Francisco Pacheco, with its riot of cherubs, functions on a much more debased artistic level. Sometimes, you just need fewer babies per inch.

PHOTO CREDITS

Top Left: View of Madrid from Capitán Haya, 1987–94 Antonio López García (Spanish, born in 1936); Oil on canvas mounted to board, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Archivo Fotográfico Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Photograph courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Top Right: View of Toledo, El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos), Greek (active in Spain), 1541–1614; Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, H.O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H.O. Havemeyer. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Bottom Left: Fray Hortensio Félix Paravicino, 1609. El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos), Greek (active in Spain), 1541–1614. Oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Isaac Sweetser Fund. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Bottom Right: The Immaculate Conception, 1618–1619. Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Spanish, 1599–1660. Oil on canvas.The National Gallery, London. Bought with the aid of The Art Fund, 1974. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston