A History of Spanish Painting: Volume IX–Part 2 A History of Spanish Painting, Volume IX: The Beginning of the Renaissance in Castile and Leon, Part 2 [Reprint 2014 ed.] 9780674600379, 9780674599734

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HARVARD-RADCLIFFE FINE ARTS SERIES

A H I S T O R Y OF SPANISH

PAINTING

VOLUME IX — P A R T II

LONDON : G E O F F R E Y

CUMBERLEGIÍ

OXFORD U N I V E R S I T Y

PRESS

A HISTORY OF SPANISH PAINTING BY

CHANDLER RATHFON POST HARVARD UNIVERSITY

VOLUME IX— PART II THE BEGINNING OF THE RENAISSANCE IN CASTILE AND LEON

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1947

COPYRIGHT,

1947

B Y T H E P R E S I D E N T AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD C O L L E G E

P R I N T E D AT T H E HARVARD U N I V E R S I T Y P R I N T I N G O F F I C E C A M B R I D G E , MASS., U.S.A.

P A R T II THE BEGINNING OF THE RENAISSANCE IN CASTILE AND LEON

CHAPTER IX T H E E A R L Y R E N A I S S A N C E IN T H E P R O V I N C E S OF LEON AND ZAMORA I.

JUAN

RODRÍGUEZ

DE

SOLÍS

has been doubly kind to us in the case of this artist, one of the most gently charming and competent painters of the beginning of the sixteenth century in northwestern Spain. In the first place, whereas signatures are so rare in this region during the M i d d l e Ages and early Renaissance and we are therefore, when, as very often, documentary identification is lacking, forced into circumlocutions of invented appellations to describe the various personalities, he has affixed his name to one of his most characteristic achievements. W e are not, however, thus informed of the local school in Spain to which he belonged, but fortune again comes to our aid and solves the question by preserving a large number of paintings in the contiguous provinces of Leon and Zamora that he manifestly executed. T h e signed achievement consists in two panels, probably the wings of a triptych the centre of which has been lost, in the Collection of the Conde de Torre-Arias at Madrid (Fig. i 8 8 ) . The theme of one wing is the Virgin of Mercy, with the unusual addition of a half-length of Our Lord in the heavens above her. It is difficult to decide whether the gesture of His uplifted right arm is one of blessing or of menace, but, if the latter attitude was intended, we are in the presence of a phase of the subject that the Spaniards called the Patrocinio de la Virgen ' in which she was conceived as protecting mankind from divine wrath, with the difference that in this instance the darts of Christ's anger ^ are omitted, as well as the pleading Sts. Dominic and Francis. In the other panel, St. Veronica displays the fabric on which is imprinted the Saviour's countenance. Both she and the Virgin are set beneath simulated Gothic arches the spandrels of which are occupied by Prophets treated, as in the Flemish school, so as to counterfeit sculpture. T h e reverses of the FORTUNE

' V o l . V I I , p. 6 9 1 . ^ Perhaps they have been painted out at the order of someone w h o realized the blasphemous nature of the theme.

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504

wings are embellished with escutcheons that will immediately concern us. The signature is written across the lower left corner of the pavement on which St. Veronica stands, with the Juan and the Rodrigues ( = Rodríguez) abbreviated. It must be the name of the

FIG. 188. JUAN RODRÍGUEZ DE SOLÍ S. VIRGIN OF M E R C Y AND ST. VERONICA. TORRE-ARIAS COLLECTION, MADRID

painter and not the donor, who would not have allowed his memory to be committed to such small and dimly seen letters. Don Diego Angulo who gave to this pair of panels their first scholarly publication 3 was uncertain whether they ought to be classified in the school of Seville or in that of Leon, since Juan Rodriguez de ^Archivo

español

de arie y arqueología,

XIII ( 1 9 3 7 ) , 201-206.

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505

Soil's is otherwise unknown in documentary or literary records, but he inclined to the former opinion. His first argument he finds in the escutcheons, two on the Virgin's panel exactly repeated on that dedicated to St. Veronica. The larger of these shields bears two charges, at the left that of the Enriquez family and at the right one that he doubtfully assigns to the Portocarreros, while admitting for it other possibilities. In the case of the smaller escutcheon he hesitates between the Cárdenas and the Villalobos families. H e is guided to Andalusia as the place of the triptych's origin because the shields of the Enriquez and Portocarreros families occur, though separated, on a ceiling in the Casa de Pilatos at Seville (betokening the fact that in the latter part of the fifteenth century a Don Pedro Enriquez married a Doña Catalina de Ribera, a granddaughter of a Beatriz Portocarrero), as well as, in combination, on the tomb of a Don Pedro Portocarrero de Cárdenas in the convent of Sta. Clara at Moguer. Angulo himself, however, acknowledges the unreliability of the heraldic evidence, especially since only the Enriquez coat of arms is surely recognizable, and he further concedes that the escutcheons were in all likelihood not painted by the author of the Virgin and St. Veronica but constituted a slightly later addition, the smaller one even possibly attached after the larger, so that the most that he can contend is that the panels would early have passed into Sevillian possession and so probably would have been painted in Andalusia. The names Enriquez and Cárdenas, moreover, are frequent also in the northern section of the peninsula, and there was a Portocarrero family in the province of Zamora where we shall find Juan Rodriguez de Solis to have been employed. Even if the heraldic indications were more definite, they would be entirely outweighed by this master's demonstrable activity in the districts of Zamora and Leon. The considerations which in the second place moved Angulo to prefer the theory of Andalusian provenience are that a lady Guiomar Rodriguez de Solis is recorded as residing at Seville in 1528, when she rented a house to the wife of no less a personage than the great explorer, Sebastian Cabot, and that she had artistic connections, since her father and her brother, Diego Márquez (who took his mother's surname), were both painters. The occurrence of the surname Rodriguez de Solis at Seville provides the most substantial bit of support for Angulo's tentative opinion, but, since both parts of the surname, Rodriguez and Solis, are common in other regions of Spain, the com-

50б

LEON AND

Z_\MORA

bination must frequently have taken place elsewhere in appellations. Furthermore, the latter part of the surname definitely emerges in the artistic annals of Leon in the person of the sculptor there active from 1 5 7 1 to 1 5 7 9 , Diego de Solís,'^ and Angulo himself points out that the section of the peninsula where the word Solis appears in the title of a place is in the parish of Santa Maria de Solis near Aviles in Asturias north of Leon. T h e Spanish scholar confesses also that the stylistic links of the panels with the painting of Seville are very tenuous, and the few slight analogies that he perceives could be applied quite as well in the other schools of the peninsula. T h e plain fact is that there are no productions of this specific character in Andalusia, an obstacle that in itself would exclude the panels from southern Spain even if we did not discover the author laboring in the provinces of Zamora and Leon. In referring to the alternative that he less favors, a derivation from the school of Leon, Angulo states that perhaps, though not surely, vague resemblances are to be descried with the manner of the principal Hispano-Flemish painter of the region, the Palanquinos Master, but it is not necessary to urge such an affiliation or to propose that this Master was the teacher of Juan Rodriguez de Solis in order to establish the latter's presence in a division of Spain where so many of his creations are actually to be found. His employment in the provinces both of Leon and Zamora raises the not very significant question as to which was the home of his activity. T h e former alternative is suggested by the fact that Zamora was never a great centre of painting but gave employment to artists from Leon and Salamanca and by the analogous case of Nicolás Francés.^ T h e restricted nature of the subjects in the Torre-Arias pictures does not permit a very broad outlook upon the painter's style, but we shall be able to amplify the vista in the other works that we shall assign to him. A faithfulness to the precedent of the L o w Countries more pronounced than in the majority of his rivals is not so apparent in these two panels, and yet the traces are by no means entirely lacking. W e have already had occasion to refer to the simulation of carved figures in the spandrels of the framing arches according to a constant practice of Flemish painters, but the trait in the pictures that most reflects an E . Díaz-Jiménez in Revista de archivos, X L V I ( 1 9 2 5 ) , 42. Diego de Solis was also employed at Orense in adjacent Galicia: see the article in the Thieme-Becker Lexikon, = Vol. I l l , p. 286.

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507

admiration for northern models is a technique so precise and approaching so close to daintiness as to imply that he may have begun his career in the atelier of some Flemish illuminator. This nicety is everywhere evident, particularly, for instance, in the delineation of the Virgin's protégés, but we may single out for special mention the captivating delicacy with which Juan Rodriguez has rendered the transparent veil that takes the place of the napkin with the sacred countenance usually held by St. Veronica. It is not too much to say that in this detail he vies with Bermejo in the rendering of such gossamery fabrics. The types appear to owe less to Memling than to Gerard David, whose great vogue in Spain we have before found reason to stress.® W e shall discover reminiscences of other Flemings as we proceed, especially of the eminent artist who was actually residing in the vicinity of Zamora and enjoying high patronage during our master's lifetime, Juan de Flandes. T h e faces of his actors and his landscapes often suggest this influence; a certain degree of fondness for effects of sjumatezza, as in the group gathered under Our Lady's mantle, may have the same source; and in several instances we shall find the contact very close and tangible. T o the aesthetic tradition of his own country we may ascribe the formality of the compositions, the conception of St., Veronica as a cultfigure, and the brilliant brocade of her gown. Although she stands in a Gothic apse, the partial relaxation of primitive asperity in the personal types forbids a date before c. 1500, and other Spanish painters, for instance Juan de Borgoña in his fresco of the Purification at Toledo, sometimes reverted to Gothic architecture for their settings at even later moments in the sixteenth century. Since, nevertheless, Juan Rodriguez de Solís ordinarily prefers architecture of the Renaissance and the Torre-Arias paintings, especially the St. Veronica, are perhaps slightly more archaic in feeling than the general run of his output, we may indulge ourselves in the guess that the triptych to which they belonged was one of his earliest commissions. We shall subsequently come upon pretty clear traces of his interest in the achievements of his predecessor in this part of Spain, Fernando Gallego. In taking up his other works, I will give precedence to those in which the same authorship as in the signed panels is clearest. The one that furnishes the most unmistakable proof is in the little museum of the Tesoro in the great church of S. Isidoro at Leon, another small 6 Vol. IV, pp. 28-29.

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LEON AND

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triptych implying that our master was in demand for these objects of devotion which are more characteristic of the Flemish than the Spanish school ( F i g . 1 8 9 ) . T h e subject of the central piece is the Epiphany, but in the background other scenes are enacted in lesser scale. At the middle the Crucifixion takes place upon a rising hill, with perhaps the intended symbolism of the contrast between the maltreatment of Our L o r d in this event and the transitory honor paid to H i m by the M a g i . At the sides of the hill are perceived, in still further diminished size, at the left the Annunciation (within an austere classical edifice) and at the right the Visitation, while the group of the Nativity can be seen in the distance behind the St. Joseph in the Epiphany. T h e left wing is consigned to St. Bernard standing and receiving the milk from the Madonna in the clouds j and the right wing displays St. Ursula in the midst of a bevy of her virginal co-martyrs.'' It is difficult to see just why Gómez-Moreno ® believes the fine, florid, carved frame of the Renaissance an addition of the second half of the sixteenth century rather than contemporary with the paintings. I submit that it is impossible that two different artists should have created figures so nearly identical as the Torre-Arias Madonna of Mercy and the St. Ursula in facial type, in curves of the body and drapery, and, above all, in an upward gazing expression of pious ecstasy that is so far unsuccessful as to be tinged with the mawkish. Upon this conclusive comparison we can heap such further proof as the reappearance of the miniaturist's exactness in brushwork, the resemblance of several of St. Ursula's associates to the women kneeling in the foreground beneath the robe of the Virgin of Mercy, and the spidery delineation of the fingers, particularly in the Epiphany, which Angulo finds to be a peculiarity of the painter of the Torre-Arias panels. As in certain other productions of Juan Rodriguez de Solís, however, St. Ursula and her two most prominent maidens seem to exhibit more tangibly than the signed panels an acquaintance with the ' J . Pérez Llamazares {El tesoro de la Real Colegiata de San Isidoro de León, Leon, 1925, p. 224, and Historia de la Real Colegiata de San Isidoro, de León, Leon, 1927, p. 406) misinterprets the subject of the right wing as representing the adolescent Christ holding His Sacred Heart and surrounded by a throng of worshippers; but the costume plainly reveals the figure to be a woman, and the arrow in her side, the angel bringing the crown of martyrdom, and the accompanying group of maidens belong to the regular iconography of St. Ursula. I can recall no other instance, however, in which she carries also the attribute of a heart. Gómez-Moreno {Catálogo monumental. Provincia de León, 202) recognizes that the figure is a canonized woman but fails to designate her as St. Ursula. ® Catálogo monumental. Provincia de León, 202.

FIG. 189. J U A N R O D R Í G U E Z D E SOLÍS. T R I P T Y C H . {Courtesy of the Frick Art Reference

S. ISIDORO, LEON

Library)

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LEON AND ZAMORA

Flemish Master of the St. Lucy Legend, who may have sojourned in Spain.9 The second work in this part of Spain very plainly exhibiting the craft of Juan Rodriguez is the only specimen of his style that has enjoyed any degree of publicity, a panel adorning the trascoro of the cathedral of Zamora (Fig. 190). Gómez-Moreno, in cases that will be duly noticed on subsequent pages, foreshadowed the reconstruction of his personality by ascribing to the author of the Zamora picture one other production with conviction and by merely suggesting that several more paintings showed affinities with his manner. The size of the panel on the Zamora trascoro is so large " that it may never have been the principal compartment of a retable but a separate effort designed for the very spot where it now exists. The subject is the blessing Pantocrator seated upon a throne of the Renaissance and surrounded by a vast galaxy of angels and saints. H e is probably conceived to some extent as Christ of the Last Judgment, for beneath the throne, at the bottom of the picture and between the two triads of angels playing upon musical instruments and singing, St. Michael, the conductor of souls, is given great prominence, and at either side of the throne there emerge clearly the figures of the Virgin and St. John Baptist, the regular companions of Our Lord in representations of this theme. The intention perhaps was to include also the idea of a devotional work in honor of All Saints," for the throng of the blessed is very dense. Amidst them, despite the darkening that the panel has suffered through accretions of dirt, we can distinguish, in addition to the Virgin and St. John Baptist, such figures as Sts. Peter and Paul, next to the Baptist, and St. Clara (with her emblem, the Host) in the serried bevy of canonized women who in smaller scale pack the background at the left of the throne. Delicately fanciful architecture of the Renaissance is used both for the throne and for the loggia in which it is imagined as ensconced. The ornamentation of the throne includes simulated sculpture, pinnacles of two Virtues and statuettes in niches on its arms. The Zamora picture will be securely established as a production of the same hand that did the Leon triptych by a number of interrelationships that on subsequent pages I shall show to exist between it and other works manifestly executed by the triptych's creator, but even if ' See my vol. I V , p. 27. It is 2.33 metres in height by 1 . 7 1 in width.

" Vol. I V , p. 596.

FIG. 190. J U A N R O D R Í G U E Z D E SOLÍ S. P A N T O C R A T O R , SAINTS, A N D ANGELS. C A T H E D R A L , Z A M O R A (From "Die Malerei in Sfanien" by Von Loga)

512

LEON AND

ZAMORA

we observe only the ties that unite the Zamora picture to the triptych, we become convinced of the single authorship. Although, for example, the panel on the trascoro of the cathedral at Zamora is a painting of considerable size, it is carried out in the same niggling mode of the illuminator, and the angelic and feminine heads that are multiplied about the Saviour recall vividly in the triptych the Virgin of the Epiphany as well as some of St. Ursula's maidens. Several of the masculine saints at the throne's right repel us with exactly the upward glance of strained piety that disfigures the Sts. Bernard and Ursula. As soon as we thus accept the Zamora picture and the triptych as productions of one man, we are furnished with another indisputable proof that this man is Juan Rodriguez de Solís in the practical facial identity of the enthroned Christ with the sacred effigy held by St. Veronica. T h e debt to Gerard David in the Zamora picture is illustrated especially by the types of Our L o r d , the women, and the angels. T h e St. Michael in pose, in drapery, and in the counterfeiting of a reflection in his shield was definitely suggested by the figure of this archangel at the centre of Juan de Flandes's retable in the Old Cathedral at Salamanca.'^ T h e Iberian tone is given by the studied symmetry of the composition and by the way in which, transcending his characteristic gentleness, he is able to invest the Saviour with the formality of a cult-figure and with something of the majesty of the old Spanish Romanesque frescoists. It is not impossible that he was cognizant of the similar representation of Our L o r d , now in the Prado, that Fernando Gallego had introduced into a retable at near-lying Toro.'^ T h e third work that most conspicuously reveals the identity of this master with Juan Rodriguez de Solís, a small Conversion of St. Paul in the Collection of M r . C. O. von Kienbusch at N e w Y o r k ( F i g . 1 9 1 ) , is thus no longer in situ and so would not in itself prove the activity of Juan Rodriguez in the provinces of Leon and Zamora, but the result is the same, since it was plainly executed by the painter of the Leon triptych and the picture on the Zamora trascoro. T h e personal touch of this painter is hard to mistake, but there is here added such determinative correspondences as exist between the cavalier pointing to the apparition of the Saviour and the Sts. Bernard and Ursula of the triptych in S. Isidoro at Leon or between the footman with uplifted arms and the first maiden at the right of St. Ursula. T o " Vol. I V , p. 40.

'^/èiV., p. n o .

FIG. 191. J U A N R O D R Í G U E Z D E SOLÍS. CONVERSION OF ST. PAUL. VON K I E N B U S C H C O L L E C T I O N , NEW Y O R K (Courtesy of the owner)

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the St. Paul himself, who has fallen from his horse to the ground, there are many parallels among the master's representations of older men, for instance several of the Apostles in the predella among the pieces of a retable belonging to the Hispanic Society at N e w Y o r k that we shall eventually assign to him and his shop. T h e hand of the signer of the Torre-Arias panels now manifests itself in the reiteration of a kind of type to which I have not hitherto called attention, the upturned visage, with squinting eyes, displayed in precisely the same aspect by the pair of St. Paul's retainers to whom we have already referred and by two of the men at the right under the Virgin's protection in one of the Torre-Arias wings. T h e parity between these wings and the Leon triptych, the Zamora picture, and the Conversion of St. Paul are quite sufficient to demonstrate that this master active in the provinces of Zamora and Leon is the same person as Juan Rodriguez de Solis, but in the sundry other works that can be attributed to the painter of Zamora and Leon we shall find much corroborative evidence. Gómez-Moreno long ago recognized the hand of the painter of the picture on the Zamora trascoro, and therefore of Juan Rodriguez de Solis, in the capacious retable over the high altar of the parish church at a town directly south of Zamora, Fuentelcarnero. Except for the pinnacle, the central section contains sculpture including a statue of the church's patron, St. Stephen, which may be contemporary with the paintings and still retains its original Gothic canopy. T h e two tiers, each of four paintings, above the predella are devoted to the story of the protomartyr. In the higher of the tiers, he is ordained to the diaconate, disputes with the Jewish ecclesiastics, is arraigned for trial, and suffers lapidation. T h e lower tier marshals some of the episodes in the tale of the long peregrinations of his body. T h e first compartment at the left depicts its interment at Jerusalem after its miraculous invention ( F i g . 1 9 2 ) ; in the next, we see the resort of the afflicted to the shrine that Alexander, the senator of Constantinople, had constructed at Jerusalem in his honor 5 the third panel shows the senator's widow, Juliana, choosing by mistake the casket of St. Stephen instead of that of her husband from the two which the bishop exhibits to herj and finally, according to the passionate fondness of the Spanish M i d d l e Ages and early Renaissance for representations of such subjects, the composition of the second compartment is almost repeated in a scene of worshippers Catálogo monumental, Provincia

de Zamora,

275-278.

FIG. 192. J U A N R O D R Í G U E Z D E SOLÍ S. I N T E R M E N T OF ST. S T E P H E N A T J E R U S A L E M , SECTION OF R E T A B L E . PARISH CHURCH, FUENTELCARNERO {Photo. Archivo Regional,

Burgos)

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LEON AND ZAMORA

of St. Stephen's relics in their temporary sojourn at Constantinople. The uppermost row in the altarpiece unfolds four events in the life of Christ, the Nativity, Epiphany, Resurrection, and Ascension. The Crucifixion that must have been set at the centre of this row now hangs on the wall beside the retable, evidently having been displaced in order to provide space for the canopy over St. Stephen's statue when this figure at some fairly modern date was moved up for the sake of finding a spot for a cult-image of the Madonna just above the tabernacle. The theme of the painting in the central pinnacle is Pentecost. The four divisions of the predella display half-lengths of eight Apostles in pairs, relieved against the old, incised gold backgrounds in contrast to the settings of landscape and architecture of the Renaissance in the compartments of the retable's main body; and the guardapolvos are adorned with six standing effigies of Patriarchs and Prophets. The presence of the craft of Juan Rodriguez is so obvious that it will be necessary here to point out only a few of the most striking stylistic identities. The entirely distinctive, strained upward glance that he affects to emphasize piety often reoccurs in the cycle, for instance in almost all the devotees in the two compartments of visits to St. Stephen's shrines, especially in the Raphaelesque youth at the left in the example located at Jerusalem. In no other work has he lavished more pleasantly his Flemish exquisiteness of technique, and nowhere has he revealed more tangibly both in types and landscape his admiration for Juan de Flandes. The landscape in the lapidation recalls that of the Epiphany in the triptych of S. Isidoro, and the interest that this Epiphany evinces in little, temple-like structures is reiterated in nearly all the scenes that concern St. Stephen. W e have perceived in the panel on the trascoro of the cathedral of Zamora that our master may have had his eyes open to the achievements of his predecessor in the region, Fernando Gallego, and in confirmation of this hypothesis we discover that at Fuentelcarnero he has thrown the composition of the Ascension off centre in the manner of the representation of the subject in the retable by Fernando and his shop at Arcenillas.'^ For the stoning of the protomartyr he has invented a new and effective composition, with the saint not kneeling, as in the usual iconography, but erect and tied to a stake with his back toward us and facing his executioners. See my vol. IV, p. 117.

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It is with somewhat less equanimity that we may set in the production of Juan Rodriguez de Solís the two retables in the parish church of Fuentelapeña, directly east of Fuentelcarnero. The one over the high altar consists partly of sculpture, and the painting is confined to twelve lateral compartments, all with scenes from the life of Christ except for a representation of the burning of St. John Evangelist in oil. It seems hard to deny the panels to the master when we observe in the Epiphany (Fig. 193) the impressive similarity of the standing Wise Man at the right in type, curious stare, gesture, and hat to the first standing King in the version of the theme in S. Isidoro at Leon. The landscape in the Epiphany at Fuentelapeña reveals specimens of his favorite ruined arches and delicately slender trees, as in the background of St. Stephen's interment at Fuentelcarnero. The countenance of one of the handmaids of the Virgin in the Purification is inexplicably depicted as distorted with sorrow in such a way that she appears reminiscent of the St. Ursula in the Leon triptych. The correspondence with the manner of Juan Rodriguez, however, is not so complete throughout the series of panels as in the case of the retable of Fuentelcarnero, and yet we shall discover on subsequent pages so many links with other works by him that we are perhaps wrong in harboring any doubts in regard to the attribution and ought to allow him the latitude of occasional slight departures from a single groove. Bits of rather incongruous genre are sometimes featured in the master's works, as in a scuffle of two youngsters in the left foreground of the Purification, but it is a rather pleasant touch of invention that has represented St. Joseph as peacefully sleeping on a bench in a chamber at the back of the room of the Annunciation. Upon the nude of Christ in the Flagellation unusual pains have been exerted, but postures and movements are not always articulated with entire success, for example in the St. John of the Baptism or the Virgin exceptionally depicted as seated in the Annunciation upon a cushion on the pavement. The St. John, however, may constitute another example of homage on the part of Juan Rodriguez de Solís to Fernando Gallego, from whose version of the Baptism in the retable of St. Ildefonso in the cathedral of Zamora the figure seems to be derived. The attachments to the style of Juan Rodriguez are, to say the least, quite as clear in the small retable of very heterogeneous themes in the baptismal chapel of the farroquia at Fuentelapeña. The subjects in the upper tier are the Noli me tangere and St. Peter, accom-

Fie. 193. JUAN RODRÍGUEZ DE SOLÍS(?)· EPIPHANY, SECTION OF RETABLE OF HIGH ALTAR. PARISH CHURCH, FUENTELAPEÑA (Photo. Archivo Regional, Burgos)

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panied by St. Paul, causing the fall of Simon Magus j and in the lower row, the Nativity, the Mass of St. Gregory, and single figures of the Baptist, St. Jerome,'^ the M a n of Sorrows surrounded by futti with instruments of the Passion ( F i g . 1 9 4 ) , and St. Anthony of Padua. T h e most telling proof for the authorship is forthcoming in the M a n of Sorrows, who embodies the master's characteristic endeavor to suggest religious devotion by forced expressiveness and upward glance. T h e landscape where the Baptist is seated, with its beetling rock from which a tree projects, resembles the setting of the conversion of St. Paul in the Von Kienbusch Collection, and the crowd approaching in the left background to listen to his admonitions furnishes another of the passages that insistently remind us of Juan de Flandes. T h e composition of the Nativity is somewhat simplified in comparison with the rendering in the retable over the high altar, but Juan Rodriguez now has the hardihood to attempt in it a nocturnal lighting. M o v i n g from Zamora northward, we find his next achievement at Benavente, a municipality still in the province of Zamora but on the borders of the province of Leon. It consists in the remains of one of his retables over an altar at the left of the nave in the church of S. Juan del Mercado in this town ( F i g . 1 9 5 ) . Episodes in the life of St. Ildefonso are depicted in the upper register, his episcopal consecration and reception of the miraculous chasuble 5 the Nativity of Christ and the Epiphany are the themes of the lower tier j and there is a predella with half-lengths of six Apostles. T h e easily recognizable types of Juan Rodriguez de Soil's for women and angels emerge in the narrative scenes, and exactly this delicate sort of countenance is utilized even for the St. Ildefonso and, in the compartment of the consecration, for the clerics at the left. T h e illuminator's technique would be almost enough in itself to authenticate the retable, for no contemporary of his in Spain carries such meticulous methods into monumental commissions. T h e Madonna of the Epiphany does not differ from the Virgin of Mercy in the Torre-Arias wing. T h e composition for the Nativity, as generally in his representations of the scene ( f o r instance, at Fuentelapeña), appears to be based upon Gerard David's iconography, and the arrangement and poses of the actors in the Epiphany are only slightly varied in the version of the theme in the Leon triptych. T h e In m y notes taken on the spot I h a v e entered another subject between the B a p tist an;l St. J e r o m e , but I am ashamed to confess that I cannot n o w read m y o w n h a n d w r i t i n g so as to s p e c i f y w h a t this subject is.

FIG. 194. JUAN RODRÍGUEZ DE SOLÍS(R). T H E MAN OF SORROWS, SECTION OF RETABLE. BAPTISMAL CHAPEL, PARISH CHURCH, FUENTELAPEÑA {Photo.

Archivo

Regional,

Burgos)

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521

greater severity of the architectural settings in the panels both of the chasuble and of the Epiphany, anticipating the manner of Juan de Herrera's edifices, would indicate a later date than for the painting on the trascoro at Zamora. Gold is no longer admitted for garments

FIG. 195. J U A N R O D R I G U E Z D E SOLÍS. SECTIONS OF R E T A B L E . S. J U A N D E L MERCADO, B E N A V E N T E {Photo. Archivo Regional^ Burgos')

and hangings, but the old tradition is still potent enough to require it for the backgrounds of the Apostles in the predella. The most extensive, preserved monument upon which Juan Rodriguez worked in the province of Leon is the retable over the high altar of the -parroquia at Cabreros del Rio, directly south of the capital. Gómez-Moreno ' ' states that the twenty panels now built helter-skelter " Catálogo

monumental,

Provincia de León, 506.

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into a modern frame in this retable recall vividly the style of our master, even in his tendency to renounce gold for accents, but we must be bolder and definitely declare him to be the author. An inequality in craftsmanship, however, is rightly descried in the panels by the great Spanish critic, and we may readily admit the inferior panels to have been handed over to the shop or to a collaborator. If we set aside two compartments with effigies of David and Isaiah, the other eighteen fall into three series of subjects, with six panels in each series. The Blessed Virgin is honored in one series with the themes of the Annunciation, Nativity, Epiphany, Flight into Egypt (a reversal of Schongauer's print of the subject). Purification, and Assumption (which, as Gómez-Moreno points out, actually repeats some details of the Zamora picture). In the second set, devoted to St. Michael, three of the scenes are easily recognizable, the fight of angels and demons, the Monte Gargano episode, and the archangel's discomfiture of the sermonizing Antichrist, which is so much emphasized in the Golden Legend. After I had the satisfaction in 1929 of overcoming the more than usual difficulties in reaching the remote, little village, I was met with a final disappointment, the inability, because of the poor light and accretions of dust, to make out the subjects of two compartments in the group dealing with Michael. Although the sixth and last panel is partly hidden by the tabernacle, one can clearly perceive the constituents, St. Michael and two human cavaliers vanquishing a third, fallen horseman; but even so we are scarcely better off than in the case of the two compartments covered with dirt, for, as in other enigmatical events in the legend of the archangel noted in former volumes,'^ I am no more able than Gómez-Moreno to find either the source or the interpretation of the scene. In the last series of six, which single out St. Ildefonso for veneration, the iconography is not so perplexing. The compartment that is most difficult to elucidate is the one in which the saint as a youth, in a composition like that of Christ among the Doctors, sits upon a throne and seems to be instructing a number of bishops j but, when we consider the great emphasis that in the accounts of him is laid upon the brilliancy which he displayed in his studies, we may surmise that it is rather he who is being taught and that it is only his sanctity which has bestowed upon him an inordinate prominence in the picture. Next ' « V I I , ' p . 560, and V I I I , p. 354.

LEON AND ZAMORA

523

follow his episcopal consecration and, as the most commonly represented event in his life, the investiture with the chasuble; but I take it that a compartment in which he appears to be walking in an ecclesiastical procession incorporates an episode that is also stressed in hagiological literature, his solemn march to the cathedral of Toledo in company with other clerics just prior to the Virgin's bestowal of the chasuble upon him. T h e last two panels exhibit to us the translation of his body to Zamora, effecting miraculous cures in its journey, and the resort of suppliants to his shrine, a second instance of this favorite Spanish kind of theme in the master's preserved works. T h e relics of one of his loveliest successes are preserved in the church of Campazas in the extreme south of the province directly in a line with the capital, Leon. T h e y consist of four panels of a retable of the Virgin, now cut to circular shape and used to decorate the pendentives of the sacristy ( F i g . 1 9 6 ) . T h e subjects are the Nativity of Our L a d y , her Presentation, the Annunciation, and Visitation. Separately from Gómez-Moreno,^" I came to the same conclusion as he, i.e., that they were executed by the author of the retable at Cabreros del R i o who, in my opinion, is Juan Rodriguez. T h e Virgin in the Visitation proves to be one of several figures in his output that suggest an acquaintance with the Flemish Master of the St. Lucy Legend, and the St. Zacharias in this compartment embodies a masculine profile that frequently crops forth in his productions, exemplified, for instance, by the first kneeling Magus in the Epiphany at Cabreros del Rio. Among the Virgin's followers in the Visitation may be discerned duplicates of the two women in the group of the Virgin's protégés in the Torre-Arias panel, and the St. Elizabeth recalls the matron with one of the naughty boys in the Purification at Fuentelapeña. T h e whole cycle in the pendentives illustrates how much of Gerard David's pleasant tenderness Juan Rodriguez managed to retain, especially the figure of the young M a r y kissing the priest's hand in the Presentation. S. Isidoro at Leon harbors a second work by our master, a separate little painting on parchment perhaps cut from a manuscript ( F i g . 1 9 7 ) symbolizing the Atonement somewhat in the iconographical fashion of the painting by Alonso de Sedano in the Brimo Collection at Paris."" Our L o r d , kneeling upon the column of H i s flagellation and surSee above, p. 5 1 4 . ^"Catálogo monumental, 508. I cannot, however, agree that the paintings at La Antigua are by the same hand. Vol. V I I I , p. 692.

FIG. 196. JUAN RODRÍGUEZ DE SOLÍ S. ANNUNCIATION AND VISITATION. PARISH CHURCH, CAMPAZAS (РЛо/о. Archivo

Regional,

Burgos)

FIG. 197. J U A N R O D R Í G U E Z D E SOLÍS. T H E A T O N E M E N T . S. ISIDORO, LEON {Photo.

Wmocio)

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rounded by many angels with other instruments of the Passion, displays His wounds before the Eternal Father, but, in distinction from the panel by Alonso de Sedano, to the intercession of the Son is joined that of H i s mother, who kneels behind H i m figuring her compassion by touching her breast.^^ Christ's head repeats a mannerism of Juan Rodriguez, the emergence of an ear between locks of straggling hair, as in the Virgin of the Visitation at Campazas, and the picture as a whole naturally incorporates an even nearer approximation than was usual with him to the practices of an illuminator. T w o of his productions have strayed into remote little corners of the world. One, a somewhat retouched Harrowing of H e l l in the Sadolin Collection at Dragoer, near Copenhagen's ( F i g . 1 9 8 ) , witnesses, like the Flight into E g y p t at Cabreros del R i o , to his occasional dependence upon Schongauer's prints. T h e general composition and especially the placing of Adam, E v e , St. John the Baptist, and the woman behind E v e seem to have had this source, and, though he assigns to his devils activities different from those of Schongauer's malign spirits, his conception of fiends, with the many sharp points of their wings, was probably also influenced by the German artist's engraving of the theme. Nevertheless, the striking similarity of the Adam to the figure of this patriarch in the Descent into H e l l in Fernando Gallego's retable at Trujillo, a panel which also probably owes something to Schongauer, suggests once more that Juan Rodriguez de Soil's was conversant with the works of his great forerunner in Castile. E v e n the type and red drapery of Christ in the Sadolin picture may be inspired by Fernando Gallego's precedents. T h e artist, however, is by no means bound by his sources and creates an original composition, fraught with much more of the demoniacal grotesquerie that Jerome Bosch was popularizing in Spain as well as in the L o w Countries. In addition to the bizarre form of Satan himself, whom Christ is expelling, a fantastically horrible devil is falling from the lintel of hell's portal, upon which is perched a hissing dragon; and one of the two imps behind Our L o r d flees while his companion looks spitefully in at the overthrow of Lucifer's kingdom and while a third sprite lurks in the background with his claw upon the infernal gate. T h e general style is quite enough to authenticate the painting, but ^^ Pérez Llamazares (Historia de la Real Colegiata de León, 407) describes the work as the "perpetual sacrifice of Jesus Christ in the heavens." Vol. VII, p. 741. ^^ Vol. IV, p. 30.

FIG. 198.

JUAN RODRÍGUEZ DE SOLÍS. HARROWING OF HELL. SADOLIN COLLECTION, DRAGOER, D E N M A R K

528

LEON AND

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there are also specific resemblances to the master's types, as faces of E v e and of the woman behind her or in the profile Baptist. L i k e the veil held by St. Veronica in the Torre-Arias the jewelled cross at the top of Christ's staff is rendered with delight and skill of the Flemings in such details.

in the of the panel, all the

His second work that is hidden away in a little visited collection is a Nativity in the Valentine Museum at Richmond, Virginia. I owe my acquaintance with the work to the perspicacity of D r . James B. F o r d of Princeton, who, despite the label that it bore, at once recognized it as Spanish, and I am likewise indebted to his kindness for the photograph that is herewith reproduced ( F i g . 199).^^ A small panel, like so many of the productions of Juan Rodriguez, measuring only about one and a half feet in height by a foot in width, it adapted itself to his affection for an illuminator's delicacy. T h e Virgin presents us with another example of the sort of countenance that he so often utilizes for his women and angels; the Child is very similar to the Infant in the Epiphany of the Leon triptych; and the composition recalls the renderings at Fuentelapeña and Benavente, even in the prominence of the ruined arch in the background. A supererogatory link with the signed panels is supplied by the resemblance of the St. Joseph to the man gazing upward in the lower right corner of the wing consigned to the Madonna of Mercy. T h e color of the Richmond Nativity illustrates the master's characteristically Spanish sobering of the Flemish tonalities. T h e panels set in a later structure over the high altar of the church at Genestacio (near L a Bañeza in the southern part of the province of Leon and close to the border of the province of Zamora) should rightly have found a place on the earlier pages of our discussion of Juan Rodriguez de Solís, since what scant photographic material I possess and my notes taken on the spot in 1929 indicate that we have to do with works that he himself painted; but we require the evidence of the productions that I have just assigned to him in order to establish the attribution. T w o of the panels are concerned with the town's patron, St. Marina, who often in Spain and particularly in the province of Leon is confused with St. Margaret.^® W e first see her conversing with her companions as she watches her nurse's sheep on the country-side ( F i g . 200) and then suffering martyrdom. A third panel A p a p e r attached to the back of the panel indicates that it w a s b o u g h t in G e r many. See a b o v e , p. 4 8 8 .

.JSP®«''

FIG. 199. J U A N R O D R Í G U E Z D E SOLÍ S. N A T I V I T Y . V A L E N T I N E MUSEUM, RICHMOND, VIRGINIA (^Courtesy of Dr. James B. Ford)

i F i e . 200. J U A N R O D R Í G U E Z D E SOLÍS. S T . M A R I N A W A T C H I N G T H E S H E E P A N D ST. S E B A S T I A N ' S O R D E A L OF T H E ARROWS, SECTIONS OF R E T A B L E . PARISH C H U R C H , G E N E S T A C I O {Photo. Archivo Regional,

Burgas)

LEON AND ZAMORA

531

shows St. Sebastian undergoing the ordeal of the arrows, but the accumulation of filth and dust that disfigures the whole series lies so heavy upon the other two compartments that my eyes could not distinguish their themes. T h e predella marshals a line of saints in half length.^'' T h e assemblage obviously shares the general traits of Juan Rodriguez's style, and his authorship seems to be clinched by the emergence of some of his favorite types. T h e maiden who kneels among St. Marina's companions possesses the very peculiar visage exemplified by the surpliced cleric at the right in the Benavente investiture of St. Ildefonso, and all the standing archers discharging their arrows at St. Sebastian reveal exactly the sharp profile of the Baptist in the Dragoer Harrowing of H e l l . Among the works that cannot unconditionally be ascribed to the master's own hand, the most important is the capacious retable that from the high altar of the parish church at Quintanilla del Olmo in the northeastern corner of the province of Zamora has been transferred to the north transept of the cathedral of Leon. T h e left section of the structure is occupied by nine scenes from the lives of St. Babylas (San Babilés in Spanish), the bishop of Antioch martyred at the end of the third century, and of the three boys, his disciples, who were put to death together with him.^^ A variety of subjects are gathered in the right section: three events from the life of St. Roch — his care of the plague-stricken, the dressing of the pestilential ulcer upon his leg by an angel, and his imprisonment at Montpellier; four episodes from the legend of the H o l y Cross; a Mass of St. G r e g o r y ; and the Pietà. T h e predella consists of eight half-lengths of Apostles still set against the traditional gold backgrounds, and into the retable there have been imported, from some other source than Quintanilla, statues of the Madonna and St. Catherine of Alexandria. T h e types, the settings of architecture of the Renaissance, the illuminator's delicacy, and the general technical methods fix the retable in the atelier of ^'Gómez-Moreno {Catàlogo monumental. Provincia de León, 493) speaks of two panels of the retable as hanging apart in the church, but they had disappeared from the edifice by the time of my visit. One of them represented St. Ursula, but the sacristan told me that the second, which Gómez-Moreno describes as the figure of another canonized woman, really depicted St. Michael. For the story of St. Babylas, who enjoyed a considerable cult in Spain, and his three young companions, see Alonso de Villegas Selvago, Flos Sanctorum, III, M a drid, 1675, pp. 5 0 - 5 3 . Since, so far as I can discover, nothing in the accounts of St. Babylas of Antioch justifies the emblem of a half-severed hand, I am still disposed to believe that he is not identical with the San Babilés represented in an Aragonese painting formerly in the Pani Collection in Mexico City: see vol. V I I I , p. 5 1 2 .

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Juan Rodríguez, and many passages imply his personal execution. It seems impossible that anyone else could have painted the three boys exhorted by St. Babylas at the moment of their decollation (Fig. 201 ), especially the uppermost lad who actually repeats the countenance of the Virgin of the Epiphany in the triptych in S. Isidoro. The protruding visage of the maiden just to the right of St. Ursula in this triptych finds a literal counterpart in the adolescent at the extreme left in the scene of the proving of the true Cross by the miracle of resurrection. The rectangular piers amidst which the Mass of St. Gregory is enacted are like those under which St. Joseph stands in the Epiphany. Other passages, however, do not appear quite worthy of the master, and it remains a moot point whether these are to be blamed upon the extensive restoration that the retable has suffered or upon the intrusion of an assistant. It is likewise difficult to determine whether we should assign to Juan Rodriguez or to a member of his school or entourage a series of panels built into the conglomerate retable over the high altar of the church at Acebedo, in the extreme northeastern corner of the province of Leon. Constituting the upper section of the structure, they comprise four scenes from the life of St. Nicholas, half-lengths of Apostles, and at the very summit two busts of Prophets. The narrative pieces depict the holy bishop's charity to the three indigent girls, his episcopal consecration, his resuscitation of the three boys from the tub (Fig. 202), and an episode, unintelligible to me, in which one man kneels before another while a form (St. Nicholas?) appears ш the air. It seems hard to deny the panels to Juan Rodriguez de Solís when we observe the practical identity of the kneeling cleric in the lower right corner of the scene of the consecration with the similarly placed, standing ecclesiastic in the like event from the life of St. Ildefonso at Benavente and with the kneeling maiden in the scene, at Genestacio, of St. Marina watching her sheep. There are, moreover, further correspondences to his types, such as the facial analogy of St. Nicholas in the miracle of resurrection to his angelic and feminine personages. I should not put it beyond the realm of credibility that in some instances, as here, he himself should have abided by the old tradition of gold backgrounds even in his narrative scenes, but the evidence remains inadequate for the predication of his own craft. With greater and yet not entire complacence we may claim for him a work that conforms more to his usual methods, particularly in a

FIG. 201. J U A N R O D R Í G U E Z D E S O L Í S ( r ) · ST. BABYLAS E X H O R T I N G T H R E E Y O U N G M A R T Y R S A N D T H E P R O V I N G O F T H E T R U E CROSS, S E C T I O N S O F RETABLE FROM QUINTANILLA DEL OLMO. CATHEDRAL, LEON {Photo. Archivo Regional,

Burgos')

FIG. 202. J U A N R O D R Í G U E Z D E SOLÍS OR A M E M B E R OF HIS C I R C L E . ST. NICHOLAS R E S U S C I T A T I N G T H R E E BOYS, SECTION OF R E T A B L E . PARISH CHURCH, A C E B E D O {Photo. Archivo Regional, Burgos)

LEON AND ZAMORA

535

background of landscape and in an absence of gold except in the haloes, a fragment of a predella, with half-lengths of Sts. John Evangelist and James M a j o r , in the Museo Arqueológico of San Marcos at Leon ( F i g . 2 0 3 ) . Both heads may be paralleled in his output, the St. John in particular by the St. Michael in the picture of the Zamora trascoro. T h e mannerism of the ear visible between loose tresses of hair also reappears in the case of the Evangelist, and the tendency to sjumatezza may be verified in the St. James. T h e Collection of the Hispanic Society at New Y o r k contains the extensive remains of a retable in which Juan Rodriguez de Solís certainly turned over a perhaps larger share of the execution to a member of his atelier than at Cabreros del Rio. Reported to come from the city of Zamora or its province,^^ it includes, according to the not infrequent custom of Spanish altarpieces, a diversity of iconographie material. If the preserved panels reflect the proportionate number of compartments allotted to the various sacred personages, the saint principally honored was John Evangelist, to whom are devoted five of the ten sections from the body of the retable. H e is first depicted as ineffectually boiled in oil at R o m e j then, writing the Apocalypse on Patmos, while he descries the vision of the "woman clothed with the sun and the moon under her f e e t " (holding the Child) j next, preaching (at Ephesus.?) then, receiving the homage of the converted philosopher Crato and his two young d i s c i p l e s a n d finally raising from the dead the husband who had succumbed after a marriage of only thirty days.3^ Of the other compartments in the main division of the retable, three reveal their subjects clearly, the Nativity of Christ, St. Martin receiving the miraculous sleeves from the angels at mass, and, somewhat less tall than the majority of the other panels, the paired, standing effigies of Sts. Catherine and Lucy. T w o further compartments, which are also smaller in size, d e f y my powers of interpretation. In one the head of a canonized deacon is being sawn asunHandbook of the Hispanic Society, New York, 1938, p. 10. I do not know whether the writer of this part of the Handbook means the city or the province. ^''Elizabeth du Gué Trapier, Catalogue of Paintings (14th and 1 ¡th Centuries) in tiie Collection of the Hisfanic Society of America, New York, 1936, p. 204, plate LXVII. Ibid., p. 200, plate L X V . ^^ Ibid., p. 198, plate L X I V . I do not believe that this is St. John's resurrection of Drusiana, represented, according- to an earlier, mediaeval custom, in the same compartment as first dead on her bier and then risen. The kneeling woman I take to be the deceased's mother or, because of her youth, perhaps rather his widow.

FIG. 203. J U A N RODRÍGUEZ D E S O L Í S ( ? ) . STS. JOHN E V A N G E L I S T AND J A M E S MAJOR. MUSEO ARQUEOLÓGICO DE SAN MARCOS, LEON

LEON

AND ZAMORA

537

der/3 and in the other a king or prince and seven companions suffer crucifixion.^'^

The

extant assemblage includes also a predella

of

twelve half-lengths of saints relieved against a g o l d background patterned with a diamond-shaped design, eleven Apostles, with Matthias taking the place of M a t t h e w and with John Baptist as the t w e l f t h figure instead of T h o m a s ( F i g . 204). T h e most compelling proof for connecting the retable with Juan R o d r i g u e z de Solís is perhaps the type used for St. L u c y and also for the effeminate representations of St. John, which, distinguished especially by a very high and broad forehead, is repeated in such other creations of his as the Virgin of the Campazas Visitation, the U r s u l a and her maidens in the triptych of S. Isidoro, L e o n , the E v e of the D r a g o e r H a r r o w i n g of H e l l , and the M a d o n n a of the Richmond Nativity. T h e St. Catherine has a slightly diverse sort of countenance that is also frequently seen in his production. In the Baptist and several of the Apostles in the predella piety assumes a d o l e f u l expression highly characteristic of the master and illustrated, for instance, by the saints at the right of the throne in the panel on the trascoro of the cathedral at Zamora and by the St. Bernard in the S. Isidoro triptych. A very exact analogy exists between the St. P a u l and the St. Joseph of the Richmond Nativity. T w o of the master's distinctive sorts of profiles are visible in the panels of the Hispanic Society. T h e concave kind exemplified by the St. Joseph of the Epiphany in S. Isidoro and by the Zacharias

in the Campazas Visitation appears in the execu-

tioner at the extreme right in the scene of St. John's boiling in oil, and the more protruding species of profile, as in the Baptist of the D r a g o e r panel, emerges in the man furthest at the right viewing the Evangelist's resurrection of the young husband. In the scene of the multiple crucifixion the adolescent martyr w h o faces us at the l e f t edge of the composition has one of the pretty and meticulously executed countenances in which Juan R o d r i g u e z constantly indulges for the repre-

^^ He cannot be the A p o s t l e St. Simon, as the Catalogue wears deacon's vestments.

( p . 1 9 7 ) suggests, f o r he

Since the principal personage is r o y a l , I seriously doubt whether the Catalogue ( p . 1 9 1 ) is r i g h t in r e c o g n i z i n g in them some of the ten thousand martyrs of M o u n t A r a r a t ( f o r w h o m see P. G u é r i n , Les petits Bollandistes, V , 2 0 9 ) . T h e subject of these martyrs, h o w e v e r , w a s definitely demanded as one of the themes in a retable at V i c h f o r w h i c h Juan Gaseó contracted in 1 5 2 6 : see J. G u d i o l ' s m o n o g r a p h on this painter, B a r c e l o n a , 1908, p. 38. O r is this figure, despite the fact that he is behind St. E l i z a b e t h , intended also to represent St. Joseph?

538

LEON

AND

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sentation of y o u t h f u l persons, as in the angel with the crown of thorns in t h e picture of the A t o n e m e n t belonging to S. Isidoro at L e o n .

The

whole retable indeed, in so far as it was executed by the master himself and in so far as it is not spoiled by extensive repaint, exhibits the deli-

FIG. 204. JUAN RODRÍGUEZ DE SOLÍS. STS. J A M E S MINOR AND PHILIP, SECTION OF RETABLE. HISPANIC SOCIETY, NEW YORK {Courtesy

of the Hispanic

Society)

cate attitude of the miniaturist with which he approaches even monumental undertakings. I t may be postulated that J u a n R o d r i g u e z reserved for his own brush: the twelve saints of the predella, perhaps because they were closest to the spectator's vision j probably t h e landscapes and, in the narrative compartments of St. J o h n ' s life, the figures of the E v a n g e l ist h i m s e l f 5 and possibly also the ( r e p a i n t e d ) Nativity and t h e effigies of Sts. Catherine and L u c y .

T h e rest, even t h e other participants in

LEON AND ZAMORA

539

St. John's story, he seems to have resigned wholly or almost wholly to his assistant, a very rustic performer who translates his teacher's style into an exaggerated attenuation of the forms and betrays an inability to articulate their postures and movements. We should probably not be justified in claiming any higher status than the hand of this assistant for pieces of a predella in the Torbado Collection at Leon representing, as half-lengths, in one fragment Sts. Barbara, Catherine, and Ursula (Fig. 205), in another piece, Sts. Apollonia, Lucy, and Margaret (or Marina), and in a third, only St. Agatha. T h e gold backgrounds are incised with a pattern corresponding in its geometric nature to that of the predella in the retable of the Hispanic Society but differing in detail, and the figuration of the haloes has counterparts in the altarpiece from Quintanilla del Olmo. Possibly from the same original retable as the virgin martyrs derive two busts of Sts. James Major and Bartholomew in the Torbado Collection in which the evidence is not sufficient for an attribution to the shop of Juan Rodriguez de Solís but for which, if such be their proper allocation, execution by the master instead of a pupil must be proposed. St. James is accompanied by a scroll with the verse of the Apostles' Creed that he ordinarily displays, "Qui conceptus est de Spiritu Sancto," but some restorer has partially botched the words in St. Bartholomew's banderole, "Credo in Spiritum Sanctum." The haloes of the two Apostles would imply provenience from the retable of the virgin martyrs, as would also the nimbus of the Virgin in a fragment of a Nativity in the same Collection, which includes also St. Joseph and three singing angels. The atelier of Juan Rodriguez was certainly the source of this fragment, but it is difficult to decide whether he or a follower was its creator. Built into a more modern altarpiece at the right of the nave in the ermita of S. Pedro de Alcántara at Villaturiel, close to the city of Leon, there is a panel of the Flight into Egypt in which the delicate craft of Juan Rodriguez seems clearly to emerge, especially in the types of the Virgin and of the angels bending the palm trees to supply the holy family with their fruits (Fig. 206). In the Epiphany of the Leon triptych the Child has a physique very like that of the Infant held by the Madonna in the Flight j but the restricted evidence incorporated in a single painting of this kind, despite the compositional analogy to the version at Cabreros del Rio, does not justify dogmatism in the matter of attribution. Inasmuch as the parish church is dedicated to

Fie. 205. SCHOOL OF J U A N R O D R I G U E Z D E SOLÍS. STS. B A R B A R A , C A T H E R I N E , A N D URSULA, S E C T I O N OF P R E D E L L A . T O R B A D O C O L L E C T I O N , LEON {Photo.

Moreno)

FIG. 206. J U A N R O D R Í G U E Z D E S O L Í S ( ? ) . F L I G H T I N T O E G Y P T . E R M I T A OF S. PEDRO D E A L C Á N T A R A , V I L L A T U R I E L {Photo. Winocio)

542

LEON AND ZAMORA

Our Lady, it is possible that the panel, which enshrines an event commonly represented in cycles from her life, was imported into the ermita from an otherwise lost retable in the more important edifice. We have already definitely ascribed to Juan Rodriguez de Solís several versions of the Nativity, and with only slightly less confidence we may place another example under his name, an ampler rendering in the Lázaro Collection at Madrid ^^ (Fig. 207). The correspondence in types, though very close, is perhaps not exact enough to substantiate by itself the attribution, but a number of other considerations raise a strong presumption in favor of the hypothesis. W e may note the same almost exquisite conception and execution of the various actors; the multiplication of details of genre that was inspired by Flemish precedent and is very tangible in the version at Richmond reappears throughout the Lázaro panel, permitting the introduction even of a deer and a peacock; the pair of shepherds leaning over a wall in the distance are the same two rustics who gaze through the openings of the ruin in the background of the Richmond picture; and the Virgin is distinguished by the diaphanous sort of halo that the master often utilizes. His rather extensive bequest to us should almost certainly be augmented also by two small panels which in 1935 I found still to be in the Eugen Jacobi Collection at Frankfurt am М а ш , representmg as standing figures Sts. Francis and Anthony of Padua (Fig. 208). In addition to the characteristic technical nicety, the St. Francis repeats not only the type of the St. Ursula in the triptych in S. Isidoro, Leon, but also the turn of her head and her curious expression of religiosity. St. Anthony looks very much like the prominent maiden in the front at the right who is one of St. Ursula's companions, and St. Francis's hands are raised exactly with the gesture of St. Joseph in the Epiphany of the triptych. The dead tree to the left of St. Anthony is conspicuous in several of the landscapes in the retable of the Hispanic Society. Another small panel, in the Harding Collection at Chicago (Fig. 209 ), may represent the same enigmatical event of plural martyrdom as one of the sections of the retable belonging to the Hispanic Society, but the victims in the Harding picture are conceived as spiked on the sharpened branches of dead trees rather than crucified.^^ In any case, No. 2 1 5 on p. 2 1 4 of vol. I of the Catalogue. In this instance, since none of them is royal, they may indeed be the martyrs of Mount A r a r a t : see above, p. 5 3 7 , n. 34.

FIG. 207. J U A N R O D R Í G U E Z D E SOLÍS(R). N A T I V I T Y . L Á Z A R O COLLECTION, M A D R I D {from the Catalogue of the Collection)

FIG. 208. J U A N R O D R Í G U E Z D E S O L Í S ( ? ) · STS. F R A N C I S A N D A N T H O N Y OF P A D U A . J A C O B I C O L L E C T I O N , F R A N K F U R T A M M A I N {From the fuhlication of the Frankfurt Exposition of /926)

Fie. 209. J U A N R O D R Í G U E Z D E S O L Í S ( ? ) . M A R T Y R D O M S . H A R D I N G C O L L E C T I O N , CHICAGO (^Photo. Kaufmann and Fabry Co.)

54б

LEON AND

ZAMORA

there is much likelihood that the master himself executed it. T h e draughtsmanship and brushwork display his peculiar daintiness, and the types are closely approximated in many of his creations. In particular the martyr at the left should be compared with the crucified youth whom we have used as proof for attribution in the corresponding scene in the retable of the Hispanic Society and with the St. Sebastian at Genestacio. T h e panel has probably been cut at the top, since in the upper right corner we descry merely the nude legs of other Christians waiting to be transfixed. There can scarcely be much doubt that we should add to the unexpectedly large number of works by Juan Rodriguez de Solís that have found their way out of Spain a small but whole retable in the Collection of Nicolas Koenisberg at Buenos Aires (Fig. 210). T h e theme of the principal compartment is the enthroned Madonna, over whom a pair of angels draw aside the curtains of a canopy and beside whom there kneels St. Lucy presenting to the H o l y Child a plate containing her emblems of the eyes. T w o further virgin martyrs grace the lower lateral panels, seated in landscapes, Catherine at the left and Eulalia at the right, and the subjects of the corresponding upper sections are St. Macarius, with his attribute of the chained demon,^® and the stigmatization of St. Francis. T h e Crucifixion, as customarily, occupies the central pinnacle, and the Christ of the Mass of St. Gregory in the middle of the predella is set between halflengths of the sorrowing Mother, St. John Evangelist, St. Peter, and St. Paul. In the midst of the very obvious conformity with Juan Rodriguez's Flemish perspicuousness of technique and Flemish treatment of the draperies, the most effective argument for the ascription is afforded by the analogy of the Madonna's narrow countenance and high forehead to a facial type very much favored by him, as in the two most prominent of St. Ursula's companions in the triptych in S. Isidoro at Leon. Since, however, Sts. Eulalia and Macarius are of more frequent occurrence in the art of the eastern Spanish littoral and the composition of the angels with the curtain is similar to the one used by Rodrigo de Osona the elder in his panel of St. Peter,з® I am loath to make the attribution to Juan Rodriguez de Solís categorical, although there seems to be no painter of Valencia or Catalonia who could be brought forward to father the retable. I have long hesitated whether to record in this section of the present Vols. V I , p. 306, n. I, and V I I , p. 33.

з« Vol. V I , pp. 1 9 0 - 1 9 2 .

Fie. 2 10. JUAN RODRÍGUEZ D E S O L Í S ( í ) · R E T A B L E . KOENISBERG COLLECTION, BUENOS AIRES

548

LEON AND

ZAMORA

volume three small panels of a retable which from the town of Corbillos have found a home in the cathedral of Leon or whether to classify them, like the panels from Sta. M a r í a del M e r c a d o / ' as of indeterminate attribution j but I have finally decided that they display enough affiliations with the style of Juan Rodriguez de Solís to justify us in entertaining, however provisionally, at least the possibility of his authorship. Hanging at my last visit to Leon in the little Diocesan Museum that had been made in a room off the cloister, they depict the heterogeneous themes of the Annunciation, St. Ildefonso's reception of the chasuble, and a rarely represented event in the life of St. Roch ( F i g . 2 1 1 ) . T h e nobleman, Gothard, puzzled by the fact that his favorite hunting dog has carried away bread each day from the table, is shown, with two retainers, as having followed the hound and discovered that the recipient of the animal's charity is the plague-stricken St. Roch in his sylvan retreat. T h e tender affection of the dog and of another member of the pack, as they lick the saint's sore legs, is rendered with an impressive veracity amazing for the period, but I cannot interpret the object that Roch holds in his left hand, unless it be meant as a piece of the loaf from Gothard's board. One thing is certain: the panels are of such sound quality that they were executed by no inferior assistant such as debased the level of the retable in the Hispanic Society at New Y o r k . Either they are the work of Juan Rodriguez de Solís himself, or they did not emanate from his shop at all. It is the painting in the cathedral of Zamora that provides the most telling analogies. T h e feminine saint at the extreme left of the Pantocrator's throne is very similar to the Gabriel of the Annunciation from Corbillos, who has also the same sort of straggling lock of hair, a detail repeated in many other productions of the artist. T h e pertness of Gabriel's profile and eyes reappears exactly in the foremost worshipper at the right in the Mass of St. Martin in the retable of the Hispanic Society, a compartment which, though not by the master himself, intimately reflects his style. T h e type of the feminine saint at Zamora emerges also in the man at the extreme left in the scene from St. Roch's life, a figure probably meant as the noble Gothard, although his companion with the halberd is more magnifiGómez-Moreno {Catálogo monumental, Provincia de León, 2 7 9 ) does not specify whether Corbillos de los Oteros, south of Leon, or Corbillos de la Sobarriba, north of the city, but I suspect that, as a more important community, the former is the correct alternative. 'I' See below, p. 5 8 1 .

FIG. 211. J U A N R O D R Í G U E Z D E SOLÍS(г г ) · G O T H A R D F I N D I N G ST. ROCH. C A T H E D R A L , LEON (From Góìnez-Moreno's "Catàlogo monumental^ Provincia de León")

550

LEON AND ZAMORA

cently accoutred; and such profiles are commonplaces in the output of Juan Rodriguez, as in several examples in the Mass of St. Gregory in the retable from Quintanilla del Olmo. The St. Roch possesses precisely the benign countenance of the Zamora Pantocrator himself, and for the Virgin and angel at the left in St. Ildefonso's reception of the chasuble a persuasive counterpart is forthcoming in Our Lady in the Assumption of the retable at Cabreros del Rio. The house of Mary in the Annunciation is built of just the sort of architecture of the Renaissance, especially in the nature of the piers, that distinguishes the edifice under which St. Joseph stands in the Epiphany in S. Isidoro, and, as again in the Epiphany, the painter treats us behind St. Roch to a pretty piece of landscape which, like so much else in the production of Juan Rodriguez, suggests Flemish tutelage. Plaques of gold constitute the haloes in all three panels, but otherwise the use of the precious material persists only in the orphreys of St. Ildefonso's chasuble and in the brocaded gown of the Virgin who bestows the vestment upon him. 2. T H E

ASTORGA

MASTER

A second important painter in the artistic milieu of the province of Leon at the beginning of the Renaissance not only possessed a style so similar to the manner of Juan de Borgoña that it is hard to escape the conclusion that he had come into contact with his great contemporary, but he was almost, if not quite, his equal in talent. H e takes the pseudonym that I have coined for him from his activity at Astorga, demonstrated by a retable that remains in situ in the cathedral of this city and by other works once at Astorga which must be ascribed to him. Subsequently to my writing of the greater part of my discussion of this artist and quite independently of me, Don Diego Angulo ' also isolated his personality and almost inevitably baptized him with the same name. The retable in the cathedral is found in the second chapel from the west end on the right aisle, and the inscription on the retable's base states, "This chapel was endowed by the Señor Duarte ( = Edward) Pérez, protonotary and canon of this church, for the service of God, St. Mary, and St. Michael Archangel, and it was finished in the year 1530." ^ The body of the structure is occupied by painted scenes from ' Archivo español de arte, X V I ( 1 9 4 3 ) , 4.04-4.09. ^ For the inscription, see Gómez-Moreno, Catálogo monumental.

Provincia

de León,

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551

the Passion, but in the middle of the upper tier there was originally in all probability a sculptured but lost image of the chapel's special patron, St. Michael. At this spot another statue (of Santiago?) has now been substituted, flanked by the Astorga Master's representations of the Betrayal and of Christ before Pilate. T h e paintings in the second row depict the Via Dolorosa, Crucifixion, and Entombment, and in the predella the Pietà at the centre ( F i g . 2 1 2 ) ^ is set between the paired half-lengths of Sts. Lawrence and James M a j o r on the left and Andrew and Martin (with his attribute of the beggar) on the right. T h e panels are ensconced in fine Plateresque frames of the early Renaissance and preserved to us in fair condition except for the Via Dolorosa and effigy of St. Martin. T h e Astorga Master's types, landscapes, and color resemble those of Juan de Borgoña so closely that a lengthy analysis of his style would only constitute a repetition of the many pages that we have devoted to the latter artist's attainments. T h e principal difference is that the Astorga Master exhibits more affinities to the Flemish school, as, for instance, in the types of the Virgin and of some of the holy women who accompany her in the Passion. H e also is prone to retain the crumpled and sharp-edged draperies affected by the artists of the L o w Countries. T h e explanation may be that, a native Spaniard, he acquired his Italianism from Juan de Borgoña without himself studying in the sister peninsula and that he therefore adhered more to the established Spanish tradition of fondness for Flemish models, embracing within his admiration those of the past as well as of his own day J but his unusually captivating landscapes, with their clarity and depth and with their delicate trees, suggest that he may have known Perugino and the Umbrian school at first hand, and we shall subsequently adduce further evidence that looks in this direction. There are indications that his Hispano-Flemish predecessor in the province of L e o n , the Palanquinos Master, influenced him and may even have been his first teacher. F o r instance, the faces and costumes of the holy women in the Astorga Master's representations of the Passion seem to be derived from his forerunner's versions of the subjects at Mayorga, and the bearded profiles that he likes to set at the edges of his

3 3 1 . I decipher the date as 1 5 3 0 , although the D , the Roman numeral f o r 500, is made differently from the other D's in the inscription. 3 I apologize f o r the inadequacy of the photograph, but even a shadow of a part of this pivotal work of the Astorga Master is of some value.

FIG. 2 12. THE ASTORGA MASTER. SECTION OF RETABLE. CATHEDRAL, ASTORGA

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553

pictures have prototypes in the Palanquinos Master's achievements, as in the two scenes from the legend of St. Michael in the Johnson Collection at Philadelphia/ The very dog in the one of this pair that depicts the Monte Gargano episode is virtually copied by the Astorga Master in his panel of the Baptist in prison.^ With a manifest sensitiveness to the charm of young women, he often makes a point of them in his paintings, imbuing them, as, for example, the Magdalene of the Pietà, with a fresh and ideal comeliness that vies with the most captivating achievements of his Italian contemporaries in the rendering of feminine beauty. H e also likes to place upon these girls the various, elaborate headdresses that were then the fashion, lavishing his skill upon the execution of the fabrics and jewels wound about and over their tresses. On the other hand, he includes within his scope a rather pronounced realism, as in the Christ of the Via Dolorosa or in St. Martin's beggar. With great originality the motif of the Deposition is superimposed upon the Crucifixion, for, although Our Lord's body still hangs upon the cross and the sorrowing Magdalene and the group about the swooning Virgin are represented beneath according to the customary iconography, the artist has chosen the unusual moment when Nicodemus(?), having already climbed a ladder, hands to Joseph of Arimathaea the first nail that he has extracted. Our Master did another retable at Astorga which must have been almost identical in subjects, arrangement, and carved frames with the altarpiece for Duarte Pérez and which is partially preserved to us in sections now at Barcelona. From the Par Collection in this city the predella has entered the Museum (Fig. 2 1 3 ) , and the provenience from Astorga is certified by an mscription on its lower ledge, declaring that the retable was ordered by a canon of the cathedral of Astorga named Meneses who was also inquisitor of the "kingdom of Galicia." The Pietà in the centre of the predella so nearly repeats the version in the altarpiece of Duarte Pérez as in itself to establish the attribution to the Astorga Master, but supererogatory proof is provided by the thematic correspondence of paired half-lengths of saints in the two lateral compartments and by the analogous representation of St. Peter in both instances. The pendant of St. Peter is his brother St. Andrew, " V o l . V I I , fig. 3 3 9 . 5 See below, p. 5 6 3 . ® F o r the deciphering of the inscription, see A n g u l o , o f . cit., 408.

FIG. 213. THE ASTORGA MASTER. PREDELLA. BARCELONA (Photo.

Archivo

de Arqueología

MUSEUM OF C A T A L A N A R T , Catalana)

LEON AND ZAMORA

555

and the Apostles in the balancing compartment at the left are the frequently united Sts. Simon and Jude. T h e similarity in the architectural motifs of the frames existing between the predella and two sections from the body of a retable in the Muntadas Collection at Barcelona justifies Angulo's supposition that they all derive from a single original monument, and the presence of all these parts in collections at Barcelona argues for the same conclusion, since it may be guessed that they were sold by a single dealer who had brought them to the city. Moreover, at my first visit to the Muntadas house in 1926 I was told that the source of the two fragments in the Collection was Astorga. T h e subjects of the four scenes comprised in the fragments are the Agony in the Garden, Betrayal, Flagellation, and Resurrection. T h e enviable breadth of Angulo's knowledge of European art has discerned that the compositions of the Betrayal and Resurrection depend very closely upon the engravings of the themes in Diirer's Copper-plate Passion dated 1508 and 1 5 1 2 respectively, thus furnishing us with a date after which the Meneses retable must have been executed. T h e treatment of the Flagellation, liice many other Spanish instances of the early Renaissance, resembles to a certain degree the version by Pedro Berruguete in the altarpiece of the cathedral at Avila. Analogous themes are comprised in a set of five injured panels in the Prado at Madrid that Angulo ^ with entire justice again perceives to derive from one of the Astorga Master's retables. T h e Agony in the Garden, Betrayal, Crucifixion ( F i g . 2 1 4 ) , Resurrection,® and stigmatization of St. Francis constitute the themes, but the church that the retable originally graced is unknown. W e require no further evidence than that afforded by the Crucifixion to fix the author. Christ upon the cross is a literal replica of H i s figure in the version of the subject in the altarpiece of Duarte P é r e z ; the Magdalene wipes her eyes with the same gesture in both examples; the sorrowing Virgin is scarcely varied in the compartments of the Pietà in either of the altarpieces that we have hitherto studied; and the haloes conform to the Astorga Master's favorite type, with golden open-work. Additional proof could be adduced, were it necessary. T h e Saviour of the Agony in the Garden, for instance, possesses a kind of masculine countenance ^ Of. cit., 409. ® I can detect no p a r t i c u l a r reason f o r A n g u l o ' s opinion that the Resurrection m a y be due to a c o l l a b o r a t o r .

FIG. 214. T H E ASTORGA MASTER. CRUCIFIXION, SECTION OF RETABLE. PRADO, MADRID {Courtesy

of the

Museum)

LEON AND ZAMORA

557

often encountered in the Master's output, as in the St. J u d e in the Meneses predella, and His locks of hair straggle down upon H i s shoulders in a mode that the artist prefers in representations of Our L o r d . N o more than details of the composition of the Agony in the Garden, Betrayal, and Resurrection are changed in the series in the Muntadas Collection. W e shall find still further elements in the Prado panels reiterated in some of the Astorga Master's other productions. W e need entertain no reservations in ascribing to him two panels in the L á z a r o Collection ^ at Madrid, belonging to a series of compartments which were imported from some undiscovered source to form a retable for the chapel of the cemetery at Astorga but which otherwise have now strayed from human ken. T h e subjects depicted in the two compartments of the Lázaro Collection have to do with the arrival of Santiago's body in Galicia — the scenes of the stone miraculously forming a sepulchre about it and of the bulls hauling it into Queen Lupa's palace. One cannot deny some analogies to the style of Rodriguez de Soil's, as especially in the representations of young men, but the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of an attribution to the Astorga Master. Queen L u p a , who peers through a large window in the background of architecture of the Renaissance at her extraordinary guests, and her two handmaidens may be perceived, despite their reduced scale, to conform to his entrancing type for young women j the highest attendant upon St. James's body illustrates a curious upward tilt of the head which, as in the Joseph of Arimathaea in the Crucifixion of the cathedral, is very characteristic of the Master, particularly in its somewhat incorrect foreshortening 5 the lovely landscapes recall those of the retable of Duarte P é r e z ; and there are further links with works that we shall subsequently assign to him with entire surety. One of these works consists in the extensive remains of another retable which I first saw at a dealer's in Berlin but which afterward, I am told, found their way to Paris or London. T h e y comprise three narrative scenes, the Nativity, Circumcision ( F i g . 2 1 5 ) , and Epiphany, and two sections of a predella with paired half-lengths of saints, as in the altarpieces of Duarte P é r e z and Meneses, Benedict and Peter in one panel and Catherine and Lucy in the other ( F i g . 2 1 6 ) . T h e ' Nos. 548 and 549 on pp. 86 and 87 in vol. II of the Catalogue. " ' G ó m e z - M o r e n o , o f . cit., pp. 3 3 9 - 3 4 0 .

FIG. 2 15- T H E ASTORGA M A S T E R . CIRCUMCISION. FORMERLY BELONGING TO A DEALER A T BERLIN

FIG. 2 I 6. THE ASTORGA MASTER. STS. CATHERINE AND LUCY. FORMERLY BELONGING TO A DEALER A T BERLIN

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LEON AND ZAMORA

elements of the Astorga Master's style enumerated in the former paragraphs are so obvious as to dispense me from pointing them out." His infatuation with feminine pulchritude has caused him to multiply the youthful attendants upon the Virgin in the Circumcision, but the most delightful of all his embodiments of this ideal is the St. Lucy of the predella. In the Nativity both the kneeling and the negroid Magi afford instances of his peculiarly upturned heads, the former practically repeating the Joseph of Arimathaea in the Crucifixion of the cathedral at Astorga. The boy behind the priest and the maiden at the extreme right in the Circumcision reproduce exactly the pert profile of the holy woman at the left in the Prado Crucifixion. The painter's proclivity for introducing realistic touches amidst his Italianate idealism finds expression in the original detail of the man holding the infant Christ's head as H e undergoes the ordeal of the Hebrew rite. This man and the younger shepherd in the Nativity are Ghirlandaiesque types, probably reaching the Astorga Master via Juan de Borgoña. The ordinance of the saints in the predella, seated in pairs upon parapets in front of windows divided by a column into two openings, reproduces the arrangement in the lateral sections of the Meneses predella, and it is through a like window that Queen Lupa observes the bulls and their burden in the panel of the Lázaro Collection. The Astorga Master's authorship of the pictures formerly at Berlin carries with it a work that belongs to exactly the same phase of his production, another painting in the Lázaro Collection at Madrid (a fragment of a retable? ), displaying in the upper register a capacious version of the Nativity and in two lower compartments the standing effigies of Sts. Dominic and Lawrence (Fig. 2 1 7 ) . The Virgin (even in costume) and the Child are repeated from the Berlin Nativity with scarcely any variations. The St. Joseph has become a younger man, Ghirlandaiesque in type, but he betrays the Master's identical struggle with the foreshortening of countenances seen in three-fourths view. There is even no alteration in the delineation and postures of the ox and the ass. The pillars and capitals of the architectural setting are closely analogous in both renderings 5 the ruined arch in the back' ' T h e panels are assigned, nevertheless, to the Valencian school by M a y e r in the Boletín de la Sociedad Es fattola de Excursiones, X L I V ( 1 9 3 6 ) , 1 1 6 - 1 1 7 . " N o . 1 0 2 3 on p. 499 in vol. I I of the Catalogue. I find it hard to believe that Señor L á z a r o was rightly told by the dealer who sold him the picture that it came from the region of the province of G u a d a l a j a r a called L a A l c a r r i a , f o r it was not the custom of artists at the period to wander so f a r from the focuses of their activities.

FIG. 217.

T H E A S T O R G A M A S T E R . N A T I V I T Y A N D STS. DOMINIC A N D LAWRENCE. LÁZARO COLLECTION, MADRID {From the Catalogue of tiie Collection)

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grounds of the Berlin Nativity and Epiphany is once more forced into service in the Lázaro picture j and the Sts. Dominic and Lawrence are relieved against broad openings and landscapes like those of the Berlin and Barcelona predellas, except that behind them the old Hispano-Flemish, brocaded fabrics conceal the spot where in the other instances a mottled column is placed. The Astorga Master's alert and original intellect, however, has taken the architectural members in the Nativity and distributed them piquantly so as to add interest to the composition. Whereas in the Berlin version they merely frame the action in a single space, two pillars in the Lázaro panel are set directly in front of the figures (actually hiding a part of St. Joseph's form), so that we seem to be looking at the scene through the beginning of a loggia 5 and the ruined arch is separated from the loggia, thus creating a middle ground and increasing, as in Perugino and Raphael, the effect of depth. Angulo points out the striking similarity in the disposition of the principal actors to Perugino's oft repeated composition for the theme, and, since it is very unlikely that any of the Umbrian's productions had at this time reached Spain, the probability of an Italian experience on the part of the Astorga Master is correspondingly increased. We have already found his keenness of mind enlivening his works also with bits of realism, and the Lázaro panel contains perhaps the most refreshing example of this phase of the Master's achievement, the episodical genre, between the pillars in the right background, of one of the shepherds of the sacred story dancing to the music of his comrades while his discarded cloak and hat lie further forward upon the pavement. The difficult posture of the animated dance quite astounds us by the convincing skill with which it is executed, and the pronounced popular note thus imported into religious art is aptly compared by Angulo to the hilarious merrymaking of the shepherds in the second of the two dramatic pieces (called Eclogues) on the Nativity by the Astorga Master's contemporary in letters, Juan del Encina. The outlook upon the artist's personality provided by this series of monuments compels us to transfer to the category of his certain works the altarpiece which was formerly in the Lafora Collection at Madrid but, as subsequently a part of the Blumenthal Collection, has now Teatro comfleto drid, 1893, p. 25.

de Juan del Encina,

Edición de la Academia Española, Ma-

LEON AND ZAMORA

563

passed into the Metropolitan Museum at New York. In volume IV we have provisionally but in so far wrongly claimed the altarpiece for the presumptive Antonio Contreras, the author of the retable of Sts. Mark and Catherine at Sigüenza. The Pietà almost reproduces the version in the altarpiece ordered by Duarte Pérez, especially in the figure of the Magdalene ; the rendering of the theme in the Meneses predella also belongs to this iconographie and stylistic group j and the Sts. Peter and John Baptist betray the curious, mincing attitudes of the Sts. Dominic and Lawrence who accompany the Nativity of the Lázaro Collection. The intimate relation of the panel of Sts. Paul and Andrew in the Bilbao Museum to the St. Andrew of the Blumenthal retable probably means that it also should be credited to the Astorga Master's account, but there is not enough further evidence for the definitive attribution. From a retable of St. John Baptist two compartments are known to me in which we can entertain no doubts as to his authorship. His custom of repeating his figures enables us to inscribe his name under one of these, a panel in the Art Institute at Chicago depicting Salome presenting to her mother the Baptist's head (Fig. 2 1 8 ) , for the man half seen in profile at the extreme left is the same person at a somewhat younger age as the similarly placed greybeard in the Circumcision formerly in Berlin. Both Salome and the serving woman above Herodias are absolute facial replicas of the Magdalene in the Prado Crucifixion. The headdresses of the women reveal that further proof is not lacking, and the Astorga Master's sprightly invention is exemplified by setting the scene in the privacy of Herodias's bedroom into which the executioner with his sword has grimly followed Salome. As so frequently in this Spanish period transitional between the Middle Ages and full Renaissance, passages of gold brocade, for instance in Salome's apparel, witness to the lingering ideals of the HispanoFlemish style. I have not yet been able to discover the collection that harbors the other compartment of the retable, which depicts the Baptist's disciples visiting him in prison (Fig. 2 1 9 ) . The Astorga Master practically signs the panel by giving us now a replica of the executioner in the youthful disciple at the left, and the group includes even a proP. 4 6 2 : cf. also vol. V I I I , p. 4.02, n. 2. " Vol. I V , pp. 4 6 2 - 4 6 3 .

FIG. 2I8. T H E ASTORGA MASTER. PRESENTATION OF ST. JOHN BAPTIST'S HEAD. A R T I N S T I T U T E , CHICAGO {Courtesy

of the Art

Institute)

FIG. 219. T H E ASTORGA M A S T E R . ST. JOHN B A P T I S T VISITED IN PRISON

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LEON AND ZAMORA

file of one of his characteristically featured and garbed young women, like the Magdalene of the Pietà in the altarpieces of Duarte Pérez and of the Blumenthal Collection. Still another work by the Astorga Master has found its way to this country, a compartment from a predella representing the seated St.

FIG. 220. T H E A S T O R G A M A S T E R . S T . P E T E R . G A L L E R Y OF T H E F I N E A R T S S O C I E T Y , SAN DIEGO, C A L I F O R N I A {Courtesy

of the

Gallery)

Peter in half length and belonging to the Gallery of the Fine Arts Society at San Diego, California (Fig. 220). The Apostle's actual countenance cannot perhaps be precisely duplicated in any of the paintings that we have assigned to the Master, but the picture is nevertheless a composite of analogies to various details in his production the sum total of which definitely substantiates the attribution.'® The head Since I once thought the panel might be a work of Pedro Berruguete, it is so registered in the Catalogue of the Official Art Exhibition of the California Pacific International Exposition of 1 9 3 5 in the Palace of Fine Arts, San Diego, p. 29, no. 5 7 5 ; but it must be through a misunderstanding of a statement of mine that the panel is

LEON AND ZAMORA

567

is posed at exactly the angle and with exactly the upward glance that distinguish the highest of the three followers of Santiago's cart in the scenes from St. James's life in the Lázaro Collection and the negroid Magus in the Epiphany once at Berlin. Although the type is different from that of the St. Peter in the Berlin series, his seated posture is much the same, and, as in this series, he is ensconced in the midst of the Master's favorite colonnettes of mottled marble. These colonnettes, however, appear both in front and behind him in the more complicated mode of the Nativity in the Lázaro Collection, and their capitals, not only in figuration but even in the chiaroscuro, practically reproduce the examples that the Nativity displays on its pillars. In the bit of landscape visible through the aperture may be descried a rock with a projecting and almost leafless tree like the corresponding elements in the right background of the Berlin Circumcision. The Lázaro Collection at Madrid proves to be indeed rich in examples of the Astorga Master if we may add two others to those that we have already aligned. One of the twain is a predella showing in the central panel the Pietà and in the other three compartments St. Francis, with a youngish gentleman as donor, Santiago, and St. Veronica, with a lady who was probably the gentleman's wife ''' (Fig. 2 2 1 ) . It is thus necessary to assume that a saint who balanced Santiago has been lost. Although the half-lengths of the sacred personages are not placed, according to the Master's custom for predellas, in fine architectural settings but are relieved against the old backgrounds of brilliant brocade, the nature of the figures themselves would seem to make an attribution to any other artist impossible. Most conclusive is the St. Veronica who reproduces the Astorga Master's distinctive, serenely beautiful type and even headdress for maidens, as especially in the St. Lucy in the Berlin sections of a retable. The other figures fit almost as easily into the niches of his style, the Santiago, for instance, recalling the man with uplifted hand in the panel of the scene in Queen Lupa's palace which we have already studied in the Lázaro Collection. The second picture in the Collection that we cannot with entire satisfaction assign to the Astorga Master depicts an enthroned, young there declared to have been a part of his retable at Santa M a r i a del Campo in the province of Burgos (cf. above, p. l o i ) . ''' Nos. 546 and 547 on pp. 84 and 85 of vol. I I of the Catalogue. No. 762 on p. 264 of the second volume of the Catalogue.

FIG. ZZI.

T H E ASTORGA MASTER(R)·

SECTIONS OF A

LÁZARO COLLECTION, {From

the Catalogue

of the

MADRID Collection)

PREDELLA.

LEON AND ZAMORA

569

canonized layman who holds the emblem of a knife and may have been intended as St. Pontius (Fig. 222). The facial type is very similar in the donor of the predella that has just occupied our atten-

FIG. 222. T H E A S T O R G A M A S T E R ( ? ) . E N T H R O N E D S A I N T . LÁZARO C O L L E C T I O N , M A D R I D {From the Catalogue of the Collection)

tion, and, since the appurtenances of the picture are rather peculiar to the Astorga Master, we may tentatively propose him as the author. Particularly significant, among these appurtenances, are the use of two windows at the sides of the architectural background, as in the Circumcision of the Berlin series, and the addiction to verv slender trees ' ' V o l . VIII, p. 416.

570

LEON AND

ZAMORA

in the landscape breaking into foliage only at the tops. W e may introduce into the argument also the emergence of exactly the same weak and carelessly drawn hands that detract from many of the Master's creations. 3.

THE

POZUELO

MASTER

W e ought perhaps to have postponed to a subsequent volume the artist whom I thus baptize and who really adopted the fundamentals of the high Roman Renaissance j but, since he maintained a certain primitive rigidity, he may be considered at the present point for the sake of keeping together the pictorial production of Leon and Zamora in the first part of the sixteenth century. His name is coined from the town that originally housed his principal, extant achievement, a vast retable once in the parish church of Pozuelo de la Orden in the province of Valladolid (west of Medina de Rioseco) but in the diocese of Leon. In 1918 it was appropriately acquired to decorate the east end of the apse of S. Isidoro at Leon, to the canons of which the control over Pozuelo used to belong. T h e very much restored, central, vertical section of the retable is occupied by a sculptured group of the Virgin and angels and by a carved background that has been adapted to a setting for the tabernacle in which the Blessed Sacrament is perpetually exposed in S. Isidoro. Of the four surrounding tiers of six paintings each, the uppermost continues to celebrate the Virgin's honor in the scenes of the Meeting at the Golden Gate, her Nativity, her Marriage, the Annunciation, Purification,' and Assumption. T h e episodes in the next row of compartments, which is devoted to the Passion of Our Lord, are the Agony in the Garden, the Betrayal, the trial before Pilate, the Flagellation, the Ecce H o m o , and the Via Dolorosa. T h e third tier from the top incorporates the miraculous activity in India of the Apostle, St. Thomas, the patron of the church at Pozuelo.^ T h e subject of the first compartment at the left is ambiguous, but the themes of the other five are not difficult to recognize. In the second compartment St. Thomas embarks for India, and in the third, having stopped at a city on his journey, he is seen at the nuptial banquet of the daugh' J. P é r e z L l a m a z a r e s (Iconografia de la Real Colegiata de San Isidoro de León, L e o n , 1 9 2 3 , p. 2 4 0 ) mistakes this scene, w h i c h has been w r o n g l y set in the third place in the series, f o r the Presentation of the V i r g i n in the T e m p l e . ^ J u a n O r t e g a R u b i o , Los fueblos de la frovincia de Valladolid, Valladolid, 1895, Π, 110.

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ter of the place's ruler, with the dog in the foreground devouring the bone from the body of the butler whom the Apostle had cursed.^ T h e next panel shows him, on his arrival at the court of the Indian king, Gundaphorus, receiving from the monarch a bag of treasure with which St. Thomas was to build a royal palace (Fig. 223). In the fifth compartment, the king's brother. Gad, hiiraculously rises from the dead in order to reveal that the palace was to be a heavenly mansion, while the Apostle watches from the prison into which he had been cast for distributing the treasure to the poor; and finally he is pierced by the spears of the henchmen of the last Indian sovereign to whom his missionary zeal had carried him. Pérez Llamazares interprets the first, enigmatical scene in the series as the reception of St. Thomas by the king whose daughter was being married, but it may depict instead his arraignment before the potentate who put him to death and so be out of its proper order. T h e lowest tier of the retable, the predella, comprises six panels of half-lengths of the Apostles disposed in pairs. A date subsequent to 1522 is championed by Pérez Llamazares ^ for the paintings on the ground that their iconography is derived from a Venetian breviary of this year owned by the church of S. Isidoro and thus accessible not only to its dependency. Pozuelo de la Orden, but also to an artist whom the authorities of S. Isidoro would probably themselves have proposed. His contention that the scenes from the life of the Virgin have their source in the descriptions and accompanying vignettes scarcely holds, since their general compositions were pretty well established as common property; but it does remain significant that the romantic experiences of St. Thomas in India are uniquely featured in the accounts in the breviary's text. T h e composition for the Ecce H o m o scarcely seems quite similar enough to Titian's rendering of 1543 at Vienna to require us to postdate the retable in S. Isidoro. T h e style incarnates a somewhat provincial, thoroughly Spanish, but not unskilled adaptation of the Italian modes of the Renaissance as they manifested themselves about 1525 when already edging upon mannerism. It reflects the general dissemination of Raphael's types and methods throughout Italy and indeed all Europe, but now and ^ F o r other representations of this story in Spanish art, see m y vols. V I I , p. 8 5 1 , and V I I I , p. 3 9 1 . Of. cit., 2 5 0 - 2 5 1 . 4bid., 256 ff.

FIG. 223. T H E POZUELO M A S T E R . ST. T H O M A S R E C E I V I N G FUNDS T O B U I L D A P A L A C E A N D W A T C H I N G T H E R E S U S C I T A T I O N OF GAD, SECTIONS OF R E T A B L E . SAN ISIDORO, LEON {Photo. Archivo Regional, Burgos)

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then one gets the impression that the author, like certain other Spanish painters of the period, was particularly familiar with the production of Ferrara and Emilia in the early Cinquecento, taking delight in the achievements of such men as Costa, Francia, and Mazzolino. Indeed, we shall later adduce a bit of concrete but not entirely conclusive evidence of indebtedness to Francia. M a n y factors appear to suggest that he was acquainted also with the Flemish interpretations of Italianism. T h e color is modulated to the cool harmonies of Raphael's followers in distinction from the richer and more brilliant tonality that the majority of artists who are considered in this volume, as transitional to the Renaissance, preserved from the old Hispano-Flemish style of the fifteenth century j and the saturation in Italianism has now finally expunged the gorgeous brocades, the haloes of gilt plaques, and the other gold appurtenances. T h e r e is much, however, that bespeaks the immediate past of Spanish art and the indigenous environment. One of the Pozuelo Master's distinctive traits is a paradoxical union of the fully evolved forms of the Italian Renaissance with a still primitive stiffness in the articulation of attitudes and movements. Conspicuous instances are the St. Thomas receiving the bag of wealth and the man fleeing in terror from the risen Gad, and both of these figures illustrate a not very convincingly rendered posture, with one knee bent, that constitutes a factor by which the Master may most easily be recognized. F o r the Assumption he still retains the composition, with the earthly participants excluded and with ideas of the Immaculate Conception conjoined, that frequently persisted from the Hispano-Flemish school in such predecessors of his in the Renaissance as Pedro Berruguete ® and Antonio de Comontes. Generally his compositions reflect the uncrowded simplicity and clarity bequeathed to him by the late M i d d l e Ages. Although he had probably studied in Italy, he is true to his race in the very Iberian types of his actors, whether, in the rôles of personages of the N e w Testament, they are dressed in the traditional, pseudo-classical garb, as, for instance, St. Thomas, or whether, as people from secular life, they wear the costumes of the reign of Charles V. It is not impossible that he was a pupil of the Astorga Master, some of whose productions, especially the pieces in the Muntadas Collection, closely approximate his modes. A certain analogy exists between the Pozuelo Master and the painter whom we shall later come to ® See above, p. 1 1 7 .

574

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know as the Lianes Master and who was active in Asturias north of L e o n ; but they are not the same personality in different stages of his career. T h e way in which the Pozuelo Master is still bound by the cramping shackles of the earlier days emerges yet more tangibly in a large, separate work of his that has also been imported into S. Isidoro from Pozuelo de la Orden/ an Entombment set in a modern imitation of an old frame and hanging on the right wall of the cafilla mayor (Fig. 224). T h e archaizing proclivity is brought into relief by a comparison with Raphael's famous composition for the theme in the Borghese Gallery at Rome, from which in part the version in S. Isidoro is mediately or immediately derived. One of the most palpable proofs of the authorship is embodied in the Nicodemus holding Christ's knees. Not only does his bending leg take the attitude that we have already noted as distinctive of the Master, but the arrangement of the drapery in a great smooth expanse over the thigh, with closely gathered folds above, is another trait that we can use in making this and other attributions to him. T h e elder of the two figures preparing the H o l y Sepulchre in the left background is a typical instance of his transmutation of his actors into gentlemen of Charles V's period. As occasionally for Christ and St. Thomas in the retable, an inconspicuous nimbus of rays is employed for the Saviour in the Entombment, but, differently from the retable, lightly limned, circular haloes as if of filigree are now set upon the holy women. T h e services of the Pozuelo Master, like those of Juan Rodriguez de Soil's, were shared by both Zamora and Leon. H e emerges, in the church of Sta. María de la Orta at Zamora, as the author of a small retable in a chapel at the right of the nave (Fig. 225). T h e whole upper register is occupied by a Crucifixion, in which the figure of Christ is sculptured in wood. T h e lower register is constituted by a small compartment with a wooden statue of St. Sebastian set between painted panels of the Mass of St. Gregory and St. Catherine's ordeal of the wheels. T h e guardafolvos are elaborately painted with effigies of the four Evangelists, Sts. Peter and Paul, and four Prophets. One will be most readily convinced of the attribution by observing how the St. John in the Crucifixion reproduces the curious and somewhat ill ' J. Pérez Llamazares, Historia de la Real Colegiata de San Isidoro, de León, Leon, 1927, p. 220, and Raimundo Rodríguez, Guía artística de León, Leon, 1925, p. 40.

FIG. 224. T H E POZUELO MASTER. E N T O M B M E N T . SAN ISIDORO, LEON {Photo. Archivo Regional, Burgos)

FIG. 225. THE POZUELO MASTER. RETABLE. STA. MARÍA DE LA ORTA, ZAMORA {Photo. Archivo Regional,

Burgos)

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577

articulated disposition of the legs of St. Thomas receiving the royal gift in the Leon retable and of the spectator turning away in awe from the prodigy of Gad's resuscitation and how the drapery is drawn across the hind leg in just the same fashion. The prominent deacon directly behind St. Gregory in the Mass resembles closely, even in intense devotion, the profile of St. Thomas undergoing martyrdom, and the tallest of St. Catherine's executioners belongs to a type of bearded man that emerges often in the retable from Pozuelo de la Orden. We get the impression in the altarpiece of Sta. María de la Orta that the Master may have come into contact with the works of Juan Correa de Vivar. Good but not conclusive arguments can be put up for the assignment to him of the retable in the chapel of the Hospital de Sotelo at Zamora. The iconography of the principal compartment is rather anomalous, the Madonna seated against a landscape, holding the Child, and crowned by two angels, while the Eternal Father blesses from a nimbus of clouds above and St. Joseph at the left presents a plate of fruit, but the underlying conception may be the Rest in the Flight into Egypt (Fig. 226). The lateral divisions at this level exhibit standing figures of Sts. John Evangelist and James Major; in the upper register the Crucifixion at the centre is set between erect effigies of Sts. Dominic and Peter Martyr; and in the predella long, narrow, horizontal representations of the Nativity and Epiphany flank the tabernacle. It is again the stride and drapery of St. John Evangelist, here in the separate compartment devoted to him, that affords the most tangible peg upon which to string the theory of the Pozuelo Master's authorship; but the general style also more or less conforms to his modes, and especially the second King in the Epiphany looks as if he might have stepped out of the retable of S. Isidoro. Analogies to Juan Rodriguez de Solís, however, are not lacking, and it is indeed not impossible that the artist of the Hospital de Sotelo was a painter identical neither with Juan Rodriguez nor the Pozuelo Master but merely affiliated with them in style. The attribution to the Pozuelo Master seems obvious in the case of a now dissociated compartment from a retable offered for sale at New York in February, 1926, as a part of the Collection of Don Luis Ruiz of Madrid (Fig. 227). The subject is St. Peter's denial to the maidservant, with Christ's arraignment before Caiaphas enacted in smaller scale in the right background. The detail that most indisputably shows

578

LEON AND ZAMORA

the Pozuelo Master to have been the painter is the posture of the Apostle, reproducing, as it does, that of the two actors in the S. Isidoro retable whom we have called into service for comparison with the St. John in the Crucifixion of the altarpiece in Sta. María de la Orta at

FIG. 226. T H E POZUELO M A S T E R ( 0 . HOLY F A M I L Y , SECTION OF R E T A B L E . H O S P I T A L D E SOTELO, Z A M O R A {Photo. Archivo Regional,

Burgos)

Zamora; but the St. Catherine in this altarpiece actually repeats the type of the maidservant interrogating St. Peter. If we dare assign to him a predella that was offered in the same sale (Fig. 228), we are then provided with definite evidence of his familiarity with the art of Bologna and Emilia. It consists of the central piece, the Lamentation over the Dead Christ, effigies of three of

FIG. 227. T H E POZUELO MASTER. ST. PETER'S DENIAL. FORMERLY IN THE COLLECTION OF LUIS RUIZ, MADRID

" Τ Τ Τ Γ ι ·, Γ Γ ί .· i .1 С ι ; l ì ι ι • ι I • I · ι t t I ι ' ι .'-ν·'

I-

ι I ι ι ι ι « · ι ι ι Ρ· s) guessed that León might be the author of the retable of St. Bartholomew in S. Lesmes at Burgos, which I have shown to be, instead, a work of Jan Joest (see above, p. 1 2 ) . Martinez y Sanz does not specify for what part of the church at Santa

6з8

BURGOS

sections of the retable, which are definitely specified in the contract, may now be seen in the Museum attached to the cathedral of Burgos, and there is also preserved in the church itself at Santa Casilda some of the pure design of his mural decoration. His intellectual curiosity and concern with aesthetic theory are demonstrated by the fact that Diego de Sagredo, in his book of 1526, Medidas del Romano, introduces León as one of the interlocutors in the dialogue.'® A further record of his activity comes from 1527, when he painted a no longer extant box in the chapel of the Santo Sepulcro in the cathedral of Burgos.''' Huidobro adds the information, from what sources I do not know, that he ornamented the rooms of the Casa del Cordón at Burgos with many paintings, chiefly portraits, that are no longer to be found there. We have already had occasion to refer to his important commission to do the polychromy of the vast sculptured retable over the high altar of the cathedral of Oviedo, the contract for which he signed on May 22, 1529, not completing the task until 1 5 3 1 , our last date of his existence in the land of the living.'® Considerable technical interest attaches to the contract because in it León analyzes at length the various processes of polychromy and gilding that he will employ. I have postponed until the end of his biography a notice which, although there is much likelihood that he is the person to whom it applies, cannot with absolute conviction be taken as assigning to him another extant production. We are informed ' ' that, when the young Charles V, on landing in Asturias in 1 5 1 7 , passed on September 27 through the town of Lianes, about half-way in this province between Oviedo and Santander, there was presented to him an artist born in Saint Omer but living with his family at Burgos, who had come to Lianes to do the sculpture of the retable over the high altar in the parish church. The reason for the honor of making the royal acquaintance was probably that the youthful monarch, as having previously dwelt in Flanders, would be interested in any sculptor from Casilda the retable was done, but Huidobro « / . ) states that it was for the high altar, probably because he saw the panels in this spot before their removal to the Museum at Burgos. F. J . Sanchez Canton, Fuentes literarias fara la historia del arte esfañol, Madrid, I ( 1 9 2 3 ) , 5 and 1 1 - 2 0 . " Martinez y Sanz, of. cit. T h e contract and other pertinent documents were published by J o s é Cuesta in the Archivo español de arte y arqueología, IX ( 1 9 3 3 ) , 7-20. Huidobro, o f . cit., 1 9 1 , and Manuel de Foronda y Aguilera, Estancias y viajes del Emperador Carlos V, M a d r i d , 1 9 1 4 , p. 99.

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639

near-lying Saint Omer. Since this city is in or on the borders of Picardy, Huidobro very logically deduces that the artist was León Picardo, and such an assumption finds support in the consideration that we definitely know him to have been summoned to Oviedo, a city even more distant in this region from Burgos, in order to assist in the decoration of the retable above the high altar of the cathedral ·, but when we remember that other foreigners must have constituted a part of the artistic milieu of Burgos at this time (in addition to Felipe Vigarni of whose provenience from Langres in Burgundy we chance to be informed), we cannot entirely exclude the possibility that the person who enjoyed the distinction of being introduced to Charles V was some other than León Picardo. The retable at Lianes is preserved and consists both of sculptures and paintings. One thing is wholly certain : León Picardo, with whose style as a painter we are conversant in the documented panels from Santa Casilda, could not have done its very different, painted sections. His designation as a sculptor in the account of his presentation to the king would not in itself indicate that he did not execute the paintings, but the internal evidence of the paintings themselves categorically negatives the attribution. I shall have to leave to specialists in Spanish sculpture the question of whether the carvings at Lianes are by the same master, very probably León Picardo, who did the retable of Cervera de Pisuerga, and indeed I am obliged to refuse the task in general of the problem of his personality as a sculptor, for no adequate photographs of the Lianes carvings exist, nor do my notes, taken at my visit to the town, arrive at any more accurate description of them than a classification in the school of the cities of Burgos or Leon at the beginning of the Cinquecento. The province of my volumes is Spanish painting, a particularly Herculean labor in the so largely uninvestigated period of the early sixteenth century, nor to the tremendous number of photographs that I am forced to have made for a study of Spanish painting can I add the onus of procuring reproductions of the sculpture. I am very slightly better off in the matter of reproductions for the carvings in the retable of Santillana del Mar, the paintings of which we shall discover to be by the same artist who executed those of the adjacent town of Lianes, but I can do no more than register my vague opinion that the sculptor of Lianes cannot with conviction be declared to have been active also at Santillana. León Picardo's documented paintings from Santa Casilda consist of

б40

BURGOS

the three principal pieces, the pinnacle of the Crucifixion (Fig. 253) and the two lower, lateral compartments depicting St. Vincent's ordeal on the eculeus and the raven, with the assistance of other birds and a pair of angels, protecting his body from the wild beasts. The style, which reveals an artist of no more than average merit, is very like a translation of the sculptural manner of Felipe Vigarni into paint. We have seen that, if we have been right in conjecturing the retable of Cervera de Pisuerga to incorporate Leon's style as a sculptor, he was in this aspect of his achievement dominated by Vigarni 5 and, as a matter of fact, there are tangible relationships between the carvings at Cervera de Pisuerga and the panels from Santa Casilda. In the pinnacle of the Crucifixion, for instance, the Virgin and St. John recall the type of woman in the Cervera sculptures, and the angel at the right guarding St. Vincent's body exhibits a resemblance to Our Lady in the Anna selbdritt at the centre of the Cervera altarpiece. Both of the angels indeed embody the lingering reminiscences of Flemish Gothicism that coalesce in Vigarni with the modes of the early Renaissance. It is especially, however, the scene of St. Vincent's torture on the eculeus that shows León Picardo to have progressed further along the ways of the full, Roman Renaissance than the majority of artists included in the present volume. The two executioners, for example, in type and rather tumultuous activity suggest the kind of painting that was being produced in Italy by the end of the first quarter of the Cinquecento. One of the characteristics of the panels from Santa Casilda is a tendency to crowd large figures into a space, and in this Leon's manner is somewhat distinguished from the practical contemporary production, in the Burgos school, of the Mambrillas Master,^" whose human types are similar but who, nevertheless, seems to me a different personality and not merely another phase of León Picardo. The same Museum in the cathedral of Burgos contains six other, slightly smaller panels which internal evidence abundantly demonstrates him to have painted and which once belonged to a retable in the church at Bocos, near Villarcayo, in the extreme northern part of the province of Burgos. The subjects are: the Annunciation; the Resurrection; Sts. Cosmas and Damian performing their miracle upon the cancered leg of their votary (with the episode of their amputation of the Ethiopian's leg enacted in lesser scale in the background, Fig. 2 5 4 ) ; their decapitation; St. Peter seated in half length in a See above, p. 625.

Fie.

253. LEÓN PICARDO. C R U C I F I X I O N , SECTION OF R E T A B L E . DIOCESAN M U S E U M , C A T H E D R A L , BURGOS {Piloto. Archivo Regional, Burgos)

FIG. Z54. LEÓN PICARDO. MIRACLE OF STS. COSMAS AND DAMIAN, SECTION OF RETABLE. DIOCESAN MUSEUM, CATHEDRAL, BURGOS (Photo.

Archivo

Regional,

Burgos)

BURGOS

643

landscape (with an adjoining fragment of another saint) j and a similar effigy of a virgin martyr. León Picardo's leaning towards effects of sjumatezza, especially in the rendering of the countenances, is here more evident than in the pieces from Santa Casilda. H e has left us a retable also in the church at Lara de los Infantes, southeast of Burgos. The principal compartment is now occupied by a cult-statue of the Virgin, but all the rest consists of his paintings and exhibits an iconographie comprehensiveness even more varied than that of the Bocos altarpiece. At the right of the statue there is represented St. Michael as conqueror of the Satanic dragon and at the left his appearance to St. Gregory's supplicatory procession, organized to stay the plague. T h e three scenes in the upper tier are the Virgin's investiture of St. Ildefonso with the chasuble, the mounted Santiago leading the Spaniards to victory over the infidels in the battle of Clavijo, and the martyrdom of St. Andrew. The Pietà in the middle of the predella (Fig. 255) is flanked in the two lateral compartments by figures of St. Roch and St. Sebastian, the latter still conceived, according to Spanish iconographical tradition, as a young seigneur. Since Roch and Sebastian were the celestial patrons especially invoked against the plague and another subject connected with this scourge is included within the assemblage, it may well be that the retable was ordered as a thank-offering for recovery from the pest. All the traits of Leon's manner are evident at first glance, his types, his favorite contemporary costumes, and his filling of spaces with a few, large forms. For instance, in the Magdalene of the Pietà at Lara and the Crucifixion from Santa Casilda, he has not bothered to vary her head, and the St. Roch closely resembles the Christ of the Resurrection from Bocos. The composition of St. Andrew's martyrdom is built up on the same lines as the scene from Santa Casilda depicting St. Vincent's torture on the eculeus. Even the haloes in the Pietà reveal a figuration identical with that of the nimbuses worn, in the Bocos series, by the virgin martyr and St. Peter. León Picardo also proves to be author of a triptych in the cathedral of Santo Domingo de la Calzada, displaying at the centre the Magdalene and at the sides Sts. Peter and Paul (Fig. 256). The Magdalene illustrates his characteristic countenance for women and his predilection for dressing even feminine saints in the most elaborate fashions of the day. H e r box of ointment is practically identical with the specimen that she holds in the Pietà at Lara de los Infantes, The

FIG. Z55. LEÓN PICARDO. PIETÀ, SECTION OF PREDELLA OF RETABLE. PARISH CHURCH, LARA DE LOS INFANTES {Photo. Archivo

Regional,

Burgos)

1 F

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1

^

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FIG. 256. LEÓN PICARDO. T R I P T Y C H OF STS. P E T E R , M A R Y M A G D A L E N E , P A U L . C A T H E D R A L , S A N T O DOMINGO D E L A C A L Z A D A {Photo. Archivo Mas)

AND

б4б

BURGOS

fluttering expanses of her sleeves embody an aspect that Leon's tendency to excited movement often assumes in his other productions. The St. Peter is only a more aged version of this Apostle as he is represented in the panels from Bocos, even in the nature of the keys that he carries as an emblem. The spaces are filled with his customary bulky figures, here marked by a stubbiness of physique that is exemplified by such other forms from his brush as in particular the St. Michael at Lara de los Infantes. If León Picardo is the heón, fintar, whom the records of 1 5 3 1 show to have received a commission for decorative work on the trascoro of the cathedral of Santo Domingo de la Calzada, his connection with the town provides further grounds for the triptych's attribution. In the chapel in the church of S. Martin at Briviesca containing the Hispano-Flemish retable that we examined in volume IV there hangs a lone panel which internal evidence clearly reveals León Picardo to have executed (Fig. 257). Representing St. Martin's encounter with the beggar, it is probably a fragment from an otherwise lost altarpiece dedicated to the heavenly patron of the edifice. The beggar's head repeats that of the soldier at the lower left in the Resurrection from Bocos; Martin's esquire reiterates the medical saint at the left in the miracle of the leg from the same source; the tree is painted in León's characteristic mode; and the mountainous landscape in general finds close analogues in the cycles from Bocos and Santa Casilda and in the retable at Lara de los Infantes. With a high degree of likelihood there may be included in the catalogue of León Picardo's rather than of the Mambrillas Master's extant works two fragments from an altarpiece in the sacristy of the parish church at Villaquirán de los Infantes, southwest of Burgos ( Fig. 258). One depicts St. Michael, as weigher of souls, presenting a kneeling, clerical donor, and the other exhibits the effigies of Sts. Catherine (?) ^^ and Margaret. T h e most telling piece of evidence for the ascription is the close similarity of the virgin martyrs to the modification of the Mambrillas Master's feminine types that we discover in such figures by León as the Magdalene at Lara de los Infantes and, in the panels from Bocos, the Virgin of the Annunciation and the separate, canonized maiden. The compartment of the donor and St. J . M a r t i y Monsó, Estudios histórico-artísticos, 585. Pp. 3 1 3 - 3 1 4 . T h e only visible attribute is the sword, but St. Catherine is not infrequently distinguished solely by this emblem.

Fie. 257. LEÓN PICARDO. S. MARTIN AND THE BEGGAR. S. MARTIN, BRIVIESCA {Photo. Archivo

Regional,

Burgos)

FIG. 258. LEÓN PICARDO(? ). ST. M I C H A E L , W I T H DONOR, A N D STS. C A T H E R I N E ( ? ) A N D M A R G A R E T . P A R I S H CHURCH, V I L L A Q U I R Á N D E LOS I N F A N T E S {Photo. Archivo Regional, Burgos)

BURGOS

649

Michael, moreover, illustrates his fondness for compressing a few large forms into a panel, and all the countenances are softened by his incipient sjumatezza. T h e representation of the kneeling ecclesiastic reveals in our painter by no means negligible gifts in vigorous, straightforward portraiture. T h e same status of the very great likelihood of his authorship may be claimed for a panel of the Mass of St. Gregory that has passed from the chapel of S. Juan de Sahagún (formerly called the chapel of Sta. Catalina de los R o j a s ) in the cathedral of Burgos to the Museum connected with the church ( F i g . 259).^^ "Phg profiles of the Pope and the second of the attendant clerics are persuasively similar to several examples in the compartments of the story of Sts. Cosmas and Damian from Bocos ; St. Gregory's halo is identical with some of the specimens in the Bocos assemblage; and the panel again betrays Leon's somewhat blurred modelling. It is legitimate to wonder whether it might have been ordered for the family's chapel by Antonio de Rojas, who was archbishop of Burgos from 1 5 2 5 to 1 5 2 7 . T h e group of nearly convincing attributions to León Ricardo may be still further augmented by a panel of the Epiphany in the Georgi Collection at New Y o r k ( F i g . 260). T h e most determinative factors are the St. Joseph, who is practically a replica of the curiously broadpated St. Peter in the triptych at Santo Domingo de la Calzada, and the tendency, as especially on the negroid Magus, to employ heavy stuffs for the draperies, disposed in rather large, complicated folds. But there are other, almost supererogatory traces of Leon's craft. T h e Virgin quite falls within his standard of young womanhood; the snubnosed negroid King recalls the soldier in the lower right corner of the Resurrection from Bocos; and the other standing Wise M a n is very much the same personage at a lesser age as the potentate presiding over St. Vincent's ordeal on the eculeus in the cycle from Santa Casilda. While this volume is passing through the press. Angulo ^^^ has published a significant article on León Ricardo, which I should have discussed at length, if I had known it sooner. Of undocumented works, he too ascribes to our master the retables of Bocos and L a r a de los Infantes, and he rightly adds a production with which I was not familiar, several panels of an altarpiece of the Virgin in private poshave already referred to this panel in vol. IV (p. 2 1 4 ) as in my opinion wrong-Iy connected by Angulo with the style of the Burgos Master, whom we may now call Alonso de Sedano: see below, p. 8co. Archivo esfañol de arte, X V I I I ( 1 9 4 5 ) , 8 4 - 9 3 .

FIG. 259. LEÓN PICARDO(?). MASS OF ST. GREGORY. DIOCESAN MUSEUM, CATHEDRAL, BURGOS {Photo. Archivo

Regional,

Burgos)

BURGOS

65.

session at Madrid, which hail from the region of Burgos and have the interest of incorporating a more tangible relation to the painting of the early Renaissance in Flanders than his other achievements, suggesting that he maintained contact with artistic developments in northern Europe after his emigration to Spain.

FIG. 260. LEÓN PICARDO(?). EPIPHANY. GEORGI COLLECTION, NEW Y O R K

Our investigations have led us to the conclusion that, whoever was responsible for the sculptures in the retable at Lianes, León Picardo could not be the author of the six painted panels inserted in the extensive plastic assemblage; and, since other works by this anonymous painter are extant, we must create for him the name of the Lianes Master. T h e arrangement of the six panels, at least in their present

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allocation, is curious. T h e narrative, in all cases passing from left to right, begins with the Annunciation and Visitation in the second of the three tiers into which the retable is divided above the predella, and it continues naturally in the lowest of the tiers with the Nativity and Epiphany ( F i g . 2 6 1 ) 5 but for the concluding events of the Virgin's life we have to ascend to the topmost tier where there are aligned the scenes of the Dormition and Coronation. T h e outstanding trait of the style is that in the attenuated and often loose-jointed figures it has passed further on the way to the characteristic mannerism of the Cinquecento than the majority of productions that fall within the scope of the present volume. In a kind of distant way the countenances, general methods, and even color recall Pier di Cosimo, who still earlier had betrayed tendencies towards mannerism, but it is not necessary to postulate any contact between the two artists. T h e Lianes Master cannot be numbered among the great in his profession, but he has created types, both male and female, which, however dimly analogous to those of Pier di Cosimo, yet imply his creative powers in their individuality and will enable us easily to recognize his hand in other monuments. H e does not possess the ingenuity for the difficult task of introducing much piquancy into the time-worn compositions, although he arouses our interest by delineating with the perspicuousness of Flanders, in the midst of his general fondness for settings of architecture of the Renaissance, a queer tattered shed in the Nativity and then by appropriately repeating it in smaller scale in the background of the Epiphany. A n occasional fabric of gold brocade in the garments still witnesses to the hard death that the old Hispano-Flemish tradition died. In the Lianes retable, the sculpture was being carried out in 1 5 1 η,""* but it is not impossible that the paintings were completed a few years later. F o r another large monument in the region, the retable over the high altar of the former Colegiata at Santillana del M a r , in which the painted panels were manifestly executed by the Lianes Master, there is only an approximate date, 1 5 3 8 , when an inventory of the church describes both the statuary and the paintings in terms proving that they were a finished a c c o m p l i s h m e n t . ^ ^ x ^ g sculpture, as I have said above, falls without the province of my volumes, although I may ^^See above, p. 638. J . Ortiz de la Azuela, Monografia Santander, 1 9 1 9 , p. 96.

de la antigua Colegiata de Santillana del

Mar,

FIG. 261. T H E LLANES M A S T E R . EPIPHANY, SECTION OF R E T A B L E . PARISH CHURCH, LLANES {Photo. Archivo Regional, Burgos)

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point out in passing that the central statue of St. Juliana of Nicomedia, whose relics the church claims to possess, is a later accretion of 1699 and that I question whether Ortiz de la Azuela's ^^ account of the transmutations that both the sculptures and paintings have undergone during the retable's history is in every detail correct, for instance his contention that the carved predella of the four Evangelists is an importation from another altar. In any case the six, well preserved paintings were certainly all carried out by the Lianes Master at least as late as some moment in the first quarter of the sixteenth century. In the two higher tiers the subjects, reading from left to right and then upward, are the Nativity, Epiphany, Entry into Jerusalem, and Deposition, but, since the high altar is dedicated to St. Juliana as well as to Our Lady, the two panels in the lowest tier represent episodes from the life of this virgin martyr, who is so rarely encountered in sacred art. T h e representations conform to her story as related in the Golden Legend: in the compartment at the left she hangs by her hair while "molten lead" is "cast on her head";^' and in the panel at the right (Fig. 262), on the way to her decapitation, she leads captive the demon who had sought to pervert her from the faith. In the lower left corner of the scene of her torture there is introduced the kneeling portrait of the lay donor, who seems fifty years old or less, but the date of the paintings forbids us to follow Ortiz de la Azuela in wishing to recognize in him the great man of letters of the first half and middle of the fifteenth century, the Marqués de Santillana, who indeed was consulted in 1453 on the matter of the translation of St. Juliana's relics. T h e opinion of Ortiz de la Azuela was doubtless influenced by an old and now discarded tendency to assign the retable to c. 1450. T h e Lianes Master's authorship is so obvious that it imposes itself at once upon the student and needs no demonstration. Among the most tangible items of proof are the absolute identity of the Virgin's head in both retables, the resort to exactly the same type for St. Juliana, and the precise resemblance of the martyr's flagellator at the left to the second Magus in the Lianes Epiphany. A t Santillana, 91 S. " In this compartment, on the throne of the magistrate who was her suitor as well as her persecutor, there is inscribed his name in a form different from the appellation, Eulogius, appearing in the Golden Legend·, but the Bollandists (under the day of her feast, February i 6 , page 874, note c ) list a whole series of variants of the name, choosing as the most authoritative Eleusius. Of. cit., Ι Ο Ι .

FIG. 262. T H E L L A N E S M A S T E R . ST. J U L I A N A L E A D I N G C A P T I V E A DEMON, SECTION OF R E T A B L E . C O L E G I A T A , S A N T I L L A N A D E L M A R {Photo. Archivo Regional, Burgos)

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however, the Master seems to have taken more pleasure in his commission and to have girded himself for slightly better craftsmanship. In the somewhat more grandiose compositions he falls in with the very general fondness of Spanish painters at this time for introducing spectators of the events in smaller scale at elevated levels in the stately architecture of the Renaissance that forms the backgrounds. H e displays some invention in changing the Lianes composition for the Epiphany, and, although he ornaments the edges of the costumes with gold here and there throughout the retable, he abjures the auric brocades that the other altarpiece still exhibits.

8.

T H E ARGANO

MASTER

Over the high altar of the parish church at Villanueva de Argaño, just west of Burgos, the retable is chiefly constituted by six panels from the life of the Virgin that will serve to endow with the name of the Argaño Master still another personality in the annals of the school of the province in the early Cinquecento ( F i g . 2 6 3 ) . Of respectable gifts or better, he already edges, like León Picardo, upon the modes of the f u l l Roman Renaissance, so that the height of his activity should probably not be dated before at least the second decade of his century. H e is still, however, enough bound by old Spanish iconographie tradition as to bring the Virgin to her knees in the subject of the Purification. H i s nearest artistic relative in the region is perhaps the Durham Master 3 but the connection is not sufficiently intimate to suggest that, like the Belorado Master, he was his pupil, and he possesses a rather distinct individuality the characteristics of which can be brought out by the comparisons necessary for the process of attributing another work to him. Be it said from the first that we cannot argue for more than possible correctness in assigning to him this work, a section of a retable in the L á z a r o Collection at M a d r i d " consisting in two long, horizontal compartments of which the lower depicts the Annunciation and the upper comprises the two scenes of the Visitation and Nativity ( F i g . 264). T h e general stylistic similarity to the altarpiece at Villanueva de Argaño is self-evident, and it remains only to marshal the detailed analogies that at least imply an identity of authorship. T h e most convincing of these analogies is the reappearance of a peculiar kind of feminine ' No. 5 5 1 on page 89 of vol. I I of the Catalogue.

FIG. 263. T H E ARGANO M A S T E R . N A T I V I T Y , SECTION OF R E T A B L E . PARISH CHURCH, V I L L A N U E V A D E ARGANO {Photo. Archivo Regional, Burgos)

FIG. 264. T H E ARGANO M A S T E R ( ? ) . A N N U N C I A T I O N , V I S I T A T I O N , AND N A T I V I T Y . LÁZARO COLLECTION, MADRID {From the Catalogue of the Collection)

B U R G O S

659

countenance occurring often in the altarpiece and not quite like that employed by any other Spanish painter of the period, long and narrow, tapering to a point at the chin, and curiously foreshadowing the types of Luis de Morales. T h e examples in the L á z a r o panels are the Virgin in the Annunciation and in the Visitation, in the latter instance so closely repeating the Mother in the Nativity at Villanueva de Argaño that it seems impossible that the two figures should not have been executed by a single man. T h e predilection for profile postures and for folded hands also reasserts itself, and the profile of Our L a d y in the L á z a r o Nativity is very similar to that of her figure in the Purification of the retable which gives the Master his name. T h e correspondence in the disposition of St. Elizabeth's wimple in both versions of the Visitation should also be noted, and in general the folds of the draperies are treated in exactly the same manner. T h e r e are resemblances also in the landscapes, fertile and filled with buildings in the middle ground but looking off to bleaker mountains in the distance. T h e fine delineation of St. Joseph in the L á z a r o Nativity and particularly his excitedly raised right arm constitute more advanced elements than we meet anywhere in the retable at Villanueva de Argaño ; but these factors may be due to a later date in the artist's career, and at least the agitation of St. Joseph is approximated in his outspread hands in the Nativity of the retable and in the uplifted arm of Zacharias in the Visitation.

9.

PAINTINGS

OF T H E

EARLY

RENAISSANCE

P R O V I N C E OF B U R G O S B U T OF U N C E R T A I N

IN

THE

ATTRIBUTION

T h e r e exist in this section of Spain a small group of works dating from the early years of the sixteenth century which are interrelated in general style but for which I cannot muster sufficient evidence to establish a single authorship or an attribution in any of the instances to the contemporary artists of the region whose personalities I have isolated. T h e finest members of the group are a series of panels at Santa M a r i a del Campo, a town to which in the course of our studies we have so often been led. T w o of the panels, each displaying a pair of the seated Evangelists ( F i g . 2 6 5 ) , are comprised within the conglomerate altarpiece that we have already found ' to include creations of the Master of the L a r g e Figures and of Pedro Berruguete. T o the ' See above, p. l o i .

FIG. 265. CASTILIAN SCHOOL, E A R L Y S I X T E E N T H C E N T U R Y . TWO EVANGELISTS. PARISH CHURCH, SANTA M A R Í A D E L CAMPO

BURGOS

661

hand that executed the Evangelists we must apparently ascribe also half-lengths of the Man of Sorrows and the grieving Virgin joined together in the remate of the other retable at Santa Maria del Campo for which Berruguete's paintings, now transferred to the conglomerate altarpiece, were originally done. The manner exhibited by the Evangelists, the Christ, and the Virgin is close to that of Juan de Borgoña, whom we have seen to have earned patronage in the province, but it is hard to verify in them tangible traces of his actual craft. Their creator was blessed with talents equal or almost equal to those of Juan de Borgoña, vigorously characterizing and differentiating the Evangelists as they compose their Gospels and endowing the eldest of them with high animation. All the figures are placed against backgrounds of brilliant gold brocade, and in addition the Redeemer and His Mother are each sheltered under shell-shaped semidomes of the Renaissance, simulated in paint."' Very tangible but unfortunately non-determinative analogies to these pieces at Santa Maria del Campo emerge in the collection of panels at Buezo which I discussed in volume IV ^ but which, contrary to the opinion that I there expressed, I am now obliged, despite the similarities, to dissociate from the predella at E l Espino, a work that on a prior page ^ I have claimed for the Belorado Master. The figures at Santa Maria del Campo are vividly recalled by the Buezo predella, in which especially the St. Peter should be compared with the Evangelist who is depicted as the most aged. In this predella also correspondingly gorgeous brocades are employed as settings. Stylistic but again not definitive connections exist between the narrative sections at Buezo and two panels built into an altar at the right of the nave in the church of Santibáñez Zarzaguda (just north of the city of Burgos itself), depicting St. Catherine's dispute with the philosophers and her ordeal of the wheels and still retaining, like the other members of this Burgos group, the old Hispano-Flemish enthusiasm for hangings of ostentatious brocades of gold. The critic who should wish to assign the paintings at Santibáñez and Buezo to the Sinobas Master would not be treading on entirely unstable ground, but his foothold would become less sure when he tried to set the series at Santa Maria del Campo under the same aegis. ' ' I cannot f o l l o w Ang-ulo in attributing- the Evangelists, Christ, and the Virgin to Pedro Berrug-uete in an article that reaches me while my book is passing through the press: Archivo español de arte, X V I I I ( 1 9 4 . 5 ) , 1 3 7 - 1 4 9 . ^Pp. 3 0 8 - 3 1 0 . ^593.

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Once more we are baffled by inconclusive resemblances to the manners of Juan de Borgoña and the Sinobas Master in a representation of the Baptism in the chapel devoted to this sacrament in the church of Sta. Águeda at Burgos itself ( F i g . 266). Curiously shaped as a circle truncated at the bottom, the panel appears to have been painted to serve for the cover of a font or at least to have eventually been cut down and adapted to this purpose. Its style manifestly places it in the

FIG. 266. C A S T I L I A N SCHOOL, E A R L Y S I X T E E N T H B A P T I S M . S T A . Á G U E D A , BURGOS {Photo. Archivo Regional,

CENTURY.

Burgos)

same general phase of Spanish painting at the beginning of the sixteenth century as Juan de Borgoña's productions, and there are such specific relations to his style as the similarity of the Baptist's face to many of his profiles and the emergence in the Saviour's form of his stiffness in the articulation of posture, exemplified by the scene of the Incredulity of St. Thomas in the chapel of St. Martin in the cathedral of Toledo. T h e Baptism, however, is diversely treated by Juan de Borgoña at Covarrubias, and, although the angel is approximated in

BURGOS

663

the panel of the Magdalene's lévitation formerly belonging to the O'Hana firm at New York, it would be difficult to place this figure and particularly the draperies in his canon. Nor do we arrive at less dubious results when we turn to the Sinobas Master, despite a partial likeness of the angel to the youth at the left in the scene of the embarcation of St. Stephen's body at Los Balbases and the analogy of the Baptist's profile to that of Joel in the Palazuelos predella. The Durham Master's composition for the theme at Torregalindo is rather similar, but also in this instance the picture in Sta. Águeda furnishes us with no exact traits upon which to seize in order to champion his authorship. In 1927 I saw at the left of the nave in the parish church of Arenillas de Río Pisuerga (near Castrogeriz, west of Burgos) a retable consisting not only of sculpture but also o^ paintings that possibly ought to be classified among the loosely interlinked works that have puzzled us in the immediately preceding paragraphs. The altarpiece at Palazuelos, probably a creation of the Sinobas Master, is perhaps the nearest analogue. Neither my notes, however, nor the two photographs that I have subsequently obtained are sufficient to solve finally the problem of the affiliations of the panels at Arenillas, which even exhibit a few, though again indecisive, resemblances to the works of the painter who was active in the adjoining province of Valladolid, the Arévalo Master. I am obliged to confess also that I failed to tabulate the themes of the retable, and the photographs (Fig. 267) reveal no more than that at least some of them have to do with a virgin martyr. In the church at Rupelo, southeast of Burgos, there is preserved a single panel of the Assumption for which, if under duress one was absolutely compelled to make an attribution, the likeliest guess would perhaps be the Belorado Master, who was employed at near-lying Cascajares de la Sierra. The high altar of the farroquia at Cerezo de Riotirón, directly east of Burgos on the frontier of the province, is surmounted by an elaborate retable to which sculpture, painting, and belated Gothic architecture contribute their quotas. In the body of the structure the eight, painted panels from the life of the Virgin have been so barbarously and entirely daubed over by some modern botcher that it would have been less poignantly tragic if they had been wholly destroyed j and at the time of my visit to the place they were covered with fairly creditable canvases by some artist of the later Renaissance. From the original

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665

paintings there thus remain to us only pieces of the predella consisting in half-lengths of Prophets, at the right Zechariah and David and at the left ( F i g . 268) Balaam ( ? ) and a Hebrew king who, as balancing David, may represent Solomon. W e l l executed works of the early Cinquecento, with the figures relieved against beautifully tooled gold

FIG. 268. SCHOOL OF BURGOS, E A R L Y SIXT E E N T H C E N T U R Y . B A L A A M ( r ) , SECTION OF P R E D E L L A OF R E T A B L E . P A R I S H CHURCH, CEREZO DE RIOTIRÓN {Photo. Archivo Regional, Burgos)

backgrounds, they do not supply enough evidence for an attribution, but both the Durham Master and the Mambrillas Master would be at least possibilities. Likewise I fail to recognize the more mediocre craftsman who did the paintings that join with sculpture to form the retable of the cafilla mayor in the church at Alcocero, south of Briviesca.'^ There are a few, * Huidobro, in my opinion wrongly, suggests León Picardo as the author: see above, p. 633, n. 2. In volume VI, p. 640, we studied the panels over a lateral altar in the church by a follower of Alonso de Sedano.

FIG. 269. SCHOOL OF BURGOS, EARLY SIXTEENTH CENTURY. PROVING OF T H E TRUE CROSS, SECTION OF RETABLE OF HIGH ALTAR. PARISH CHURCH, ALCOCERO (Photo.

Archivo

Regional,

Burgos)

FIG. 270. SPANISH SCHOOL, E A R L Y S I X T E E N T H C E N T U R Y . P U R I F I C A TION, SECTION OF R E T A B L E . PARISH CHURCH, Q U I N T A N A D U E Ñ A S {Photo. Archivo Regional, Burgos)

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rather precise correspondences with the productions of the Gamonal Master, but the ties with his manner are insufficient to f o r m a bridge leading us to him. T h e subjects of the paintings in the lowest tier are the Last Supper and the A g o n y in the Garden, but the two upper tiers are devoted to the history of the H o l y Cross. W e first encounter St. H e l e n interrogating the future St. Quiriacus about the spot where the Cross was buried ; in the background of the next compartment, the precious relic is excavated, whereas the foreground is occupied by the scene of St. H e l e n directing the segregation of the true Cross f r o m the gibbets of the thieves through the test of the miracle of resurrection that it performs ( F i g . 269) j then (in the presence of the kneeling, clerical donor of the retable) the mounted Heraclius is turned back by an angel and by the barrier of the miraculous stone wall f r o m pompously carrying the Cross into Jerusalem; and finally the chastened emperor is seen bearing his sacred burden into the city barefoot and in l o w l y state.5 In looking at four small panels built into a retable over a lateral altar in the church at Quintanadueñas, just north of Burgos, and representing the Annunciation, Visitation, Nativity, and Purification ( F i g . 2 7 0 ) , one gets the strange impression that there has wandered into Castile a not too highly endowed follower of the distinguished Aragonese artist w h o m we shall learn to know in a subsequent v o l u m e as the author of the retablo mayor in the conventual church of Sijena; but the resemblances may w e l l be the result of an independent development on the part of a local painter in the school of Burgos, w h o possibly was conversant with the production of such a contemporary Flemish master as Jan Gossart. ^ F o r the i c o n o g r a p h y of the story of the H o l y Cross, see inter alia in m y volumes, V I I I , p. 92.

CHAPTER XI T H E OSMA

MASTER

IN the region southeast of the province of Burgos, the town of Burgo de Osma and the country round about were graced with the presence of a painter of considerable talent and gentle charm, transitional between the manners of the M i d d l e Ages and Renaissance. W e will bestow upon him the title of the Osma Master from the name of the diocese the cathedral of which is situated at Burgo de Osma, but like the L u n a Master whose pupil he manifestly was and who has left us a retable at Berlanga de Duero,' near Burgo de Osma, he may have originated further south, at Guadalajara, Sigüenza, or Toledo.^ T h e fundamental works for the study of his accomplishments are an extensive series of panels now built into baroque frames in a retable over the altar in the chapel of St. Ildefonso in the cathedral of Burgo de Osma. T h e chapel and the paintings by the Osma Master were made at the cost of the archdeacon of Soria and canon of the cathedral of Burgo de Osma, Alfonso D i a z de Palacios,^ and, although the date of the enterprise has not been published, the style of the paintings would set their creation in the vicinity of the year 1500. In his chapel he established three chaplaincies, one in honor of the Assumption of the Virgin and two devoted to his patron, St. Ildefonso 5 and the paintings therefore largely comprise themes connected with this double dedication. T h e fact that the assemblage includes two sets of smaller panels suitable for predellas suggests the possibility that the paintings were originally divided between two retables by the Osma Master in the chapel and were only subsequently brought together in the present structure; but, even if they from the first constituted a single altarpiece, it can hardly be doubted that the pristine arrangement has been disturbed. According to the present disposition of the panels, the highest tier contains at the centre the Via Dolorosa, at the right the • V o l . V, p. 334· ^ Vols. IV, pp. 370 and 376, and V I I , p. 855. ^ For the published facts about Alfonso Diaz de Palacios and his chapel, see Juan Loperráez Corvalán, Descripción histórica del Obisfado de Osma, II (Madrid, 1 7 8 8 ) , 62.

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MASTER

Purification, and at the left the figure of the Virgin standing under a canopy upheld by angels while other members of the celestial host sound her praises on instruments of music or support her body. Despite the idea of her soaring imparted by the angelic pair clasping her draperies, the subject can scarcely be the Assumption, since, as we shall find, the panel from the retable depicting this event seems to be preserved. The intent may have been to represent merely the general devotion due to her, as in the pictures where she holds the Child as she is adored by angels; or, although the usual symbols of the mystery are absent, such as the crescent moon, the panel may embody an early setting forth of the Immaculate Conception. The tier next below includes four smaller compartments, as if from a predella, all with figures in half length, the donor Diaz de Palacios, Sts. Lucy, Agatha, and ( ? ) Peter Martyr." In the third row from the top we again meet larger compartments, in the middle St. Ildefonso's miraculous investiture with the chasuble (Fig. 2 7 1 ) and at the sides the Annunciation and Nativity of Christ. The lowest row exhibits no less than six small panels, with the forms again reduced to half length: probably from the centre of a predella, the glorified Christ of the Passion, whose robe is lifted by Sts. Michael ^ and Gabriel ; the Virgin in a posture of adoration and with her mantle also lightly raised by two angels, so that she was probably meant to be worshipping her Son and thus, as next at the left, would still be in her original position in the predella; the penitent St. Jerome; the Mass of St. Gregory; the vision of St. Bernard; and a gory effigy of St. Stephen, covered with as many of his emblems, the stones, as the array of arrows that customarily puncture a nude St. Sebastian. A large compartment of the Assumption by the Osma Master, now used as a separate altarpiece in another chapel of the cathedral (Fig. 272), must have once belonged to the retable or retables of the donation of Alfonso Diaz de Palacios.® The types, especially those of the women and angels, very definitely witness to a tutelage of the Osma Master under the Luna Master. T h e saint here depicted appears to be a Dominican, but his only attribute is a halberd, without the customary emblems by which St. Peter M a r t y r may be recognized. I am, therefore, merely guessing that the halberd is in this instance anomalously considered to be the instrument of his assassination. 5 If this angel with the sword be not rather the Guardian A n g e l : see vol. VIII, P· 79· ® Into the summit of still another altar in the cathedral there is built an Entombment which I cannot classify more accurately than as an inferior w o r k by an HispanoFlemish hand, dating f r o m the end of the fifteenth century, or by a retrogressive imitator of the Osma Master.

FIG. 271. T H E OSMA MASTER. ST. ILDEFONSO'S RECEPTION OF T H E CHASUBLE, SECTION OF RETABLE. CATHEDRAL, BURGO DE OSMA (Photo.

Archivo

Regional,

Burgos)

FIG. 272. THE OSMA MASTER. ASSUMPTION, SECTION OF RETABLE. CATHEDRAL, BURGO DE OSMA {Photo. Archivo

Regional,

Burgos)

T H E OSMA MASTER

673

T h e relationship is most tangible in the angel playing an organ beside the Virgin's canopy and in the Sts. Michael and Gabriel accompanying the Christ of the Passion. T h e composition of the latter panel was suggested by the L u n a Master's versions of the theme, as in his retable at Berlanga de Duero, in another example formerly in the Gorostiza Collection at Bilbao,^ and in the specimen in the Mateu Collection at Barcelona.^ T h e L u n a Master's types, however, have lost their asperity and assumed a blandness, placidity, and idealization that constitute one of the Osma Master's outstanding traits. T h e reason may have been merely the general tendency of late Hispano-Flemish art in this direction, but, although at this stage in his evolution he does not yet introduce the architecture of the Renaissance into his settings, it is not impossible that he had already felt in some way the breath of Italian art of the late Quattrocento or early Cinquecento. Perhaps the mollification owed something to a renewed contact on his part with Flemish painting, which itself, in the hands of M e m l i n g and Gerard David, largely moderated its old harshness, for the Osma Master's figures sometimes seem to imply an acquaintance with David's works, particularly the midwife in the Nativity. H e conserves, indeed, much of even the earlier Hispano-Flemish manner. In the Annunciation, the Eternal Father appears, as H e dispatches the dove of the H o l y Spirit, in the opening of a Gothic portal the sides of which, in the old Flemish way, are embellished with simulated statues. T h e Osma Master retains also in many places both for costumes and hangings, as especially in the gorgeous spectacle of the delivery of the chasuble, the magnificently brocaded fabrics of which his predecessors had been so fond. When he admits gold backgrounds, the precious material strangely remains untooled, in a reversion to the practices of the very beginning of Gothic painting in Spain. H e is a true Spaniard of his period also in that he is better as a monumental composer than as a relator of sacred narrative. H e tells the stories in a somewhat dull and conventional fashion, but, with his by no means negligible gifts in draughtsmanship and in harmonies of bright color, he is able, when he comes to such formal themes as the glorification of the Virgin, her Assumption, or St. Ildefonso's reception of the chasuble, to build up his crowded groups of figures into serenely majestic, decorative masses. H i s augmented and tranquil breadth of manner is one of the ? V o L IV, p. 380. 8 Vol. V I , p. 644.

074

T H E OSMA

MASTER

traits that again stirs the suspicion that he had already come into touch, mediately or immediately, with the Italian Renaissance. T h e general style and the types render it probable that he was the author of a fresco of very peculiar content under an arch in the north transept of the cathedral of Burgo de Osma. Those who commissioned the painting of the fresco seem to have had a double intent: to preserve the memory of six bishops of the see in the twelfth century who are stated in an inscription on a stone beneath the picture to be there buried 5 and to perpetuate the record of an unsavory event during this century in the history of the episcopate of the see, in which, however, the saint in this episcopate, Peter of Osma, had played a laudatory rôle. It is recounted in his legend that on a certain night he came forth from his grave in the cathedral, that he then aroused two of his successors in the see, Bertram and Stephen, from their sepulchres, and that the three finally summoned from his tomb and drove from the church a Juan Téllez who, having been elected to the bishopric after Stephen, died before his accession could be confirmed by the pope and was subjected tq this posthumous and supernatural punishment by his predecessors for the crime of having permitted his body to be interred beside the relics of so illustrious a light of sanctity as Peter of Osma. Probably because it appeared a severe chastisement for a piece of mortuary arrogance of which the authorities of the cathedral rather than the already deceased Juan Téllez were guilty, certain later writers alleged that his real sin was the purchase of the episcopal dignity through simony, the stain upon the history of the see which is more generally declared to have stigmatized a Bernard who was bishop from 1 1 7 4 until after two years he is thought to have been deposed for his simoniacal practices in 1 1 7 6 . The left half of the fresco depicts Stephen, according to the details of the legend, hurling at the culprit (who is dragged away by a devil) the candlestick that he had picked up, while Bertram comes next with the other candlestick, followed by the haloed St. Peter of Osma holding merely his pastoral staff. The three prelates are named on accompanying inscriptions in Gothic letters, but the erring ecclesiastic is labelled merely a simoniac. It is probable, however, that the painter or those who ordered the fresco considered him to be Juan Téllez, for Bernard is included in the row of respectable bishops of Osma who occupy the right half of the fresco, again designated by the inscriptions, (reading from right to left) John, Bernard, and Michael. John

T H E OSMA MASTER

675

(to be distinguished from Juan T é l l e z ) was Bernard's immediate predecessor in the see and Michael his immediate successor, and the three are represented with closed eyes because they did not rise from their tombs to wreak vengeance upon the simoniac. St. Peter of Osma's body is interred elsewhere in the cathedral as an object of reverence, and we have thus accounted for five of the six bishops whom the stone inscription declares to be buried beneath the fresco, Stephen, Bertram, Michael, Bernard, and John. T h e sixth bishop is also there, but I have not yet mentioned him because he embodies a very difficult problem. H e stands at the end of the row on the right, next after John, thus balancing the simoniac on the l e f t end, and he is said to be described by the curious inscription, Pseudo Bernardus Anonymus.» Although he is represented in the same pious attitude as the virtuous bishops beside him and although even his arms are crossed as if in the peaceful repose of death, I can suggest no other explanation for his introduction into the series than the realization on the part of the authorities of the cathedral that there was confusion in tradition as to whether the wicked prelate was Juan T é l l e z or a Bernard and their desire to indicate that, if he was the latter, he must have been some other Bernard than the one included in the honorable line of succession. It was possibly the purpose of the artist to symbolize the undisturbed rest of the bishops in the right half of the fresco by setting behind them the suggestion of a cemetery with a crenellated wall enclosing regularly aligned cypresses, whereas the clerics expelling the simoniac stand in an interior which looks out on a landscape. A later moment in the Osma Master's career, when he had definitely adopted settings of architecture of the Renaissance and accommodated somewhat his types of persons to the sixteenth century's more exact reproduction of nature, is incorporated in a retable in the Capilla de Coria in the Colegiata at Berlanga de Duero. T h e present church was constructed between 1 5 2 6 and 1 5 3 0 , and the retable was moved into the new building from the older edifice that gave place to it. In the older church the retable had been made for the decoration of a chapel the patronage of which was obtained on October 1 3 , 1 5 1 6 , by Juan de Ortega Bravo de Lagunas, a native of Berlanga who ' T h e inscription is so read by J u a n Loperráez Corvalán, who discusses at length the perplexities in the simoniacal story and in the identification of the sinner in his o f . cit., I, 1 4 6 - 1 6 1 . T h e r e are a f e w , small errors in his description of the fresco, but, so f a r as I can judge from his vague statements, his elucidation of the Pseudo Bernardus Anonymus is similar to mine.

буб

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MASTER

was successively bishop of Ciudad R o d r i g o , Calahorra, and Coria, d y i n g in 1 5 1 7 . ' ° T h u s dated approximately in 1 5 1 6 , the retable displays in its whole central portion sculptures of the same period which have been discussed by W e i s e . ' '

T h e paintings are confined to four

panels, at the upper level St. U r s u l a surrounded by her b e v y of maidens in one compartment ( F i g . 273) and Sts. Marina " and Catherine paired in the other, and at the lower level the M e e t i n g at the G o l d e n Gate and St. A n t h o n y Abbot (accompanied even in this narrative scene by his emblem, the pig) undergoing temptation by the devil in the guise of a young gentleman, whose infernal character, however, is betrayed to the spectator by claws instead of feet, by a demoniacal mask at the back of his head, and by imps peering forth behind him. In the process of partially losing their primitive candor and of approximating a more faithful imitation of actuality, the types have been slightly hardened in features, and the posture of St. M a r i n a even presages mannerism

but the O s m a Master still abides closely enough

by his earlier standards to make his authorship a certainty. H e often repeats in the assembly of U r s u l a and her co-martyrs the faces that he had e m p l o y e d at B u r g o de O s m a for saintly maidens and angels, even g i v i n g us in the companion just to the l e f t of U r s u l a one of the very round countenances in which he often indulges.

T h e r e are several

examples in the altarpiece at B u r g o de Osma of the crowns and floral fillets that he lavishes upon the y o u t h f u l heroines of Christianity at Berlanga, where also he continues to use his light and peculiar haloes consisting merely of two delicate, closely contiguous, golden rings on the outer circumference. T h e chief new element is the architecture of the Renaissance inserted in the settings of the pictures, although the carver of the frames for the altarpiece remains true to the Gothic tradition. T h e architecture is of a stately but rich and fantastic character, such as we should expect of a painter playing with the forms of another major art that he did not understand. H e is so carried away with enthusiasm for the new style that he admits architecture almost too prodigally into his panels, for instance nearly dwarfing his figures F o r the facts about the chapel and its patron, see A . O r t i z G a r c i a , Reseña histórica de la insigne Colegial de Santa Maria del Mercado, de Berlanga de Duero, S i g ü e n z a , 1 9 3 0 , pp. 27 and 5 5 . G . Weise, Sfanisc/ie Plastik aus sieben Jahrhunderten, I, 47 ff. So labelled in her h a l o . F o r the confusion, in Spain, of Sts. M a r g a r e t and M a r i n a , see above, p. 488.

FIG. 273. THE OSMA MASTER. ST. URSULA AND HER MAIDENS, SECTION OF RETABLE. COLEGIATA, BERLANGA DE DUERO {Photo.

Archivo

Regional,

Burgos)

678

T H E OSMA

MASTER

in the Meeting at the Golden Gate and the temptation of St. Anthony by the massive piers, lintels, and even huge bases, with simulated medallions of sculpture, in which he ensconces the scenes. In addition to the brocades of gold, with solidly packed figuration, characteristic of the old Hispano-Flemish style and employed by the Osma Master in his earlier productions, there appears frequently in the costumes of the retable at Berlanga de Duero (as upon St. Ursula's companion at the extreme left) a kind of fabric in which the figures of the brocade are disposed only at intervals over the expanse of cloth. The activity of our Master extended not only east from Burgo de Osma to Berlanga de Duero but also even further westward to points just within the border of the province of Valladolid, where he executed works that, partly because the towns in which they are found belong to the diocese of Falencia, I have conditionally but in so far wrongly assigned in former volumes to the Palencian school. The finest of these works consists in the eight sections of a predella at Corrales de Duero that I registered in volume V I as probably by a follower of the Palencian Master of Frómista. It is true that the style of the predella is such that one could easily be pardoned for believing its author to have fallen under the Frómista Master's influence, but the intensive study of the Osma Master which I have had to undertake for the present volume has clearly revealed to me that, instead, he alone could have painted the panels at Corrales. In addition to general similarities both in technique, especially in the way of representing the glance of the eyes, and in serenity of spirit, there are many exact analogues in the Osma Master's other productions for the prophets and saints included in the Corrales cycle. Sts. Catherine (Fig. 274) and Barbara reproduce the type that he uses again and again for maidens and angels 5 the St. Sebastian is practically the same person as the St. Stephen in the retable at Burgo de Osma; the unidentified, canonized bishop vividly recalls the St. Bernard, the St. Jerome, and even the portrait of the donor in this retable; the Moses also has a counterpart in the St. Jerome; the Jeremiah could be interchanged with the St. Joseph of the Purification; and even the more incisively characterized and less conventionally handsome Isaiah (illustrated as figure 281 in volume V I ) can be paralleled by the Osma Master's departures from his habitual composure in other works, as, for example, in the crowd of Christ's tormentors in the Via Dolorosa at Burgo de Pp. 6 3 1 - 6 3 2 .

FIG. 274. T H E OSMA M A S T E R . STS. C A T H E R I N E A N D SEBASTIAN, SECTIONS OF P R E D E L L A . PARISH CHURCH, CORRALES D E DUERO {Fhoto. Archivo Regional, Burgos)

68ο

T H E OSMA

MASTER

Osma, one of whom, just above the Saviour's head, actually possesses a countenance like that of the Corrales Prophet. T h e haloes are the common solid gold plaques of Spanish painting of the period and not the chaster pair of light rings that we have noted in the retables of Burgo de Osma and Berlanga, but we shall find the Osma Master using nimbuses of this more normal sort in panels in the Barcelona Museum and in the Metropolitan Museum at New Y o r k that no one would have a moment's hesitation in attributing to him. If we accede to the virtual mandate of ascribing to him a second work in the region, we are compelled to demolish the personality in the Palencian school whom I created in volumes V I and VII,'^ giving him the name of the Curiel Master, for the second work is the foundation of the edifice that I have built for this Master, the four panels of a retable of Our L a d y that have now been removed from the church of Curiel de los Ajos to the Museum of Valladolid. These paintings resemble in style the productions of the Palencian school to a greater degree than does the predella at Corrales de Duero, and I do not know that I should have thought of the possibility of the Osma Master, were it not that Curiel lies only a few miles distant from Corrales j but the reexamination of the panels of Curiel to which I was induced by this geographical hint has practically convinced me that, despite the apparent Palencian affinities, they should be transferred to the Osma Master's count. His distinctive feminine type emerges in the Virgin of the Annunciation and Visitation, in her handmaid in the latter scene, and in the Magdalene of the Pietà (illustrated in volume V I , figure 2 8 4 ) ; the St. Joachim in the Presentation of Our L a d y seems plainly reminiscent of the St. Jerome in the altarpiece of Burgo de Osma; and the woman holding the doves and the angel in the Purification of this altarpiece as well as the girl in the upper right corner of the panel depicting the delivery of the chasuble to St. Ildefonso exhibit even the profiles, with snooping noses, that I had used as proof of an affiliation of the Curiel panels with pictures which I had classified in the Palencian school. In the Corrales predella there is no opportunity for architectural backgrounds, but in the cycle of Curiel, amidst the generally Gothic character of the settings, one detail of the Renaissance emerges, a portal in the Annunciation, suggesting that the Osma Master enjoyed patronage in this region at some time between his activity at Burgo de Osma and his summons to Berlanga. Pp. 6 3 3 - 6 3 6 .

Pp. 8 4 3 - 8 4 5 .

T H E OSMA MASTER

681

Instead of destroying the Curici Master, we might describe him merely as one phase of the Osma Master, if we could with surety attribute to the latter the two other works that I had assigned to the former. T h e Visitation in the M i l á Collection at Barcelona, however, I am about convinced, cannot be claimed for the Osma Master and should still probably be placed within the school of Falencia. In the case of the Presentation of the Virgin in the Art Institute at Chicago, I should be disposed to be less dogmatic about an exclusion from the list of his authentic productions, but it certainly reveals traits hard to reconcile with his standards. One of the rather countrified assemblages of panels in the church at Corrales de Duero that I mentioned in a note on page 631 of volume V I constitutes a retable of St. Michael, the main interest of which is that, as manifestly the bungling creation of some follower of the Osma Master, it confirms his presence in this part of Spain. T h e effigy of the archangel as victor over Satan and weigher of souls at the centre is surrounded by the episodes of the angelic struggle with the demons, the shooting of the bull on Monte Gargano, the bishop's healing of the eye of the man upon whom the arrow directed against the bull had reacted, and the episcopal procession to the spot where the beast had manifested itself. T h e Osma Master was With surety the author of another work which is preserved in this same remote corner of the diocese of Falencia but which I have described in no former volume, an effigy of St. Peter in papal vestments belonging to the church at Langayo ( Fig. 2 7 5 ) . T h e head and especially the eyes are delineated in conformity with his easily recognizable standards 5 the furrows round the mouth and chin should be compared with those on the visages of Isaiah and Daniel at Corrales j the Apostle's chasuble and the hanging behind him incorporate the Master's lingering, Hispano-Flemish passion for the decorative effect of brilliant brocades j the figuration of his halo is the same as on the nimbuses of the Corrales half-lengths of saints j and he stands in one of the artist's favorite interiors, the walls of a receding apse lit by windows the glass of which is set in a network of crisscrossed lines of lead. T h e placid loveliness with which the Osma Master excelled in imbuing his representations of saintly maidens evidently led patrons to turn to him when they wanted such subjects. W e have noted the examples in the retables of Burgo de Osma, Berlanga de Duero, and

FIG. 275. T H E OSMA MASTER. ST. PETER. PARISH CHURCH, LANGAYO {Photo. Archivo Regional, Burgos)

T H E OSMA M A S T E R

683

Corrales, and a very fine and monumental specimen has passed, with the rest of the Plandiura Collection, into the Museum of Catalan Art at Barcelona, a panel depicting St. Agatha enthroned between two serenading angels (Fig. 276).'^ The faces of the virgin martyr and of the angels actually duplicate his types for such figures, and his retention of the splendid accessories of the Hispano-Flemish tradition is illustrated by St. Agatha's gown of red and gold brocade under her blue mantle and by the gorgeous textile on the back of the throne. The general pictorial style and the architectural character of the room in which she is placed prove that the picture belongs to the Osma Master's earlier period of which the retable in the cathedral of Burgo de Osma is the principal example. There is still another work of his at Barcelona, a bust of the Madonna holding the Child (Fig. 277), built into one of the several conglomerate altarpieces in the convent of Pedralbes that were constructed from paintings of various styles and epochs. A date at the beginning of his career is implied in this instance by the very Flemish character of the Child, the sort of sickly infant, as if afflicted with rickets in the manner of Roger van der Weyden, who lies in the manger of the Nativity at Burgo de Osma. The Pedralbes picture carries with it into the category of the Osma Master's authentic production a diptych in the Instituto de Valencia de Don Juan at Madrid, displaying on one side a very similar version of the subject of the Virgin and Child and on the other the Salvator Mundi (Fig. 278). In the Burgo de Osma retable, the Saviour of the Via Dolorosa and of the compartment in which H e is depicted as glorified between two angels provides analogues for the Christ of the diptych, whose eyes also are delineated in exactly the Master's distinctive mode. H e apparently made a specialty of these busts of the Madonna holding the Child, which were by no means so common in the Spanish school of the time as in Italy and Flanders. The Perriollat Collection at Paris contains a third specimen from his hand (Fig. 279), in which repaint does not succeed in hiding the entire conformity of the Mother and the Infant with the corresponding figures in his two other Its original provenience is not recorded, but it is said to have been bought in Saragossa, a likely city into which might drift a saleable painting from the not very distant region of B u r g o de Osma. M a y e r (ButUeti dels Müsens d'Art de Barcelona, December, 1 9 3 6 , p. 3 7 8 ) w r o n g l y classifies the picture in the Catalan school under the influence of Bermejo.

F I G . губ.

THE

OSMA MASTER. CATALAN

ART,

ST. A G A T H A . BARCELONA

{Photo. Serra)

MUSEUM

OF

T H E OSMA

MASTER

685

renderings. In this instance they are relieved against the characteristic, Spanish background of a brilliant brocade. Sánchez Cantón ^^ once ascribed the diptych in the Instituto de Valencia de Don Juan to an unknown artist of France, and, among the other, almost countless Spanish pictures formerly classified in the French school of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, there are two

FIG. 2 7 7 . T H E O S M A M A S T E R . M A D O N N A . C O N V E N T OF PEDRALBES, BARCELONA {Photo.

Archivo

de Arqueología

Catalana)

further early panels by the Osma Master, which were shown in the Exposition de Primitifs Français at Paris in 1904 as then belonging to Dr. Brouillon of Marseilles (Fig. 280). Small in dimensions and depicting the Pietà and the peculiarly Spanish devotional theme of ' ' I n his Catalogue of the Valencia de Don J u a n Collection, Madrid, 1 9 2 3 , pp. 170-171. Nos. 62 and 63 on pp. 27 and 28 of the Catalogue of the Exposition. Independently of me, Charles Jacques Sterling· (¿Й peinture française, les fcintres du moyen âge, Paris, 1 9 4 1 , p. 56, no. 1 2 ) doubts their association with the French school.

686

T H E OSMA

MASTER

Christ at the Column (to whom one flagellator is here added), they exhibit methods and types so manifestly harmonious with the Osma Master's other achievements that no detailed demonstration of his authorship is required. A very exact analogue for the Pietà is forthcoming in the Virgin and Christ of the version from Curiel de los Ajos.

FIG. 278. T H E OSMA M A S T E R . D I P T Y C H OF T H E MADONNA A N D S A L V A T O R MUNDI. I N S T I T U T O D E V A L E N C I A D E DON J U A N , M A D R I D {From Sánchez Cantónos Catalogue of the Collection)

T o the same moment in the Osma Master's evolution as these paintings there should be assigned a primal and most characteristic work that was once to be seen in private possession at Milan, a compartment from an altarpiece of St. James M a j o r representing the bulls depositing the Apostle's body in Queen Lupa's palace ( F i g . 2 8 1 ) . A striking similarity to the Plandiura picture in composition, setting, and types is exhibited by a panel in the Metropolitan Museum

T H E OSMA

MASTER

687

at N e w Y o r k , depicting St. Anne enthroned again between a pair of music-making angels, with the Virgin and Child seated on an oriental rug in front of her ( F i g . 2 8 2 ) , a work in which Don Diego Angulo has anticipated me by recognizing with surety the Osma Master's hand. Inasmuch as the countenances of St. Anne and particularly of the angels reveal a derivation from the L u n a Master more

FIG. 279. T H E OSMA M A S T E R . MADONNA. P E R R I O L L A T COLLECTION, PARIS {Photo. Girau¿on)

tangibly than any other production of his, it would perhaps be legitimate to denominate the N e w Y o r k painting as one of his earliest preserved creations, were it not that the tendencies of the Renaissance have very much prettified the kind of scrawny, Flemish Child whom he seems to have been prone to depict at the time of his début. T h e halo of the Child is decorated with the cross feuri that he twice utilizes for the Saviour in the retable at Burgo de Osma. ' ' Cf. H. в. Wehle, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, A Catalogue of Italian, Spanish and Byzantine Paintings, New York, 1940, p. 222.

FIG. 280. T H E OSMA M A S T E R . C H R I S T A T T H E C O L U M N A N D P I E T À . BROUILLON C O L L E C T I O N , M A R S E I L L E S (Photo.

Giraudon)

FIG. 281. T H E OSMA M A S T E R . A R R I V A L OF ST. J A M E S ' S BODY IN QUEEN LUPA'S P A L A C E . P R I V A T E C O L L E C T I O N , M I L A N {Courtesy of Dr. Wilhelm

Suida)

FIG. 282. T H E OSMA M A S T E R . ST. ANNE, VIRGIN, CHILD, AND ANGELS. METROPOLITAN MUSEUM, NEW YORK (^Courtesy of the

Museum)

THE

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MASTER

691

T h e character of the C h i l d is one of several factors compelling us to ascribe also to a late date in the Osma Master's career what is perhaps his most delightful achievement, a small panel, possibly a relic from a predella, that was lent to the Exposition de Primitifs Français at Paris in 1904 by Colnaghi and C o . ( F i g . 283). L i k e the panel of c. 1400 in the cathedral of Barcelona,^" where the Virgin is cutting her Son a shirt while H e attempts to toddle with a go-cart, the subject is prophetic of the naturalism with which the Spanish masters of the seventeenth century, as, for example, M u r i l l o in the Sagrada Familia del Pajarito in the Prado, were to treat religious material. O u r L a d y is seated on the ground sewing and watching the Infant who is amusing H i m s e l f by endeavoring to fit her sandals upon H i s tiny feet according to the joy taken by children in decking themselves in their elders' array. T h e introduction of the adoring St. Catherine of Siena at the l e f t may mean that the panel was painted for a Dominican institution. In both the Virgin and the St. Catherine the O s m a Master has so exactly repeated types which he utilizes again and again, for instance even in the retable at B u r g o de O s m a , that he might just as well have added his signature.

H e rarely does as much with land-

scape, but the Brouillon Pietà provides a parallel.

In the Berlanga

retable there are many counterparts to the architecture of the Renaissance that constitutes a handsome colonnade between the landscape and the sacred personages. In a large panel in the Academia de San "Carlos at M e x i c o City representing side by side St. Catherine of Alexandria and the M a g dalene ( F i g . 284), the O s m a Master returns to his theme of predilection, y o u t h f u l women. T h e emphasis upon opulent contemporary costume would approximate the picture to the later date of the retable at Berlanga de D u e r o , but, on the other hand, the architectural setting is still mediaeval. A photograph ( F i g . 285) is m y only source of stylistic evidence in the case of a panel displaying a half-length of St. P a u l , reported in 1927 as in the possession of an A b b é T h u é l i n at Paris, but no one w h o had studied at all the Osma Master's production w o u l d require any further proof for assigning the picture to him.^' T h e structure of the I I , p. 388. " A note on the p h o t o g r a p h in the F r i c k A r t Reference L i b r a r y (to w h i c h I am indebted f o r my k n o w l e d g e of the p a i n t i n g ) states that it is signed in the l o w e r r i g h t corner by Jacques D a r e t ; but no such signature is detectable in the p h o t o g r a p h , and.

FIG. 283. T H E OSMA M A S T E R . MADONNA, CHILD, A N D ST. C A T H E R I N E OF SIENA. F O R M E R L Y IN T H E POSSESSION OF COLNAGHI A N D CO. {Photo.

Giraudon)

FIG. 284. T H E OSMA MASTER. STS. C A T H E R I N E AND M A R Y MAGDALENE. ACADEMIA DE SAN CARLOS, MEXICO C I T Y

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T H E OSMA MASTER

Apostle's face corresponds exactly to his norm for older men, and the halo belongs to the delicately ornate class that he occasionally affects. The chief significance of the panel is that, like the Brouillon Pietà and the Colnaghi Madonna, it reveals the Master's ability in landscape, of which his other works give us only inklings. One of

F i c . 285. T H E O S M A M A S T E R . S T . P A U L . T H U É L I N COLLECTION, PARIS {Courtesy

of tiie Frick Art Reference

Library)

St. Paul's hands lifts the hilt of his emblem, the sword, and the other is covered with a bordered cloth by which he grasps its blade, not, I think, meant to represent the veil that he received from Plautilla to bind his eyes at his decapitation but rather the ritualistic veil with which sacred relics were held. T h e blade is inscribed with a series of letters that the photograph is not sufficiently clear for me to decipher, but, even if they were legible, similar instances ^^ have shown us that if it ever existed, it must have been a later addition, since this Flemish master of the early fifteenth century cannot conceivably have been the author. ^^Vols. IV, p. 462, and V, p. 48.

Fie. 286. T H E OSMA M A S T E R ( ? ) . EPIPHANY AND ASSUMPTION. MUSEO ARQUEOLÓGICO, MADRID {Photo. Ruiz Vernaccï)

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T H E OSMA MASTER

we could not decide whether they embodied the name of the painter or of a blade-smith. It would probably be easier to discern with confidence his handicraft in two rather small panels in the Archaeological Museum at Madrid, representing the Epiphany and Assumption, if their original condition had not been lamentably impaired by deterioration and repaint (Fig. 286).^^ His types and methods, however, would seem to defy the alterations that these pictures have undergone. W e often meet in his authenticated creations the countenances of the Virgin and angels, especially of the angel, with the Master's characteristically alert eyes, in the upper right corner of the Assumption. For the Christ of the Epiphany there is inflicted upon us another anaemic infant. Both panels incorporate his frequent tendency to fill his compositions entirely with figures. ^^ M . Dieulafoy {Art in Sfain and Portugal, Ars Una series, New Y o r k , 1 9 1 3 , pp. 1 8 4 and 1 8 8 ) seems to mean that they are parts of a triptych and that they come from Daroca in A r a g o n ; but, since there are no grounds f o r his reference to a triptych, it is not necessary to talee seriously his allegation of an Aragonese provenience. T h e probability is that he alluded in the text (p. 1 8 4 ) to the retable of Sts. Martin, Sylvester, and Susanna at Daroca, produced in Bennejo's shop (see my vol. V , p. 1 9 5 ) , and that by an oversight there was printed (p. 1 8 8 ) as an illustration of a section of this retable the Epiphany of the Archaeological Museum.

CHAPTER XII JUAN DE

PEREDA

considerable but not absolute equanimity we may attach this name to a painter whose ascertained activity focused at Sigüenza and extended to territory within range of this city's influence and who, although he proceeded very far along the paths of the mature, Roman Renaissance, yet retained enough links with the style transitional in Spain between the Hispano-Flemish manner and fully evolved Italianism to justify his inclusion in the present volume. T h e evidence for dubbing him Juan de Pereda is provided by a small painted altarpiece in a niche at the lower centre of the huge architectural and sculptural retable in the chapel of Sta. Librada in the cathedral of Sigüenza that also enshrines this virgin martyr's relics. In his monograph on the church ^ Manuel Pérez-Villamil records, unfortunately without quoting the document upon which his statement is based, that in 1 5 2 5 - 1 5 2 6 Juan de Pereda "painted the retable of Sta. Librada for 31003 maravedís" ; and he therefore concludes ^ that Pereda was the author of the six small, painted panels that comprise the altarpiece. Mayer and Tormo " come to the same conclusion, the latter pointing out that the sums given to Juan de Borgoña for his various paintings at Toledo demonstrate 31003 maravedís to have been a just remuneration for the panels at Sigüenza. We cannot, however, entirely neglect the possibility that it was only for the folychromy of the great, framing retable of architecture and sculpture that Pereda was paid, with the corollary that the inner, painted altarpiece might have been executed by someone elsej and indeed the very financial books which Tormo WITH

' In his little monograph on Sigüenza published by the Patronato Nacional del T u r i s m o , T o r m o ( p . 4 0 ) states, on what authority I have not been able to learn, that the name is Juan de Soreda or Sorera instead of Pereda, and Sánchez Canton also calls him Soreda {Promenades à travers Madrid et excursions à ses environs, Madrid 1 9 3 2 , p. 1 6 5 ) ; but I am informed that neither scholar now holds to the f o r m Soreda or Sorera, and I note that Gómez-Moreno calls the artist Pereda in his recent book of 1941, Las Águilas del Renacimiento Español, p. 1 6 6 . 'La catedral de Sigüenza, M a d r i d , 1 8 9 9 , p. 4 7 1 . I do not know whether the altarpiece survived the disturbances of the Spanish civil w a r . ^ Ibid., p. 1 7 1 . " Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones, X X I V ( 1 9 1 6 ) , 225-229.

698

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adduces to prove his own contention reveal that, although the sculptured retable at Sigiienza was of lesser size, tremendously larger sums, in proportion, were expended for the polychromy of the carved retable over the high altar of the cathedral of Toledo. Moreover, in the only other reference ^ that we have to Pereda, he appears as engaged merely in a minor, decorative task in the cathedral of Sigiienza, the painting, in 1 5 1 7 , together with an artist called Francisco Verdugo, of the guardapolvos of the retable in the Capilla del Entierro. Nevertheless, the most natural interpretation of Pérez-Villamil's summary of the documentary mention of Pereda's connection with the altarpiece of Sta. Librada is that he really executed the six panels, and we must remember also that Pérez-Villamil, who had actually seen the document, accepts this interpretation. Until, therefore, further and contrary evidence is forthcoming, I will call the personality who now concerns us Juan de Pereda, in order to avoid, despite the demands of pedantic accuracy, the invention of a cumbersome pseudonym such as the Master of Santa Librada. The central panel in the lower tier ® displays St. Liberata (in Spanish, Librada) enthroned before a grandiose and beautifully delineated expanse of architecture of the Renaissance, and above in the upper tier and thus in its accustomed spot there may be seen the Crucifixion. The four lateral compartments depict scenes from the remarkable story of this Portuguese maiden, St. Liberata,^ and the eight sisters said to have been born together with her at a single parturition of the mother (Fig. 287).^ First we see them, during the persecution by Domitian, brought before their father, the Pagan magistrate, Catellius,® who recognizes them as his offspring barbarously but ineffectively exposed by the mother at their birth and who exhorts them to abjure the Christian faith j next, during the day of grace allowed them for deliberation, they determine, on their knees in prayer, that they will not worship the idols j the girls having then run away, each in a different = Pérez-Villamil, o f . cit., 470. ® For a more detailed description of the paintings, see T o r m o , the above-mentioned article in the Boletín de la Sociedad Esfañola de Excursiones, 226-227. '' F o r the story of Liberata, also called Wilg-efortis, see Henrique Flórez, Esfaña Sagrada, X I V , 1 2 2 ; the Bollandists under J u l y 2 0 ; and Perez-Villamil, o f . cit., 4 5 7 . ® T h e altarpiece, so f a r as I know, has never been properly photographed, but I am grateful even to be able to publish the present, inadequate illustrations, which reproduce the pair included by T o r m o in his article. ® Also spelled, Catillius, and, in Spanish, Catelio.

FIG. 287. J U A N D E P E R E D A . S T . L I B E R A T A W I T H H E R S I S T E R S A R R A I G N E D B E F O R E T H E I R F A T H E R A N D T H E N , T O G E T H E R W I T H T W O OF T H E S I S T E R S , S U F F E R I N G D E C A P I T A T I O N , S E C T I O N S OF R E T A B L E . C A T H E D R A L , S I G Ü E N Z A {From an article by

Tormo)

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direction, in order that Catellius might not be forced to commit the crime of slaying his own daughters, we are introduced, in the third' compartment, to his condemnation of the recaptured Liberata to death j and in the last panel is depicted her decapitation as well as that of two of the others. The altarpiece embodies, in essence, a capable reflection of Italian achievement of the early Cinquecento, betraying as yet few traces of a leaning towards mannerism. One gets the impression that Pereda had not confined his attention to any single Italian master of the period but evolved a style of his own in which he fused harmoniously characteristics derived from many of the great contemporary artists in the sister peninsula. The most potent influence was perhaps that of Raphael. Tormo points out the similarity between the soldier with his back toward us in the left foreground of the scene of the saint's condemnation to the correspondingly placed bravo in the Via Dolorosa (popularly known in Spain as El fasmo de Sicilia) by Raphael and his atelier, now in the Prado ; and, although the general posture is rather common in European art at the time, the analogy so nearly approaches identity that the derivation from Raphael may be set down as practically certain. The numerous futti, often with flying locks, are quite as obviously lifted directly out of Raphael's creations. The type for old men, as in the representations of Catellius, seems also to have its origin in the Raphaelesque milieu. The majority of painters in Castile and Leon during the early sixteenth century were given to backgrounds of stately edifices of the Renaissance, but settings of this sort assume so much greater importance in the Sigüenza altarpiece that they again suggest a direct relationship to Raphael, who emphasized architecture in his paintings as one mode of obtaining monumental grandeur. No more, however, than so many other artists of the beginning of the Cinquecento could Pereda entirely escape the allurements of Leonardo da Vinci, and his women sometimes, for instance the enthroned Liberata and the maiden facing us in the group at the left in the scene where the girls first appear before their father, are accommodated to memories of the Florentine master's insinuatingly seductive countenances. Frequently also the feminine types seem to imply that Pereda had enjoyed intimate contact with the works of Bugiardini. It is only occasionally that the approach of mannerism is foreboded by an elongated form. One of the ways in which he modifies his Italianism is by a delight-

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ful delicacy of craftsmanship. It is probably this characteristic that •misled Mayer into making him a follower of Pintoricchio, but, instead, in this respect he may owe something to Flemish example and thus witness to the generally persistent affection for the art of the L o w Countries during the early Renaissance in Spain. Liberata is still enthroned in the central compartment as a cult-figure in the fashion of mediaeval Spanish retables, and Pereda has invested her with a loveliness that constitutes the finest instance of the predilection for beautiful women revealed throughout his production. Although he tends somewhat to the neutral harmonies of the Roman Renaissance, the deep red of the enthroned martyr's vesture is echoed in the somewhat ruddy tonality of all the panels, which distinguishes them from their Italian prototypes and possibly should be interpreted as an indigenous quality. Tormo ventures the guess that Pereda may have been Portuguese, probably for no other reason than that the bishop of Sigiienza who ordered the decoration of the chapel of Sta. Librada, Don Fadrique de Portugal, was of Lusitanian origin. Diego Angulo " makes of him a Toledan, on what authority I do not know. If he was not a native of some province of western Spain, there would be the possibility that he came from near-lying Aragon, which at the first of the fifteenth century had probably supplied Sigiienza with at least one artist." I have found, however, no mention of a painter, Juan de Pereda, in the published Aragonese records. The theory of Aragonese affiliations receives some support from the provenience of another series of paintings which he surely executed, three panels that are now in the Museum of Soria but originally graced the monastery of Santa Maria de Huerta in the southeastern corner of the province of Soria on the very edge of the province of Saragossa. It is to be remembered, however, that a Castilian artist of the Hispano-Flemish period, the Luna Master, had found patronage both at Sigiienza and in the province of Soria at Berlanga de Duero, although in this instance the inclusion of Berlanga in the diocese of Sigiienza may have been a contributing r e a s o n . T h e panels, probably once parts of a retable, depict the Nativity, Epiphany (Fig. 288), and Assumption. The repetition of the types found in the altarpiece of Sta. Librada makes the attribution of these panels to Pereda manSee below, p. 705, n. 14. " V o l s . I l l , pp. 1 7 5 - 1 7 6 and 3 3 0 - 3 3 2 ; IV, 6 3 7 - 6 3 8 ; and VI, 600. B. Taracena and J . Tudela, Soria, Soria, 1928, p. 100. " V o l . V, p. 334.

FIG. 288. J U A N D E PEREDA. EPIPHANY AND ASSUMPTION. MUSEUM, SORIA

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datory. T h e Virgin's face in the Epiphany, for instance, reproduces a kind of countenance, with one lock straggling loose from the coiffure, that w e often encounter among the maidens in the paintings at Sigüenza, especially in the foremost girl in the group at the right in the scene of their first arraignment before their father. T h e clothed angels supporting the mandorla in the Assumption belong to precisely the same family as the naked futti

w h o throng the compartments at Si-

güenza, and in particular we perceive the identical mode of treating their windblown shocks of hair.

T h e young, standing M a g u s , dis-

tinguished by the attenuation and elegant gestures of

mannerism,

should be compared with the soldier at the l e f t of Catellius's throne in the panel of Liberata's condemnation, and both the

Nativity

and Epiphany exhibit Pereda's absorbed concern with architectural setting. In accord with the enterprising spirit revealed by every aspect of his creations and especially by a technical competence equal to that of P e d r o Berruguete and Juan de Borgoña, he makes the Nativity into a night scene illuminated by the radiance f r o m the H o l y C h i l d , about contemporary with Correggio's and Beccafumi's analogous treatments of the subject and certainly in anticipation of Jacopo Bassano's nocturnal studies. It is particularly Beccafumi that he here resembles in his desire for weird flashes of effulgence, and he solves the problems of lighting thus presented to him with considerable adroitness.

The

Flemings of the period, however, for instance Gossart, Jan Joest, and the A n t w e r p mannerists, were lavishing much effort upon the illusion of nocturnal effects, and the landscape of the Nativity likewise suggests that P e r e d a did not develop his style without some k n o w l e d g e of the northern Renaissance. H u n g in various spots in the Colegiata of S. P e d r o at Soria there are three panels that I am v e r y much inclined to claim for Juan de Pereda and even to guess to be sections f r o m the same retable as the pieces in the M u s e u m . O f an Annunciation and of a somewhat larger compartment that was probably once the centre of the retable and displays the Italian theme of the enthroned M a d o n n a and C h i l d with the infant Baptist and two angels, I have no photographs, but the notes which I took the last time I visited the church tell me that then, fresh f r o m examining the series in the M u s e u m , I was strongly under the impression that the author of this series was responsible also for all three pictures in S. Pedro. T h e photograph that I myself took of the

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third panel, the Purification, is too inferior a performance for publication but nevertheless sufficiently clear to fortify the opinion that I derived from the original in regard to the attribution. T h e Virgin in the middle behind the table in the Purification is so nearly a replica, in type and headdress, of Our Lady of the Assumption in the Museum that I cannot believe in anything less than execution by the same master. The Child, whose body is modelled in chiaroscuro with unusual care, is repeated from the episodes of the Nativity and Epiphany, but H e is here invested with something of the precocious piety that betokens the strained sentiment which disfigures so much of the art of the early sixteenth century in Italy. The color, as in the works of Pereda that we have already studied, has sacrificed something of the brilliant richness of the late mediaeval manner in favor of the colder and greyer tonalities of the Roman Renaissance. The architectural interest now focuses in a kind of low colonnade of Lombard candelabrum-shafts at the back of the hall in which the ceremony takes place. T h e old love of mediaeval Spain for formal magnificence in its pictures, however, died hard and has interrupted the space in the middle of the colonnade with a great expanse of gold against the rear wall. Upon the gold is drawn an elaborate architectural design, including a Plateresque portal, but what the artist meant this whole passage to represent I cannot divine. Since also the priest (or is it Simeon?) wears a vestment of the gold brocade that so often sparkles forth in the productions of the earlier, Hispano-Flemish school and since the composition largely maintains the simple arrangement and rigid lines of more primitive art, the panel of the Purification joins with the Assumption in the Museum and with the central compartment of the Sigiienza altarpiece to show that we have not been wrong in including Pereda among the Spanish painters who were only transitional to the High Renaissance. The composition for the Purification resembles somewhat Juan de Borgoña's treatments of the theme but not to such an extent, in view of the general similarity in all versions of the subject about 1500, that we need postulate a debt of Pereda to his contemporary at Toledo; nor is it possible to detect in his output any vital dependence upon Pedro Berruguete. The whole picture is worthy of his already demonstrated proficiency, especially the incisive individualization of the St. Joseph into a virtual portrait, the pains that he has successfully spent upon rendering the ideal beauty of the deacon attendant upon the

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priest, and the deftness, as of a miniaturist, with which he has featured the two hanging lamps that decorate the Temple. For my analysis of this painting I am partly indebted to Mrs. Delphine Fitz Darby, who undertook a study of it at my suggestion. Tormo (Boletm de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones, X X V I , 1 9 1 8 , pp. 1 2 4 - 1 2 5 ) suggests that Pereda may have executed the Flagellation, No. 1925 of the Prado, but I postpone its discussion to volume X , since I am inclined to agree with Angulo's assignment to the Andalusian school {Anales de la Universidad Hispalense, II, 2, 1939, p. 5 8 ) .

CHAPTER XIII ANDRÉS LÓPEZ AND ANTONIO D E

VEGA

THE break is so negligible in the chain of evidence which connects an assemblage of extant panels with Andrés L ó p e z and Antonio de Vega, the principal painters whose activity in the early Renaissance centered at Segovia, that, as in the similar case of Juan de Pereda at Sigüenza, we may ascribe the style embodied in the panels to them without the constant annoyance of qualifying phrases. Since this style is homogeneous, it is quite as impossible to distinguish the hand of one partner from the other as in the works of the Aragonese masters, Salvador R o i g and Juan Rius.' T h e panels in question are found in the church of the Trinidad at Segovia, the majority built into the sides of the baroque retable in the chapel of the Campo family and two others last seen by me hanging at the left of the nave near the pulpit, but the style and other considerations which we shall subsequently adduce show that they were all originally parts of a single altarpiece. T h e subjects of the compartments in the retable of the Campo chapel are mainly paired effigies of saints, Sebastian and Catherine, Onuphrius and John Baptist, and Peter and John Evangelist; but the fourth panel, at the lower right, unfolds the scene of the Mass of St. Gregory. T h e sections in the nave of the church ( F i g . 289) are the centre of the original altarpiece, depicting the Madonna enthroned amidst musical angels, and a narrative compartment displaying the Meeting at the Golden Gate. T h e Marqués de L o z o y a ^ has summarized and in part quoted the documents that with practical certainty reveal the panels' authors to have been Andrés L ó p e z and Antonio de Vega. On November 18, 1 5 1 1 , they contracted with Francisca, the widow of a Juan de Cáceres, to do the painting and carved frames of a retable in her deceased husband's chapel in the church of the Trinidad at Segovia. T h e inscribed stone in the church that commemorates the Campo chapel's foundation gives the date for this event as 1 5 1 3 and calls its founder, Francisca de 'Vol. v i l i , p. 247.

^Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones, X X X V I (1928), 245.

FIG. 289. ANDRÉS LÓPEZ AND ANTONIO DE VEGA. MADONNA W I T H ANGELS A N D MEETING A T T H E GOLDEN GATE. CHURCH OF T H E TRINIDAD, SEGOVIA {From an article by the Marqués de

Lozoya)

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la Trinidad, the wife of Pedro del Campo, but several arguments virtually prove that she was the lady of the 1511 contract, that by reason of a second marriage the patronage of the chapel passed to her new husband, Pedro del Campo, and that for it the retable commissioned in 1511 was eventually carried out. T h e number of the preserved panels is the same, six, as those demanded in the contract j but only two correspond in theme, the enthroned Madonna for the principal compartment and the Mass of St. Gregory, and the Madonna is not accompanied by the St. Anne whom the document requires. T h e reservation of one of the extant compartments, however, for the Meeting at the Golden Gate may be taken as reflecting the original, desired prominence of St. Anne in the enterprise, and there are many other demonstrable instances of changes in the iconographie programs of retables quite as drastic.^ T h e details indicated by the Marqués de Lozoya in the principal compartment as corresponding to the contract's terms — the architecture of the Renaissance in the throne, the light veil over the Virgin's head, the loin-cloth of the Child, and the tiles of the pavement — are such common elements in the representations of the theme at the time as not to possess much additional probative force. H e suggests also that the substitution of a series of saints in the lateral compartments for the subjects originally intended may have been provoked by the wish to include the heavenly patrons of Francisca's second husband, Pedro del Campo; but St. Peter appears almost monotonously in retables of the Middle Ages and Renaissance without any reference to donors, and we do not know whether the other saints depicted enjoyed any special cult in the Campo family. Still further evidence can be advanced in support of the contention that the extant panels belonged to the retable ordered from Andrés L ó p e z and Antonio de Vega. Unless it were that they derived from a lost retable over the high altar of the church of the Trinidad to the painting of which at this period there is, so far as my information goes, no allusion, they must come originally from the Campo chapel because this was the only chapel in the edifice at the beginning of the sixteenth century. T h e given name of the lady on the stone recording the chapel's foundation, Francisca, is the same as that of the widow who in 1511 first bestowed the commission for the retable upon the two artists, and the rest of the appellation, De la Trinidady either would embody an additional Christian name, according to the regular Span3 Vol. V I I I , p. 250.

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ish custom of calling women after the various mysteries of the faith, or would signalize her devotion to the church of the Trinidad at Segovia. The arms of the Madonna's throne in the chief compartment are represented as carved with medallions of two portrait-busts, who would be Doña Francisca and either one of her two husbands. The price stipulated for the retable in 1 5 1 1 is relatively low, 15000 maravedís, but painters would not be so roundly remunerated at Segovia as in the great towns of Burgos and Toledo. The Marqués de Lozoya has gathered a sparse number of other records of Andrés López and Antonio de Vega, which unfortunately fail to authenticate any further extant worlcs as theirs. On December 19, 1505, the former is mentioned as having performed some task for his father, a painter Juan Martinez, and his mother, Inés López, and we thus discover that Andrés, like Velazquez and many another Spaniard, was at least sometimes designated by the maternal rather than the paternal surname, that, since his parents were living and active, he was still probably rather young, and that he inherited from his father his profession. Indeed, the document suggests an interesting speculation. Because the types of women and angels in the paintings by Andrés López and Antonio de Vega are rather similar to those of the Hispano-Flemish artist whom I have dubbed the Segovia Master and because a son would naturally be first formed by his father, we may permit ourselves the mere hypothesis that the Segovia Master's name was Juan Martinez. On May 30, 1507, Andrés, now a full-fledged painter with assistants, contracted to execute some pictures that have disappeared from the church at Mozoncillo, just north of Segovia. The only supplementary appearances of Antonio de Vega in the archives have to do with his financial transactions in 1506 and 1508. The two partners turn out to be competent but not inspired artists in whom lessons from the Flemish painters of the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries, in particular perhaps Quentin Vol. I V , pp. 4 5 1 ff. T h e series of panels in the Prado by the Segovia Master the provenience of which is reported by Sentenach to be T o l e d o are definitely stated by T o r m o {EL desarrollo de la fintura española del siglo XVI, M a d r i d , 1 9 0 2 , p. 2 3 ) to come from Uclés, and his title for the Segovia Master is therefore " e l anonimo de U c l é s " ; but (Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones, X X V I I , 1 9 1 9 , p. 2 0 6 ) he agrees with me and others in the attribution of the Prado series to the painter who did the St. Ildefonso panel at Segovia, i.e., my Segovia Master. W. Schöne (Oteric Bouts und seine Schule, Berlin, 1 9 3 8 , pp. 1 5 3 - 1 5 4 ) believes that a lost work of Bouts inspired the panel in the series depicting St. Anthony's maltreatment by demons, which has been generally (but, according to him, w r o n g l y ) supposed to be based at least partially upon one of Schongauer's prints.

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Matsys, are very much modified by an acquaintance with the manner of Raphael and other Italians. E v e n the landscape of the M e e t i n g at the Golden Gate recalls that of Raphael's practically synchronous Madonna of Foligno.

One gets the impression, however, that in their

adaptation of the Italian Renaissance they may have owed a good deal to Juan de Borgoña. T h e types of persons resemble those of the Osma Master but not to such a degree as to predicate any interrelation. T h e women and angels depicted by Santa C r u z also have similar countenances, and Tormo,5 before the Marqués de L o z o y a published the documentary evidence, tentatively attributed the series in the church of the Trinidad to this artist ; but the faces in the creations of Andrés L ó p e z and Antonio de V e g a reflect less than those of Santa C r u z a dependence upon Flemish sources. A n opulent interpretation of the architecture of the Renaissance, as so often in the paintings of the period, plays a large part in the settings that the two associates give to their figures. T h e escutcheon upheld by a pair of nude little angels in the tympanum of the Golden Gate is so exactly similar in its treatment to the corresponding element in the portal in the background of Pedro Berruguete's Mass of St. Gregory in the cathedral of Segovia,^ even in the attitudes of the futti, that it is hard to escape the conviction that Andrés L ó p e z and Antonio de Vega were copying this detail from the earlier work, but in no essential respects does Berruguete seem to have made them his debtors. In their color they recall such a contemporary Florentine as Ridolfo Ghirlandaio. O n stylistic grounds the Marqués de L o z o y a ascribes to them three panels which were once in the parish church of the town of Hoyuelos, west of Segovia, and which I have not seen, namely, the Virgin and Child now in the Collection of the Conde de Cedillo at Madrid,^ another Meeting at the Golden Gate belonging to the Marqués de Borghetto in the same city, and an Annunciation (cut now to the form of an oval) in the Collection of D o ñ a Fernanda Morenes, the widow of L ó p e z de A y a l a , at Seville. O f his other attributions to Andrés L ó p e z and Antonio de Vega, we have already had occasion to reject ® the Mass of St. Gregory in the cathedral of Segovia, most undoubtedly ^Boletín

de la Sociedad

Española

de Excursiones,

X X V I I ( 1 9 1 9 ) , 203.

® See a b o v e , p. 1 1 3 . ' T h e C o n d e de C e d i l l o himself refers to these paintings in his article on H o y u e l o s in the boletín de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones, X X X V I I I ( 1 9 3 0 ) , l o - i i , but he mistakes the M e e t i n g at the G o l d e n Gate f o r the Visitation. ^ See above, p. 1 1 0 , n. 14.

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one of Pedro Berruguete's major creations. Finally he assigns to them three panels in the Provincial Museum at Segovia, the relics of a retable from the Hieronymite monastery of E l Parral in the outskirts of the city. One of these, representing St. Jerome in his study, I do not recall having found in the Museum, but the other two I should hesitate to claim for the partners, so far as I can trust, in the lack of photographs, the slim evidence of the notes that I took when I studied the originals. T h e larger of the two panels is the Virgin of Sorrows to which I devoted a paragraph in volume IV,β and the other is a bit of a predella with seated figures of St. Jerome and ( ? ) St. Ambrose. W e have not the means to divorce the personalities of Andrés López and Antonio de Vega from each other, and so we must list our further attributions under their joint names. In this category the perceptive eye of Don Diego Angulo has placed a number of works. T o judge by his reproductions of two in the set, he justly recognizes exactly the partners' style in three panels of the Ceballos Collection at Madrid, a thoroughly Italianate composition of the H o l y Family with the Infant St. John, and, whether or not deriving from the same retable as the H o l y Family, two companion-pieces probably parts of a predella, representing the young Virgin sewing and then as seated in the Temple while some of her maidenly friends display to her the veil that they have fashioned for the sanctuary." T h e Madonna in the H o l y Family is little more than a replica of her enthroned effigy in the Trinidad at Segovia; the St. Joseph reiterates the partial effect of sfumatezza that we observe in the masculine countenances of the Meeting at the Golden Gate; and even the landscape in this latter picture is also very nearly repeated as a setting for the sacred group. T h e types of the Virgin in the Temple and her most prominent associate are likewise often found in the Segovia cycle. I have not been able to rediscover the panel of Our Lady's suitors that Angulo saw during the Spanish civil war as saved probably from another private collection at Madrid and as attributable to the two ' P . 458· ^"Archivo esfañol de arte, X I V ( 1 9 4 1 ) , 4 7 5 - 4 7 6 . S c h o l a r l y c a u t i o n , h o w e v e r , prevents him, because of the lacunae in the evidence, f r o m i n d u l g i n g in m y boldness and f r o m attaching, even f o r the sake of convenience, the names of the t w o painters to the style of the series of productions discussed in the present chapter, and he invents f o r these w o r k s a single author under the title of the Master of the F a m i l y D e l Campo. ' ' F o r the subject, see m y v o l . I I , p. 308.

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partners 5 nor am I familiar with the Baptism of Christ in the Museum, Segovia, where he discerns the same style. M y own augmentation of their works begins with a retable that I know only in an old reproduction (Fig. 290) which, despite its indistinctness, is quite enough to reveal the authorship. The fact that the reproduction was made by the photographer residing at Segovia, Unturbe, indicates that the retable was at least once to be seen in a church of this city or its province. The principal panel is occupied by an effigy of St. Martha, distinguished by her emblems of the tarasque and aspergillum and by the inscription of her name on an underlying ledge of the Plateresque frame in which the panels are set. She is worshipped by a female donor, accompanied by a daughter. In the compartments beside her stand St. Catherine of Alexandria, receiving the homage of a kneeling Dominican, and St. Jerome. The centre of the upper tier displays the enthroned Madonna with the Child, and the lateral panels harbor the figures of a canonized Dominican (Peter Martyr? ) and a haloed virgin. The presence of two Dominicans in the assemblage would imply that the retable was made for some church of their Order. The attribution is sufficiently established by the reappearance, in the Sts. Martha and Catherine, of the type employed for Our Lady in the Trinidad at Segovia and in the Holy Family of the Ceballos Collection and by the facial resemblance of the Madonna and virgin martyr in the upper tier to certain of the angels surrounding Mary's throne in the Trinidad series. Amidst the general settings of architecture of the Renaissance in the retable of St. Martha, the richly adorned throne of the Madonna recalls the example employed as her seat in the panel from the Campo chapel. To our legacy from Andrés López and Antonio de Vega we may also add two panels, probably coming from a single retable, formerly in the Baud Collection at Lausanne, one depicting St. Ildefonso's reception of the miraculous chasuble and the other, the Nativity of Christ (Fig. 2 9 1 ) . It is in the former that the links with the works at Segovia are most tangible. The types of Our Lady, of the angel who assists her in vesting St. Ildefonso, and of the virgin martyrs who regularly accompany her in both the literary and artistic versions of the theme are duplicated in the Trinidad series, and the partners have accommodatingly confirmed the attribution by actually repeating, in the martyr in the right background, the similarly located attendant upon St. Anne in the Segovia Meeting at the Golden Gate. The

FIG. 290. A N D R E S LÓPEZ A N D ANTONIO D E VEGA. PROVINCE OF SEGOVIA {Courtesy of the Frick Art Reference Library)

RETABLE.

FIG. z g i . ANDRÉS LÓPEZ AND A N T O N I O DE VEGA. ST. ILDEFONSO'S R E C E P T I O N OF T H E CHASUBLE AND T H E N A T I V I T Y . FORMERLY IN T H E BAUD COLLECTION, LAUSANNE

SEGOVIA

715

repetition is carried to the point of the identical, casual posture of the body and even of the same gesticulation with the hand. T h e composition is perhaps not so precisely analogous to that used by Juan de Borgoña at Toledo as to corroborate our surmise in regard to his influence upon Andrés L ó p e z and Antonio de Vega. T h e old man in profile entering the scene at the left edge of the panel recalls a peculiarity of the Astorga Master's compositions, but there is no further specific correspondence. Since the figure carries a crutch, he should probably be explained as St. Anthony Abbot, whose presence also in the painting of the theme that gives the St. Ildefonso Master his name suggests that some literary source (which I have been unable to discover) definitely mentioned him amidst the celestial throng escorting the Virgin in her appearance to bestow the chasuble. In the Nativity, the attachments to the cycle at Segovia are not quite so concrete, but its presence in the same Collection as the panel of St. Ildefonso and its virtual equality in dimensions,'^ when taken together with at least a very close stylistic similarity, argue almost unescapably for derivation from the same, original retable and so for identity of authorship. T h e similarity in style, moreover, becomes in places no longer close but exact. T h e two, delicately featured angels adoring the newborn Saviour spring from the same heavenly host as those in the scene of St. Ildefonso's investiture with the chasuble and in the Segovia compartment of the enthroned Madonna. In particular, they should be compared with the angel blowing a pipe just to the left of the H o l y Child. T h e Virgin herself in the Nativity merely shows to us in profile the feminine type that in the partners' other works we ordinarily see in fuller face, and the St. Joseph is the same man, in frontal view, as the St. Anthony Abbot in the accompanying panel of the Baud Collection. In ascribing the Nativity to Andrés L ó p e z and Antonio de Vega, I do not wish to be accused of having failed to perceive a few affinities to the manner of Juan de Pereda, such as the flying locks of the larger angel who rushes into the composition at the left or the position of the Child upon a cloth spread over a raised base, as in Pereda's rendering of the theme at Soria, but the preponderance of evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the Segovian artists' authorship. " V o l . I V , p. 402. T h e measurements of the panel of St. Ildefonso are 1 . 0 7 metres by .85, and those of the Nativity, 1.05 by .85.

716

SEGOVIA

F o r a panel of the decollation of St. John Baptist once in the possession of the Silberman C o m p a n y at Vienna, the most congenial h o m e that I can find is the output of A n d r é s L ó p e z and A n t o n i o de V e g a , but I scarcely dare to m a k e the attribution categorical ( F i g .

292).

V a g u e affiliations with the manner of Santa C r u z are obvious, but it becomes practically impossible to d e n y the picture to the partners w h e n

FIG. 292. ANDRÉS LÓPEZ AND ANTONIO DE V E G A ( 0 · DECOLLATION OF THE BAPTIST. FORMERLY IN THE POSSESSION OF THE SILBERMAN COMPANY, VIENNA (Courtesy

of Dr. Wilhelm

Suida)

one observes the exact a n a l o g y of S a l o m e and her t w o handmaids to their feminine types, particularly the virtual identity of the h a n d m a i d w h o faces us with the w o m e n at the e x t r e m e r i g h t in the S e g o v i a M e e t i n g at the G o l d e n G a t e . It is indeed this M e e t i n g at the G o l d e n G a t e that provides the greatest n u m b e r of similarities to the Silberman panel.

T h e countenance seen just within the G a t e is echoed in the

h a n d m a i d carrying the platter, and St. Joachim's attendant reveals a certain likeness to both the Baptist and his executioner. T h e a g e d and

SEGOVIA

717

scowling baldpate who views the decapitation from the background recalls the St. Ildefonso in the scene of the bestowal of the chasuble in the Baud Collection, and the upward-gazing youth in front of him wears the kind of brocade for which Andrés and Antonio exhibit a special fondness.

CHAPTER XIV PAINTINGS OF W E S T E R N SPAIN B E L O N G I N G T O T H E EARLY RENAISSANCE BUT OF UNCERTAIN ATTRIBUTION E V E N in comparison with Zamora, Salamanca now lost the eminence that she had enjoyed as a centre of painting in the late Middle Ages through the presence first of Dello Delli and then of Fernando Gallego. T h e artists from Toledo, Juan de Borgoña and Juan Correa de Vivar, have left us achievements in the city, but otherwise there remain only works of quite secondary importance, among which the most interesting is perhaps the retable in the chapel of the Casa de la Caridad (also called the Casa de las Viejas). T h e central compartment displays St. Bartholomew clad in brocaded gold and seated in an awkwardly articulated posture against a colonnade of the Renaissance, and beneath, in diminished scale, there kneel the donor and his wife, who may some day be identified by means of the escutcheon depicted between them (Fig. 293). T h e two lateral compartments are consigned to a standing effigy of St. Anthony Abbot and the Mass of St. Gregory, and the predella exhibits in half length the paired Sts. Peter and Paul between panels of Sts. Catherine and John Evangelist. I fail to recognize the author in any of the artists employed in the general region or in the contiguous provinces, but one gets the impression that he might have been trained under Fernando Gallego, whose follower, Pedro Bello,' if he eventually developed into a somewhat better technician and an exponent of the ways of the early Renaissance, could conceivably have painted in this fashion.

A t Badajoz on the periphery of Castilian territory there exists a lone retable of the same period in the chapel of Sta. Bàrbara in the cathedral. T h e name of Nuestra Señora de las Tribulaciones is also attached to the chapel because of the statue of the Madonna in the retable's principal compartment. T h e rest of the structure consists of paintings. On a level with the statue the subjects are the Baptism of Our Lord and the penitence of St. Jerome (with the arrival of the ' V o l . I V , pp. 1 0 8 - 1 0 9 .

FIG. 293. SPANISH SCHOOL, E A R L Y S I X T E E N T H C E N T U R Y . ST. B A R T H O L O M E W , C E N T R E OF R E T A B L E . CASA D E L A C A R I D A D , S A L A M A N C A {Photo. Archivo Regional,

Burgos)

720

UNCERTAIN

ATTRIBUTIONS

lion in his monastery enacted in smaller scale in the background) and in the upper tier, in the corresponding lateral spaces, the Nativity and Epiphany. A modern canvas of the Crucifixion at the centre in this tier either hides the original panel depicting the theme or is a substitution for it. The middle of the predella is reserved for the Lamentation over the Dead Christ (Fig. 294), and in the pieces at the sides assemblies of donors and devotees are presented by saints. Jerome appears in the left piece as the patron of a lay donor, an ecclesiastic, and, less prominently featured, a group of seven in which six also are clerics. On the other side, three ladies are accompanied by a canonized Hieronymite nun,^ probably St. Paula, the outstanding female light of the Order. The Hieronymite strain in the retable accounts for the fact that in its main body a scene from St. Jerome's story is placed on a par with the episodes from the life of Christ. The style is that of Spanish painting in general at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Hispano-Flemish manner relaxed and idealized by the first breaths of the Renaissance. So far as the extensive retouching to which the retable has been subjected permits judgment, the author is none of the personalities active in Castile or Leon at the time with whom I am familiar. At Badajoz a commission to a master from Andalusia would be a possibility, but the search in southern Spain for the same hand also draws a blank. In further pursuit of the painter, one would naturally think, in Estremadura, of the employment of a member of the vigorous school in adjacent Portugal, but, although there are vague resemblances to the contemporary artistic production of that country at the commencement of the Cinquecento, I cannot discover actual identity of style in any Portuguese pictures of the period. W e are informed of two painters of the Renaissance from Estremadura both of whom had the surname Rubiales but neither of whom does the retable's style justify us in proposing as its author. In a subsequent volume we shall occupy ourselves at length with one, Pedro, who has left us in Valencia and its territory works executed in partnership with a Gaspar Requena. The other, Francisco, who has wrongly been confused with Pedro, joined the Italian school in the first half of the sixteenth century as a pupil of Polidoro Caldara da Caravaggio and then of Francesco Salviati, being ^ Not a. Dominican, since the cape and scapular over the white habit are not black but the brown of the Hieronymites. She is wrongly identified as St. Bridget (which one of this n a m e ? ) by A . Covarsi in his article on the retable in the Revista del Centro de Estudios Extremeños, I ( 1 9 2 7 ) , p. 30, η. i .

FIG. 294. SPANISH SCHOOL, E A R L Y S I X T E E N T H C E N T U R Y . L A M E N T A T I O N OVER T H E D E A D C H R I S T , SECTION OF P R E D E L L A OF R E T A B L E . C A T H E D R A L , B A D A J O Z {From an article by Covarsi)

722

UNCERTAIN

ATTRIBUTIONS

called by the Italians Francesco Ruviale, with the nickname of il Polidorino. H e is not recorded to have exercised his profession in his native country, and the Badajoz retable differs widely in manner from what little we know of the works in Italy that he did when not collaborating with his masters. At my visit to Badajoz for the sake of studying the altarpiece, the liberal amount of repaint gave me the fleeting impression of a tardier moment in the Cinquecento than the actual date, which can scarcely be later than the second decade of the century. In the parish church at Calatañazor, west of Soria on the way to Burgo de Osma, there are hung four panels of the early Renaissance, the remains of a retable, depicting the Agony in the Garden, Betrayal, Flagellation, and Via Dolorosa. Out of an examination of them it is possible to wring a certain vague analogy to the style of Juan de Pereda, who was active in the region, but the geographical argument cannot be pressed, since they were deposited in the church from a near-lying ermita to which there is a report that they were presented by a gentleman, who might, of course, have acquired them from another part of Spain. They scarcely measure up to the standard of Pereda's craft, but they might conceivably have been sections of a retable that he turned over to an assistant for execution. Although the painter employs settings of architecture of the Renaissance for his scenes, he hangs upon the background of this sort in the Flagellation one of the brilliant gold textiles of his mediaeval predecessors, and he continues to resort to gold accents in garments and haloes. A larger panel in the sacristy, representing St. Sebastian tied to a dead tree against the background of a wild, mountainous landscape, looks to be a slightly later creation j but such casual impressions are often deceptive, and it may be a fragment from the same retable as the panels of the Passion. The martyr's loin-cloth still flutters forth in one of the flying folds affected by the Flemings of the fifteenth century. So far as my knowledge goes, there is in Navarre only one monument of significance that probably ought to be connected with the phase of painting which occupies us in the present volume, the very early stage of the Castilian Renaissance that retains for the most part firm affiliations with the Hispano-Flemish style of the late Middle Ages.3 This is the retable enshrining a miraculous sculptured Crucifix ^ W h e n in a future v o l u m e we consider the corresponding phase o f the Aragonese school, additional paintings of the first part of the sixteenth century in N a v a r r e w i l l

UNCERTAIN ATTRIBUTIONS

723

in a chapel of the ambulatory of the cathedral of Pamplona to which I briefly referred in volume I V as not exhibiting very intimate links with the Navarrese works in the Hispano-Flemish manner; but a renewed study persuades me that it is after all merely a continuation of the ultimate mediaeval fashions of the region in painting and that it has only added settings of architecture of the Renaissance and achieved a somewhat less primitive conception of the human countenance. T h e body of the retable consists of twelve compartments containing as many standing figures of the Prophets and Patriarchs accompanied by great scrolls inscribed with their allusions to the subject of the altarpiece, the Crucifixion. T h e y are arranged in an order that I cannot elucidate — Hosea, Moses, Ezekiel, Amos, Jacob, David, Solomon, Job, Jeremiah ( F i g . 2 9 5 ) , Isaiah, Zechariah, and Daniel. T h e idea is extended to the base of the overhanging canopy at the summit of the structure, which is adorned with the seated forms of Malachi, J o e l , Zephaniah, and Habakkuk.^ In the great Gothic sweeps of drapery and of scrolls, ш the brilliancy of the auric brocades, and even somewhat in the types, the retable seems to incorporate a persistence of the Castilian tradition that had been introduced into Navarre by Pedro D i a z de Oviedo and naturalized there by his followers, but the relation is still closer to the altarpiece of 1 5 0 7 donated by Pedro Marcilla de Caparroso in an adjoining chapel of the ambulatory, which may represent an HispanoFlemish strain untouched by Pedro Diaz's influence.® I have not been able to discover whether the title sometimes given to the Crucifix at the centre of the retable that now concerns us, el Santo Cristo de Caparroso, means that it was a gift of Pedro Marcilla or his family, but in any case I should hesitate to affirm or deny that the painter who did the altarpiece of 1 5 0 7 was called upon to execute also this retable, possibly at a somewhat later date. T h e architecture of the Renaissance f a l l within our cogriizance, and still others will concern us when we pass to the more fully evolved Renaissance. T h e pictorial output of Navarre in the Cinquecento has already been much clarified by Don Diego Angulo in the periodical Princife de Viana^ IV ( 1 9 4 3 ) , 4 2 1 - 4 4 4 · ^ P . 448. ^ The following are the sources of the quotations on the scrolls: Hosea, X I I I , 1 4 ; for Moses, Exodus, X V , 1 3 ; Ezekiel, X L V I I , 1 2 ; Amos, V I I I , 9; for Jacob, Genesis, X L I X , 9i for David, Psalms, X X I I , 16 and 1 7 , and L X I X , 21 ; for Solomon, Wisdom, II, 1 2 ff.j J o b , X V I , I I and 1 2 ; for Jeremiah, Lamentations, IV, 2 0 ; Isaiah, L I I I , 4 and 5 ; Zechariah, X I , 1 2 , and X I I , 1 0 , and X I I I , 6 ; Daniel, I X , 2 6 ; Malachi, IV, 6; Joel, I I I , 1 2 ; Zephaniah, I, 1 8 ; and Habakkuk, I I I , 4. "•Vol. IV, pp. 446-448.

724

UNCERTAIN

ATTRIBUTIONS

had been introduced sparingly even by a pupil of Pedro Diaz in the retable at Artajona between 1497 1 5 0 1 / ^nd the only difference in the example now under discussion is that it is used consistently

FIG. 295.

SPANISH SCHOOL OF

THE EARLY

RENAISSANCE.

J E R E M I A H , S E C T I O N OF RETABLE. CATHEDRAL, PAMPLONA (Photo.

Archivo

Mas)

throughout the body of the monument in the niches against which the worthies of the Old Testament are conceived as standing. A secondary interest of the paintings is that they afford a western parallel to the exaggerated culmination of the Spanish velleity for opulence incorporated in the Prophets by Pablo Verges in Catalonia.® T h e repre'' Ibid., p. 444. J . Gudiol Ricart {Princife de Viana, V, 1944, p. 2 8 8 ) quotes a cleric of the eighteenth centurj' as stating the Artajona dates to be 1 5 1 1 - 1 5 1 5 , but I cling to the reading by P. de Madrazo: cf. my vol. IV, p. 440. " V o l . VII, pp. 4 2 9 - 4 3 0 .

UNCERTAIN ATTRIBUTIONS

725

sentatives of the elder dispensation are oppressed beneath an unusually extravagant aspect of the heavy magnificence of accoutrement which, probably under the influence of the religious drama, had become traditional in European art for their effigies since the beginning of the fifteenth century. A preeminent instance in the Pamplona retable is the very jaunty Jacob. In a panel of the Parmeggiani Collection at R e g g i o Emilia ( F i g . 2 9 6 ) , St. Dominic stands as the patron of a kneeling, noble lady, whom M a y e r , ' through the aid of the escutcheons displayed on the gold brocade of the prie-dieu and in the window behind her, has identified as Doña Mencia de Mendoza, the wife of Pedro Fernández de Velasco, Count of H a r o and Constable of Castile, the founder of the great Chapel of the Constable in the cathedral of Burgos. H e therefore assigns the painting to the school of Burgos, but, at the time when it must have been executed, before or shortly after her death which occurred in 1500, I cannot find any artist employed at Burgos and in the vicinity with whom it could plausibly be connected, except by a remote possibility the Sinobas Master. A great peeress, however, like Doña Mencia, with affiliations throughout the country, might well have selected for her portrait a painter from another part of the peninsula. T h e nearest stylistic parallel is perhaps Santa Cruz's picture with the royal family in the Prado, and on this basis, as well as by a comparison with his other works, we can put up at least some kind of an argument for an attribution of the panel at Reggio Emilia to his brush. In shape of head and features St. Dominic resembles the supposed Torquemada in the Prado painting, and the lady's face is accommodated to a recurrent type in the production of Santa Cruz, illustrated, for instance, by the swooning Virgin in the Avila Crucifixion, by M a r y Annunciate in the Toledo retable, and by the angel in the Baptism of this altarpiece. T h e perspicuous delineation of the Book of Hours that the lady is fingering and the technical mode of rendering the window and its glass would agree with Santa Cruz's lingering and more decided affection for the Flemish school in contrast to Berruguete and Juan de Borgoña. Since the general character of the style, as well as the year of the lady's decease, precludes a date much after the first years of the sixteenth century, the panel could easily have been executed within the brief, ascertained period of his ^Revista 687.

española de arte, X I I ( 1 9 3 4 - 1 9 3 5 ) , 3 3 1 .

See also my volume V I I I , p.

FIG. 296. CASTILIAN SCHOOL, E A R L Y S I X T E E N T H C E N T U R Y . ST. DOMINIC AND DOÑA MENCIA DE MENDOZA. PARMEGGIANI COLLECTION, REGGIO E M I L I A {Photo.

Foto-Ars)

UNCERTAIN ATTRIBUTIONS

727

activity; but the evidence is far from sufficient for a definitive inclusion of the work within his extant production. Both the pictorial manner and the presence of St. Emilianus (San M i l l á n ) , who enjoyed particular favor in the provinces of Burgos and L o g r o ñ o / " practically compel us to derive from northwestern Spain a predella bought in Madrid and now in the keeping of M r s . Helen Grey Powell at St. Johnsbury, Vermont. Of the four compartments of half-lengths of saints set against gold brocades which hang in front of parapets and between trees, it is the one at the extreme right that honors Emilianus " ( F i g . 2 9 7 ) , and the subjects of the others, reading towards the left, are John Evangelist, the Virgin, and Bernard experiencing the vision of the Madonna of the M i l k . Endeavors at attribution are balked by extensive repaint. One could perhaps weakly defend an ascription to the Sinobas Master in the province of Burgos, but the Portillo Master, the chief seat of whose employment was the contiguous province of Valladolid, is a more tempting surmise. A panel of the Assumption, in the possession of Bacri Frères at Paris ( F i g . 298), is technically superior to the general average of pictorial production in Spain during the early Renaissance, and for this reason and because a clearly marked, artistic individuality stands forth from the panel, it seems at first sight that the author ought to be easy to recognize ; but the more we immerse ourselves in the problem, the more bafHing it becomes, and we turn in rotation to the various Spanish painters of the period without in any instance arriving at anything like conviction. T h e composition, in which implications of the Immaculate Conception are united to the Assumption, is frequent in Castile and Leon not only at the end of the fifteenth century but also, as we have found in the present volume, at the beginning of the sixteenth, and the style itself would appear to make it impossible to place the panel in any other region of the peninsula. T h e student of Spanish art gets a general but definite impression of a relationship to painting at Toledo during this period, and yet, as soon as he begins to make comparisons with the works of the masters there active, he cannot settle upon a sure candidate. T h e manners of Pedro Berruguete, Juan de Borgoña, and Correa seem to exclude them from consideration. Antonio de Comontes might just conceivably have executed the panel in one of his few inspired moments, but there is perhaps a little more to be said for the newly discovered Pedro Delgado by reason of the See a b o v e , pp. 6 0 3 and 6 1 6 , n. 4 .

" H i s n a m e is inscribed beside h i m .

цщ

FIG. 297. SCHOOL OF NORTHWESTERN SPAIN, E A R L Y S I X T E E N T H C E N T U R Y . STS. JOHN E V A N G E L I S T AND EMILIANUS, SECTION OF P R E D E L L A . IN T H E K E E P ING OF MRS. HELEN G R E Y POWELL, ST. JOHNSBURY, V E R M O N T

FIG. 298. SPAN4SH SCHOOL, E A R L Y S I X T E E N T H C E N T U R Y . ASSUMPTION. B A C R I F R È R E S , PARIS {Courtesy of the owners)

730

UNCERTAIN

ATTRIBUTIONS

persisting, pronounced flights of Flemish drapery, the type of the angel at the lower right, and the nature of the landscape. Nevertheless, not really content to rest the case with either of these men, we might next be attracted, in our constantly thwarted search, to Segovia and the partners Andrés López and Antonio de Vega, but only eventually to reject them. Indeed there is just one artist outside of the Toledo circle who might really stop us at all in our quest, the Astorga Master in the province of Leon, and yet he scarcely proves to be our goal. If other scholars, on the basis of the illustration that I include, wish to pursue the investigation — with, I trust, better success — they should realize that the reproduction falsifies somewhat the tonality and makes it appear lighter than it actually is. The panel of the Madonna and angels in a private collection at Cadiz of which an illustration is herewith published (Fig. 299) may quite credibly be a production of the Andalusian school, with characteristics that vaguely suggest Juan Núñez or his entourage^ but I discuss it at this point in my volumes because certain factors evoke more insistently in my mind affiliations with the manner of the elusive Castilian master, Santa Cruz. The most telling of these factors is the rather stiff, oblique posture of the angel at the left, several times repeated in the Pentecost of his retable at Toledo and not exactly duplicated in any other Spanish artist of the period. The types of the Madonna and angels cannot be precisely paralleled in any work of Santa Cruz, although the angel at the right resembles somewhat the St. John Evangelist, No. 1923 of the Prado j but the Child looks very like the Infant held by the Virgin in the royal panel in this Museum that comes from Sto. Tomás at Avila. Almost as persuasive as the pose of the angel at the left is the reappearance, especially on the Madonna, not only of Santa Cruz's favorite disposition of the drapery but also of his translation of Flemish, puckered folds. In the Museum at L e Mans there is catalogued as an Italian painting of the end of the Quattrocento a small panel, representing an episcopal saint miraculously causing the downfall of an idol in the presence of a heathen potentate, which should be classified rather as a Spanish work of the early sixteenth century (Fig. 300). Within this classification, however, it is difficult to arrive at the exact author or even regional school. The fact that I register it in the present volume reveals my general feeling that it was executed in Castile or Leon, and there are some characteristics that could be reconciled with

FIG. 299. C A S T I L I A N (OR A N D A L U S I A N Ì ) SCHOOL. MADONNA A N D ANGELS. P R I V A T E C O L L E C T I O N , CADIZ {Photo. Archivo

Mas)

Fie. 300. SPANISH SCHOOL, E A R L Y S I X T E E N T H C E N T U R Y . SAINT OVERTHROWING AN IDOL. MUSEUM, L E MANS

UiNCERTAIN ATTRIBUTIONS

733

the theory of the Portillo Master's craft; but Valencia, in the neighborhood of the Cabanyes Master, cannot entirely be excluded from the reckoning. Judgment is hampered by "restoration," as in the modern gold filling the window spaces in the background. T h e brocades of the potentate's coat beneath his mantle and of the saint's dalmatic under his cope are well preserved and suggest Pedro Be-

FIG. 301. SPANISH SCHOOL, ABOUT 1500. ST. JOHN BAPTIST. MUSEUM, ENSCHEDE {Courtesy of the Museum)

rruguete's treatment of such fabrics, although he is in other respects unthinkable as the author. W h i l e again not overlooking the chances of a Valencian or even Andalusian provenience, I am disposed to assign to the part of Spain that is the subject of the present volume and to a date in the vicinity of 1 5 0 0 a very small panel of St. John Baptist in the Museum at Enschede in Holland ( F i g . 3 0 1 ) . T h e picture really affords insufficient material for the solution of a problem in connoisseurship. If it

FIG. 302. C A S T I L I A N SCHOOL, E A R L Y S I X T E E N T H C E N T U R Y . CORONATION OF AN EPISCOPAL S A I N T . COSTA C O L L E C T I O N , P L A I N F I E L D , NEW J E R S E Y {Photo. Archivo de Arqueología

Catalana)

UNCERTAIN ATTRIBUTIONS

735

is indeed a production of the early Castilian Renaissance, Santa Cruz, the Paredes Master, Pedro Delgado, or even Pedro Berruguete could each be proposed with some show of plausibility5 but as a matter of fact there is nothing in the panel that absolutely forbids the hypothesis that it is a late work of one of the preceding Hispano-Flemings such as Fernando Gallego or the St. Ildefonso Master. The several interesting early Spanish paintings in the Costa Collection at Plainfield, New J e r s e y , i n c l u d e a sadly injured panel depicting the consecration of an episcopal saint (Fig· 302) which the general style and especially the nature of the ornate throne of the Renaissance seem to place in the school of Pedro Berruguete. W e cannot reasonably assign the picture to any one of his Palencian followers, the Paredes Master, the Becerril Master, or the Cueza Master. The throne is very similar to the specimen in the painting in the Johnson Collection by his supposed disciple in the region of Valladolid, Castro, who would be one of my guesses for the authorship, although the types of the figures themselves lend little support to this assumption. Other but again inconclusive possibilities are the Manzanillo Master, who was active in the province of Valladolid, and the Arévalo Master who worked in a manner somewhat like Castro's and found patronage in the same section of the peninsula where he is conjectured to have been employed. See the Index of Places in vol. V I I I . Although his name is incised in the halo, the Gothic letters are of such characteristically cryptic forms and so f a r destroyed that I cannot decipher it.

APPENDIX

APPENDIX ADDITIONS TO VOLUMES I-VIII THE

FRANCO-GOTHIC

STYLE

SINCE the merits of the exponent of this phase in the evolution of Spanish painting· who did the great frescoes in the refectorio bajo attached to the cloister of the cathedral of Pamplona are superior to those of the majority of his rivals who worked in the same manner, historical justice almost demanded that he should at some time receive the reward of the ascertainment of his name, and the discovery has now been made, during· the operations of removal of the frescoes for installment in the projected new Museum of the city, by the emergence of an inscription on their lower border, recording· that the refectory was built in 1 3 3 0 under the patronage of the Archdeacon Juan Pedro de Estella and that the painter was called Juan Oliveri.'

It thus turns out that I was

right in my judgment^ that the frescoes should be placed much earlier in the fourteenth century than had been supposed. The preserved Andalusian examples of Franco-Gothic painting are so very rare ^ that it is worth while recording the existence of a most characteristic mural fragment on the right wall of the nave in the partially ruined Ermita de S. Mateo at Carmona." The subject of the fresco is an effigy of St. Lucy, and the date would fall in the middle or second half of the fourteenth century. In accordance with the sound truth embodied in the proverb, " I t is an ill wind that blows nobody good," the results of the Spanish civil war have revealed, among many other hitherto unknown works of art, a set of Franco-Gothic frescoes in the apse of the church at Yaso, east of Huesca, in the general region that has yielded to our study such copious further examples of mural paintings in this style.^ In the apse's semidome the old Romanesque theme of the Pantocrator surrounded by the signs of the Evangelists is arcommodated to Gothic modes, but the composition is still partially hidden by a section of an overpainting in pure design perpetrated in the eighteenth century. From this concealment the wall beneath was saved because a baroque retable had been constructed in front of it, and here there remain two of the original frescoes, on either side of a window, unfolding scenes from the life of the church's patron, St. Andrew. The one at the right is his familiar miracle of the resurrection of the devotees who had been drowned on their journey to listen to his preaching® (represented in this case by only a small delegation of the forty specified in the accounts of the prodigy). In the ' See the article by J . Gudiol Ricart in the periodical Princife de Viana, V ( 1 9 4 4 ) , 287. ^Vol. II, p. n o . ^ See my vol. I l l , pp. 297 ff. ^Catálogo arqueológico y artistico de la provincia de Sevilla, II ( 1 9 4 3 ) , p. 200 and fig. 398. 5 Vol. II, pp. 57 fï. ® See, for instance, vol. II, p. 434.

740

APPENDIX

space at the left of the window he is being led to prison by a jailer whose countenance retains the hawk-like profile of Romanesque caricature, but I am at a loss to explain the meaning of the apparition of a kind of conventionalized symbol in a diamondshaped frame above the prison, which Ricardo del A r c o , the first publisher of the cycle,' interprets as a schematized representation of the heavenly Jerusalem into which the Apostle was soon to be exalted by martyrdom. T h e Yaso frescoes are assigned by Del Arco to so phenomenally early a moment f o r Gothic painting in Spain as the middle of the thirteenth century, but I should prefer to place them at the beginning of the Trecento, the period of the other mural decorations in the region, to which they are related in manner. T h e nearest analogue is provided perhaps by the cycle at Bierge. FERRER

BASSA

T h e Spanish scholar, F . P. Verrié,' has augmented our information in regard to this leader in the introduction of the Italo-Gothic style into Catalonia by publishing a document of J a n u a r y 29, 1 3 4 8 , which records that he and his son Arnaldo then took as an apprentice an otherwise unknown Galcerán Provençal of Gerona. THE

IRAVALLS

MASTER

Beyond my own and others' efforts, registered in previous volumes, to distinguish the almost desperately interrelated members of the circle of the Serras, an important step in advance has been taken by the younger Gudiol ' through segregating a group of paintings embodying a primitive form of the two brothers' manners; and another Catalan critic, Verrié,^ has now proposed, with a considerable degree of probability, a name f o r the author of this group, Ramón Destorrents.

With scholarly caution

Gudiol at first left it an open question whether we owe the group to an early moment in J a i m e Serra's career, to a member of his shop at this period, or to a predecessor whose methods he and Pedro would have inherited; but the differences from Jaime's manner, though slight, are yet sufficiently tangible to permit me to agree with Verrié, at least provisionally until the discovery of definitely c l a r i f y i n g documents, in his judgment that we have to do, not with any phase of J a i m e , but with a personality distinct from him, and Gudiol

now shares this opinion.

Gudiol's original list comprised: the retable of St. M a r t h a at Iravalls which I assigned in volume IV " to J a i m e Serra's beginnings; the panel of St. Vincent in the Diocesan Museum, Barcelona, which I eventually concurred with Soler y March in attributing to another member of the Serras' entourage,

the Master of St. M a r k ; ^ the

panel of Sts. C l a r a and Catherine in the cathedral of Barcelona, f o r which the Master ''Arte

esfañol,

X V ( 1 9 4 4 ) , 66.

' Anales y Boletín

de los Museos de Arte de Barcelona,

I I , i ( 1 9 4 4 ) , 67 and 75.

' José Gudiol Ricart, La fintura gòtica a Catalunya, Barcelona, 1 9 3 8 , p. 1 3 . ^ F. P. Verrié, Oos contratos trescentistas de afrendizaje de fintar. Anales y Boletín de los Museos de Arte de Barcelona, I I , i ( 1 9 4 4 ) , 6 7 - 7 6 ; and Más, sobre Destorrents, ibid., I I , 3 ( 1 9 4 4 ) , 6 3 - 6 5 . ' In his new edition of his above-mentioned book, published under the title Historia de la fintura gótica en Cataluña, Barcelona, 1 9 4 4 , p. 26. i P . 516. - Vol. V I , p. 5 2 2 , and below, p. 742.

APPENDIX

741

of St. Mark also once seemed to me to deserve the credit; ® further fragments from a single altarpiece that I had likewise claimed for this Master, the St. Matthias in the Museum of Catalan Art, Barcelona, and the other Apostles in the Museum of Lille; '' the predella of St. Onuphrius in the cathedral of Barcelona which in volume II ® was merely placed by me in Jaime Serra's vicinity; and the Pentecost in the Diocesan Museum, Barcelona, that I had vaguely classified in the circle of Pedro Serra. ^ T o these Verrie, with keen perception, has added the St. Anne in the Lisbon Museum, which at first

I rightly described as leading into the Serbas' modes but which subsequently ' ' I

was misled into calling an early production of Pedro. Prompted by another Catalan scholar, J . Ainaud, Verrie deduces that the Lisbon picture was painted sometime between the marriage of Peter IV of Aragon with Leonora of Portugal in 1347 and her death in 1348, since the escutcheons of the royal houses of the two countries decorate the panel's uprights. For a single artist he claims only the Lisbon panel, the Iravalls retable, the St. Vincent, the panel of Sts. Clara and Catherine, and the Barcelona and Lille figures of Apostles, dating the last about 1360 towards the conjectured end of the artist's career. In the predella of St. Onuphrius he finds a slight divergence in "subtlety of color" and in a general elegance, and the Pentecost of the Diocesan Museum he condemns for inferior quality; but I am willing to ascribe them to the author of the other works, having in mind the partial elasticity in any painter's personality, the constant practice of delegating passages to assistants, and the failure of most artists to maintain always the same high grade of achievement. Gudiol now

assigns the

predella of St. Onuphrius and the Barcelona and Lille Apostles to a group intermediate between the author of the other works and Jaime Serra. Verrie would like to believe that the master in question was the teacher of the Serras, and, since he has found a document in which Pedro on April 14, 1357 (earlier than any hitherto known date in his life),'^ signs a contract of apprenticeship for four years under the painter Ramón Destorrents, he champions the hypothesis that Ramón may have been this teacher. The activity of Ramón as both miniaturist and a more monumental artist can be traced in the records from 1 3 5 1 to 1 3 6 2 ;

but none of his docu-

mented works is preserved, and he cannot, of course, be identical with the Aragonese painter, Ramón Torrent, who died in 1 3 2 5 . ' ' Since Gudiol's other alternative remains ®Vol. V I I I , p. 562. Despite Gudiol and Verrie, I still believe the figure at the left to be St. Clara and not St. Martha: her costume looks like that of St. Martha at Iravalls, but it is a monastic habit and does not display the details of a secular dress that relieve the St. Martha's attire at Iravalls. The companion figure at Barcelona still seems to me St. Catherine and not the St. Eulalia of Gudiol or the St. Margaret of Verrié. ' V o l . VI, p. 524. 8 P. 246. ^VoL V, p. 260. " V o l . V, p. 252. " Vol. V I I I , p. 559. " Historia de la pintura gòtica en Cataluña, 27. On unspecified authority Verrié (p. 7 1 ) extends the last mention of Pedro as alive to 1403, and Gudiol (p. 29), to 1405. The older Gudiol, Els trescentistes, II, 2 1 0 and 3 3 7 ; Verrié, of. cit., 70; and J . M . Madurell in an article on Borrassá in the Barcelona periodical. La notaría, L X X I X ( 1 9 4 4 ) , 168. See my vol. IV, p. 558, n. i.

742

APPENDIX

that our painter may have been an associate of the Serras at the commencement of their careers rather than their instructor, I hesitate to retain for him Verrié's title, the Master of the Serras, and prefer the less ambitious appellation, the Travails Master, derived from his most comprehensive monument. Moreover, the Master of St. Mark reveals a greater similarity to him than do either of the Serras, so that he would be more properly described as the Master of St. Mark's teacher; and this consideration explains my former attribution of some of the Iravalls Master's achievements to the Master of St. Mark, who, however, is somewhat more mature and more prone to cultivate effects of sfumatezza. Gudiol now adds to Destorrents's count the two illuminations in a Missal belonging to the town hall at Reus which old Sanpere

by a proc-

ess of pure clairvoyance had merely divined to be his production and which I should not dare to classify more exactly than in the Iravalls Master's general circle. THE

ESTIMARÍU

MASTER

The keen connoisseurship of the younger Gudiol ' has justly perceived what escaped my notice, namely that in all probability we ought to claim for this early exponent of the Italo-Gothic style in Catalonia, not only the retable of St. Vincent from the town of Estimaríu, which I have already assigned to him, but also the altar-canopy from the same place now in the Museum of Catalan Art at Barcelona.^ THE

MASTER

OF

SAN

VICENTE

DELS

HORTS

The younger Gudiol ' also champions a single authorship for the St. Vincent from the town of San Vicente dels Horts, now in the Diocesan Museum, Barcelona,^ and the fragments, in the same Museum, of a retable from the town of Santa Oliva del Panadés; ^ and it is difficult not to agree with him when one descries the practical facial identity and modelling in the St. Vincent and in the St. Julian included in one of the fragments. There is thus defined for us another personality transitional between the fashions of Ferrer Bassa and the developed modes of the Serras, with the result that I am compelled to abandon my former, very tentative idea that the author of the St. Vincent might have done the retable from Estopiñán now in the Museum of Catalan Art at Barcelona. THE

MASTER

OF

ST.

MARK

In a long, perceptive, and exhaustive article,' which casts much light upon the problems of the Italo-Gothic school in Catalonia during the fourteenth century, particularly by elucidating the intimate affiliations between the panel paintings and the Catalan illuminations of manuscripts in the period. Professor Millard Meiss proposes definitely to ascribe to the Master of St. Mark the polyptych in the Morgan Library at Els trescentistes, pp. 290 ff. ^ Historia de la f intura gòtica en Cataluña, p. 25 and the discussion of plate X X V . ^ See my vol. II, pp. 42-44. ' Historia de la fintar a gòtica en Cataluña, p. 25 and the discussions under plates X X V I and X X V I I . ' See my vol. V, p. 250. 3 Vol. II, p. 240. ' The Journal

of the Walters Art Gallery

(Baltimore), IV ( 1 9 4 1 ) , 45-87.

A P P E N D I X

743

New York which in volume VIII,^ following Gudiol Ricart, I assigned at least to this artist's immediate circle. Since this article and my volume V I I I were published at about the same time, neither of us had seen what the other had written on the matter; but even now I am unprepared to go farther than the vaguer allocation that I suggested for the polyptych. I well realize the very close stylistic affinities with the Master of St. Mark, for instance in the type of the crucified Saviour, and I am conscious of the divergent technical procedure that would be occasioned by the smaller scale, as of actual miniatures, in the scenes of the Morgan altarpiece ; but the other differences, as in the countenances of the women, still restrain me from asserting a unity of authorship or anything more than a joint participation in exactly the same phase of Catalan painting or mayhap even in the same shop. M y discussion of the Iravalls Master, however, reveals that I now agree in Professor Meiss's reduction of the Master of St. Mark's other, certain works to four, the retable at Manresa, the fragment from Cardona in the Museum of Catalan Art, Barcelona, the Nativity in the Crane Collection, New York, and the Santiago of the Diocesan Museum, Barcelona. I am glad to find also that he shares my doubts in regard to an identification of the Master of St. Mark with Arnaldo de la Pena,^ adducing a still further reason for scepticism. The identification was based upon the impressive (but in my opinion, not absolute) stylistic similarity of the Master's works to the miniatures in the manuscript of the Llibre

Vert,

which have been credited to Arnaldo; but Meiss astutely discerns that what knowledge we possess about Arnaldo does not entirely justify us in ascribing to him more than the ornamentation of the capital letters in the manuscript, and in any case he fails to descry in the miniatures' author more than an association with the Master of St. Mark. Whether or not the Master of St. Mark himself executed miniatures, one of the most valuable contributions of Meiss's article is the demonstration that his style was scrupulously imitated in a whole series of Catalan illuminated manuscripts both contemporary with him and even slightly subsequent to his day, so that there is the greatest likelihood that a number of illuminators were gathered in his very atelier. Finally Professor Meiss desires to classify in the Catalan school and specifically in the Master of St. Mark's circle a triptych in the Walters Collection at Baltimore containing in the centre the Madonna and Child adored by angels and in the wings four scenes from her life. I have, of course, long known this work, and, observing in it analogies to the painting of Catalonia, I have wished, because of its beauty, to claim it for this region of the Spanish peninsula; but I have eventually been compelled to abandon the idea that it could have been executed by a Spaniard from any section of the country and to leave it to the credit of some Italian or of an artist, strongly under Italian influence, belonging to a European nation other than Spain. The resemblances to the Master of St. Mark's modes, particularly to the Morgan polyptych, that Meiss stresses are entirely evident to me, and yet he cannot quite persuade me to accept a Catalan authorship.

For one thing, there is no Catalan painting of the fourteenth

century, either fresco or panel, that justifies us in believing that this school, which, despite its lively charm, remained after all provincial, was capable of achieving the high quality of the triptych either in draughtsmanship or realization of form. Profes' P . 564. ^ Gudiol Ricart {Historia de la f intura gòtica en Cataluña, authority I do not know, that Arnaldo did not die until 1 4 1 0 .

31 ) states, on what

744

A P P E N D I X

sor Meiss himself is c o g n i z a n t of this superior c r a f t and leaves himself the l o o p h o l e of the possibility that the a u t h o r " w a s an I t a l i a n painter w h o e m i g r a t e d to C a t a l o n i a v e r y e a r l y in his c a r e e r . " THE

MASTER

OF T H E

CARDONA

PENTECOST

A p r e d e l l a in the Collection of D o n C a r l o s G . H a r t m a n n at B a r c e l o n a constitutes one of the f r a i l e s t creations of this artist, w h o a l w a y s takes the a l r e a d y delicate style of the Serras and reduces it to an even g e n t l e r unsubstantiality.

T h e subjects of the

seven s m a l l compartments are f r o m the l i f e of the V i r g i n — the A n n u n c i a t i o n ,

Na-

t i v i t y of Christ, E p i p h a n y , Resurrection (in the presence of O u r L a d y , a c c o r d i n g to m e d i a e v a l C a t a l a n i c o n o g r a p h y ) . Ascension, Pentecost (in both of w h i c h scenes M a r y is also p r o m i n e n t ) , and C o r o n a t i o n .

T h e Annunciation

and Pentecost

(Fig.

303)

exhibit o n l y m i n o r v a r i a t i o n s f r o m the M a s t e r ' s other preserved treatments of these themes. Someone has " r e s t o r e d " a f r a g m e n t w h i c h derives f r o m one of his retables a n d w a s f o r m e r l y in the C o l l e c t i o n of H u g o E n g e l at V i e n n a ( F i g . 3 0 + ) , but nevertheless his u n m i s t a k a b l e types and methods c l e a r l y assert themselves.

T h e t w o c o m p a r t m e n t s in-

cluded in the f r a g m e n t a r e a pinnacle representing St. L a w r e n c e ' s conversion of his j a i l e r , St. H i p p o l y t u s , a n d a l o w e r p a n e l depicting his interment. THE

RUBIO

MASTER

I n v o l u m e I I ' w e w e r e m i n d e d to assign the retable of St. A n t h o n y A b b o t then in the O p p e n h e i m C o l l e c t i o n at F r a n k f u r t to the school of J a i m e S e r r a , a n d the o p p o r tunities f o r f u r t h e r study of the p r o b l e m a f f o r d e d b y its recent emergence in an A m e r ican collection h a v e demonstrated to me that it is in reality a w o r k of the S e r r a s ' r a t h e r g i f t e d f o l l o w e r , the R u b i o M a s t e r , whose personality I w a s volume VIII.^

finally

able to isolate in

I n the midst of the g e n e r a l dependence upon the Serras' modes a n d of

the g e n e r a l affinities w i t h the R u b i o M a s t e r ' s style, the a p p e a r a n c e of his p e c u l i a r mannerism of the t w o stray locks upon the f o r e h e a d of C h r i s t c o n s o l i n g St. A n t h o n y (Fig. 305)

is perhaps not quite e n o u g h to establish his a u t h o r s h i p , but even a brief

e x a m i n a t i o n of the altarpiece reveals to us m a n y other distinctive f a c t o r s that w e h a v e detected in his productions.

The

figure

u n i q u e l y characteristic of him is the c r i p p l e d

y o u t h s t a n d i n g at the r i g h t in the c o m p a r t m e n t d e p i c t i n g the resort of the afflicted to St. A n t h o n y ' s shrine, a type often encountered in his output and absolutely repeated in the l e f t s c o u r g e r of Christ in the p r e d e l l a of the Passion at V i c h . T h e a n a l o g i e s , h o w e v e r , by no means end here.

T h e countenance with w h i c h the R u b i o M a s t e r customa-

r i l y e n d o w s the S a v i o u r , f o r instance, is seen in both panels in w h i c h H e is introduced into the retable, and the p a r a l l e l i s m is p a r t i c u l a r l y obvious between O u r L o r d in the Oppenheim C r u c i f i x i o n a n d the Christ of the V i a D o l o r o s a in the Vich p r e d e l l a .

The

central e f f i g y of St. A n t h o n y c o n f o r m s to his conception of old men, especially to the C a i a p h a s in the V i c h scenes f r o m the Passion ; the h o l y w o m e n in the C r u c i f i x i o n are reiterated in the Vich representations of the V i a D o l o r o s a and the L a m e n t a t i o n ; and the soldier at the extreme r i g h t in the C r u c i f i x i o n is p r o v i d e d w i t h a counterpart, a m o n g the actors in the Vich p r e d e l l a , by the r i g h t ' Pp. 2 4 9 - 2 5 1 · ^Pp. 565-572·

flagellator.

T h e retable of St.

FIG. 303. T H E MASTER OF T H E CARDONA PENTECOST. ANNUNCIATION AND PENTECOST, SECTIONS OF PREDELLA. HARTMANN COLLECTION, BARCELONA {Courtesy

of the

owner)

FIG. 304. THE MASTER OF T H E CARDONA PENTECOST. ST. LAWRENCE'S CONVERSION OF ST. HIPPOLYTUS AND BURIAL. FORMERLY IN THE ENGEL COLLECTION, VIENNA (Courtesy

of Dr. Wilhelm

Suida)

FIG. 305. T H E RUBIO MASTER. ST. ANTHONY ABBOT CONSOLED BY CHRIST AND T H E VISIT OF T H E A F F L I C T E D TO T H E SAINT'S SHRINE, SECTIONS OF R E T A B L E . F O R M E R L Y IN T H E OPPENHEIM COLLECTION, F R A N K F U R T AM MAIN

748

A P P E N D I X

Anthony is one of the Rubio Master's works in which his manner is most clearly differentiated from the closely allied but more vaporous style of the Master of St. M a r k . THE

CIRCLE

OF T H E

SERRAS

In the National Gallery at Ottawa, Canada, there is a small compartment from a retable, depicting the Via Dolorosa, which is provisionally ascribed in the Catalogue to the British school of the end of the fourteenth or beginning of the fifteenth century ' but which, instead, is most certainly a product of the shop or circle of the Serras in Catalonia ( F i g . 3 0 6 ) . Among the many painters in this coterie, the Master of St. M a r k seems to me a possibility for the authorship ; but the correspondence with his style is not complete, and it may well be that repaint conceals the hand of some other member of the group, perhaps even of Jaime Serra himself. LUIS

BORRASSÁ

In a long article in the Barcelona periodical little known to students of painting. La notaría·^ José M a r i a Madurell has enormously increased our documentary knowledge of Borrassá, elaborating our notices of the members of the artistic family of Gerona to which he belonged, throwing new light upon his own intimate domestic life, his quarrels with his contemporaries, and his many purely financial transactions, adding names to the number of his apprentices, discovering the record of further lost works by the master, and substantiating the attribution of retables which hitherto had been doubtfully assigned to him only on internal evidence. Of the fresh facts of his biography pertinent to historians of art, the first is that he must have established himself in Barcelona at least by 1 3 8 3 , since it required a previous residence of two years to enjoy the title of a citizen of the town and since he is given this title in a receipt of M a y 24, 1 3 8 5 , f o r a retable which he had there done for the convent of San Damián and the proper price of which was appraised by no less a personage than the famous sculptor, Pedro Moragues. We also learn that as early as December 19, 1 3 9 2 , he purchased his notorious T a r t a r slave, Lucas, whom he initiated in the ways of painting.^ T h e last notice of his existence occurs on October 27, 1 4 2 4 , and Madurell adduces a document of November 20, 1 4 2 6 , showing that by this date he was certainly dead, since it is an acknowledgment by his daughter, Leonor, of her acquisition of the legacy from her father, who had never made a will. Not only do the Catalan scholar's delvings in the archives give us additional references to a number of retables for which we heretofore possessed only one record, thus revealing how long their execution took, but they also date with surety two contracts about the years of which we had not been absolutely certain — f o r the lost example of 1400 at Albarells ^ and the extant specimen of 1 4 1 1 in S. Pedro at Tarrasa."

Still

more importantly he documents for us as definitely by Borrassá two works that I once thought to have been executed perhaps rather by followers. T h e first is the retable of St. Michael at Cruilles which turns out to have been ordered from Borrassá in 1 4 1 6 and ' P . 13 of the Catalogue published in 1940. ^ L X X I X (1944), 164-195. ^ See my vol. II, p. 379. 3 See my vol. V I I I , p. 585. Vol. II, p. 320.

FIG. 306. C I R C L E OF T H E SERRAS. VIA DOLOROSA. NATIONAL GALLERY, OTTAWA (Courtesy of the Gallery)

750

A P P E N D I X

in connection with which, I am glad to say, I eventually changed my opinion, even f o r stylistic reasons, in f a v o r of the master's own authorship.= Second, M a d u r e l l summarizes the records that prove Borrassá to have done at the very end of his life in 1 4 2 4 a retable of St. Stephen at Palautordera, from which there is preserved in the Diocesan Museum at Barcelona the central panel of the enthroned protomartyr that I did not dare in volume V ® to raise to a higher status than of the artist's school. T h e f u l l part taken by Borrassá in the life of his time is pleasantly illustrated by his activity as stage-manager and scene-painter f o r two dramatic spectacles at Barcelona, one given in 1 3 9 7 by the guild of butchers in honor of K i n g Martin the Humane and the other arranged by the guild of bridle-makers in 1 4 0 0 to celebrate the return of the monarch's queen from her coronation at Saragossa. In the issue of El Correo

Catalán

for J a n u a r y 2 , 1 9 4 6 , Luis G . Constans publishes

a contract of A p r i l 18, 1 4 0 7 , by which Luis Borrassá agreed to do a retable of St. Michael for the monastic church of San M i g u e l de F l u v i á in the province of Gerona that his father, Guillermo, recently deceased, had originally undertaken to paint.

The

records show that the commission was soon carried out, but I am f a m i l i a r with no panels that can be recognized as its relics on the basis of the description in the contract. Don J o s é Gudiol y Ricart has kindly called to my attention a fragment that he has correctly recognized as a work of Borrassá, the half of a representation of Pentecost, belonging to the Cooper Union at New Y o r k ( F i g . 3 0 7 ) . T h e evidence is partly hidden by the injuries of time and by repaint, but only Borrassá could have delineated the head of the Apostle at the right edge of the panel. JUAN

MATES

(THE

PEÑAFIEL

MASTER)

Strangely but happily the recent identification of the Catalan Master of St. George as Bernardo Martorell has been immediately followed by the discovery that his slightly earlier predecessor in the same region, the iriember of Borrassá's circle whom we have dubbed the Peñafiel Master, was none other than the J u a n Mates active in Barcelona and the surrounding country whose biography I summarized in volume V I I I ' without knowing that any extant work of his existed.

T h r o u g h letters from Catalonia and

through short, scattered references in books and periodicals I have been informed for some time of the important fact, but, since its fortunate discoverer, J u a n Ainaud, has not yet published his material, I am still compelled to rely for my discussion upon these secondary sources, chiefly upon a brief paragraph in his review of my volumes V I I and V I I I ^ and upon a page in Gudiol's Historia

de la pintura gòtica en

Cataluña?

Ainaud found in the archives the contract and receipts of J u a n Mates for one of the Peñafiel Master's principal works, the retable of Sts. Martin and Ambrose in the cathedral of Barcelona. He even unearthed the record of its installation in the church and 5 Vols. I I , p. 3 3 2 , and I V , p. 538. T h e retable is now in the Diocesan Museum, Gerona. ® P. 274. In its present condition the panel of St. Michael from Palautordera in the same Museum certainly does not look as if it had been a part of Borrassá's retable. ' P. 6 1 3 . ^Anales y Boletín "Pp- 37-3«.

d.e los Museos de Arte de Barcelona,

I, 2 ( 1 9 4 2 ) ,

iii.

FIG. 307. LUIS BORRASSÁ. F R A G M E N T OF A PENTECOST, COOPER UNION, NEW YORK {Courtesy

of the Cooper

Union)

752

APPENDIX

through all these documents dated its execution from 1 4 1 1 to 1 4 1 5 . On the basis of entries in the archives with which I am not familiar, Gudiol states that Mates was a native of the town of Villafranca del Panades, that his activity at Barcelona may be traced back to 1400, eight years prior to the first date in his life that I had ascertained, and that he died in this city in 143 i, thus solving in the negative the query that I raised in volume V I I I in regard to his identity with a homonym at Perpignan whose decease did not take place until 1463. We may thus now transfer to the name of Juan Mates the majority of the works that in volumes VI,·* VII,·'' and V I I I ® have been gathered together under the titles of the Peñafiel Group or the Peñafiel Master: the retable of Sts. Martin and Ambrose in the Barcelona cathedral; the pair of retables from Peñafiel itself; the retable of the two St. Johns from which the narrative compartments are in the Carreras y Candi Collection at Barcelona and the central panel at last report in the Collection of a Swiss gentleman at Paris, Monsieur Schneeli ; the retable at Cagliari (showing that the vogue of Mates, like that of Juan Figuera and other Catalan artists, had spread to Sardinia) ; the retable of St. James Major in the Diocesan Museum, Tarragona; the triptych. No. 19 of the Vich Museum; the predella in the Latecoère Collection at Toulouse; the panel of the combat of angels and demons in the Otto-O'Meara Collection, Brussels; and the Nativity in the Dohan Collection at Darling, Pennsylvania. I should still retain the mark of interrogation after the attributions of certain other works to the Peñafiel Master (and therefore to Mates) that I have listed in my former volumes. Among these is the retable of St. Margaret which I knew only as once in the Homar Collection but which Gudiol states to derive from the Cistercian convent of Valldoncella and now to be in the church of Santa Cruz de Olorde, just west of Barcelona. The abbess who kneels as donor at the feet of St. Margaret in the central panel would thus have been the contemporary head of this institution. Gudiol further ascribes to Mates and dates between 1423 and 1425 a retable of St. Sebastian in the Museum of Catalan Art at Barcelona which I do not recall ever having seen. Moreover, he tentatively claims for this painter who has emerged from the limbo of anonymity the Lamentation over the Dead Christ in the cathedral of Gerona, for which the stylistically analogous Gerardo Gener has seemed to me '' a more likely parent, and the fragment of the same theme in the Museum of Catalan Art in which, while not absolutely rejecting the old assignment to Martorell, I have likewise discerned affiliations with Gener; ® and I should still wish to abide by my old opinions. Among the documents generously copied or summarized for me by Duran y Sanpere to which I referred in volume V I I I as demonstrating the activity of Mates over a considerable period, there is his receipt of February 5, 1 4 2 3 , for payment on a retable of Corpus Christi that he had painted for the parroquia of Sta. María at Blanes, north of Barcelona on the coast, and a few fragments are said to be preserved in the church which may be relics of this altarpiece.« There are a few, perhaps not insuperable, obstacles to Ainaud's desire to identify ^P. 528. 747· ®Ρ·597· ' V o l . V I I I , p. 597. ® Ibid., pp. 6 2 1 - 6 2 2 . ' See p. 175 of the article by Madurell to which we have referred above in our discussion of Borrassá.

A P P E N D I X

7 5 3

the retable in the church of Banastas, near Huesca, which I described in volume I I I

"

as belong-ing to the circle of Borrassá, with the retable of St. E n g r a c i a that I mentioned in volume V I I I as ordered from J u a n Mates on J a n u a r y i 8 , 1 4 1 6 , for the cathedral of Huesca; but it is purely and sadly a mere academic question since the works of art at Banastas were destroyed in the revolutionary outbreaks of 1 9 3 6 .

The

location at Banastás need not bother us, f o r there are countless instances of the removal of altarpieces from a cathedral to towns of a diocese.

T h e contract of 1 4 1 6

with

Mates provides that an inscription shall be placed at the bottom of the retable declaring the donor's name. In the inscription on the Banastás retable, Ricardo del A r c o " read the name as the canon of the cathedral of Huesca, J u a n Doto,

interpreting the

appellation as J u a n de Oto (an Aragonese town in the Pyrenees),'^ and Durán in the copy of the contract that he made f o r me gives the canon's name as J u a n Docho ; but, in view of the difficult palaeography of the period, it is entirely possible that one or the other Spanish scholar w r o n g l y deciphered the character or characters between the two o's. T h e date on the retable was taken by Del A r c o to be 1 4 2 4 and by me, 1 4 1 4 ; but it is conceivable that, if 1 4 2 4 was correct, this year should embody a later recording of the earlier completed order, or, if I was right, that 1 4 1 4 should incorporate the time when the enterprise was first planned. A Latin postscript to the contract contains the information that the retable was finished by June 1 2 , 1 4 1 7 .

I doubtfully

guessed that the virgin martyr honored in the altarpiece might be St. Eulalia, but the one scene that I specified in my notes taken on the spot, the torture on a cross, might apply also to St. Engracia, who is stated to have been torn with sharp hooks before her death. T h e general nature of the subjects

in the retable and their arrangement

accorded with what is demanded in the contract except that there were four lateral, narrative compartments from the martyr's life instead of the six prescribed (without naming the actual episodes) in the document — a much less pronounced change in iconographie program than many others that we have registered in these volumes. Nevertheless, all the little divergences from the data of the contract that I have listed above do exist, and it could be maintained that two retables were ordered about the same time, one for Banastás and another, from Mates, for the cathedral of Huesca. JAIME

CIRERA

T h e curiously large number of renderings of the Crucifixion by this Catalan artist of the international movement and by his shop that chance to have been preserved may now even be increased with an example surely by the master himself and by the master at the best of which he was capable, a retable's pinnacle formerly in the De K u f f n e r Collection at Diószegh, H u n g a r y ( F i g . 3 0 8 ) .

T h e composition practically

repeats that of the version in the retable of Sts. Michael and J o h n Baptist at San Lorenzo de Morúnys. - P . 175. " Catálogo monumental de Esfaña, Huesca, Madrid, 1 9 4 2 , p. 1 4 6 . " See my vol. I I I , p. 3 3 2 . T h e contract itemizes in the predella at the sides of the dead Christ the figures of the Virgin, Sts. John, Michael, Martin, Catherine, James, Lawrence, and A g a t h a , but in my notes I failed to enter who the corresponding figures at Banastás were. Nor did I describe the guardafolvos (if they still existed) which are also the object of definite specifications in the document.

FIG. 308. CIRERA. CRUCIFIXION. F O R M E R L Y IN T H E COLLECTION OF T H E BARON DE K U F F N E R , DIÓSZEGH

APPENDIX JAIME

755

CABRERA

It is a ticklish job to distinguish between the works of Pedro Serra and those of his followers and between the closely interrelated styles of these followers themselves; but, although many analogies to Pedro Serra and Borrassá emerge in a small panel of the young Christ among the Doctors in the Collection of Don Antonio Santamarina at Buenos Aires ( F i g . 309), the attachments to the methods and types of another member of the coterie, Jaime Cabrera, seem more intimate and almost, if not quite, conclusive for the attribution. The countenance, for instance, of St. Joseph and of the Doctor in the upper right corner of the panel cannot be precisely verified in Borrassá's output, but they are of constant occurrence in Cabrera's paintings, particularly if we are willing to ascribe to him (as I am more and more convinced that we must) the retable at San Martin Sarroca.' A scrutiny of the same Doctor and of his colleague in the lower left corner reveals that the actual manner of molding the faces conforms more to Cabrera's practices. The adolescent Saviour himself exemplifies Cabrera's rather than Borrassá's adaptation of Pedro Serra's conception of maidens and youths. In my third volume ^ I wavered between Cabrera and the Valencian school in a search for the author of the triptych of the marriage of St. Catherine in the Román Vicente Collection at Saragossa, finally inclining, though without conviction, to the latter alternative ; but, prompted by Gudiol Ricart,^ I am now willing to change back and give the Catalan painter the honor, particularly as I have never found any Valencian work precisely comparable. THE ALL

MASTER

In volume V I I I ' we finally dignified with this name a very rustic exponent of the general style established in Catalonia by Cirera as well as by Borrassá, and to the extant, recognizable works by his hand we may here add a retable's pinnacle, representing the Crucifixion, formerly in a private collection at Vienna (Fig. 3 1 0 ) .

Several

of the actors in the version of the subject in the altarpiece at All itself reappear, little or not at all changed, notably the figure of the Crucified, the St. John Evangelist, and three of the Roman soldiers, two of whom embody the painter's velleity for caricature. BERNARDO

MARTORELL

Hidden away as a mere footnote ' in José M. Madurell's fundamental articles on Catalan painting of the early Renaissance there has emerged the very important fact of a second documentary confirmation that Martorell was no other than our old friend, the Master of St. George, his contract of 1435 ^ to do the two panels of the Resurrection and Pentecost for the high altar of the church of Sta. María del Mar at ' V o l . II, p. 368. ^P. 110. ^ Historia de la f intura gòtica en Cataluña, 40. ' P. 608. ' Anales y Boletín de los Museos de Arte de Barcelona, I, 3 ( 1 9 4 3 ) , p. 8 1 , n. 128. ^ Madurell merely gives the years of the notary's book in which the contract is found, 1 4 3 4 - 1 4 3 5 , but Gudiol Ricart (Historia de la fintura gótica en Cataluña, 46) specifies 1435.

FIG. 309. J A I M E C A B R E R A ( f ) · C H R I S T A M O N G T H E DOCTORS. S A N T A M A R I N A C O L L E C T I O N , BUENOS A I R E S (Photo. Moreno)

FIG. 310. T H E ALL MASTER. CRUCIFIXION. FORMERLY IN A PRIVATE COLLECTION, VIENNA {Courtesy

of Dr. Wilhelm

Suida)

758

APPENDIX

Barcelona, which we had ascribed to the Master of St. George on internal evidence and which are well known and photoijraphed, as extant ^ until their destruction in the revolutionary disturbances of 1936. By one of the happy coincidences that have often occurred in the investigation of the history of art, the confirmation follows chronologically close upon the first discovery of the Master of St. George's identity through the publication of the contract that assigns his retable at Púbol to Martorell,'· and the document also proves what had hitherto been only conjectured, namely that the Resurrection and Pentecost were made for the retable over the high altar of Sta. María del Mar. It likewise corroborates our classification of the panels among Martorell's later works, but it places them earlier than c. 1450, the date at which we had arrived on the further but indecisive external evidence that we already possessed. Since internal evidence ^ seemed also to point to a moment at the very end of the painter's life, we are once more confronted with the frequent fallacy of students of art that I have often stressed in these volumes, the danger of trying to arrive within a few years of a date on stylistic arguments. Gudiol ® explains the deceptively more mature characteristics of the panels on the ground of the difïerent demands of larger and more monumental undertakings. PEDRO

NICOLÁU

AND

HIS

CIRCLE

Saralegui has now included in two long articles,' as well as in a somewhat previously published epitome,^ the discussion of Nicoláu, the members of his coterie, and his followers which he will eventually embody in his definitive book on mediaeval Valencian painting and to which I had occasion to refer with eager anticipation in volume VIII.^ Since I so heartily concur, with a few insignificant exceptions, in Saralegui's keenly perceptive and important findings as to wish to make them my own, it is my pleasant duty to summarize the results of his extensive and intensive study of the complicated problems involved in the separation of Nicoláu's own style from the manners of his contemporary imitators and his disciples. In all honesty I must confess at the same time that many of these problems have hitherto baffled my powers of discernment. Through conclusively proving by incontrovertible evidence what I had already suggested in volume V I I as a likelihood, i.e., that the rest of Nicoláu's documented retable, the central compartment of which exists at Sarrión, is to be identified with an assemblage of panels in the Deering Collection at Tamarit, Saralegui has amassed a goodly array of material for determining the nature of the master's personal style. On this basis he convincingly assigns to Nicoláu himself: the retables at Albentosa and Pina; the panels of the Aras Collection at Neguri now in the Museum of Bilbao; the 3 See my vol. V I I I , p. 629. ''Ibid., pp. 614 ff. 5 Vol. VI, p. 544. ® Of. cit., 46. ' Boletín de la Sociedad Esfañola de Excursiones, X L I X ( 1 9 4 1 ) , 7 6 - 1 0 7 , and L (1942), 98-152. ^Almanaque de ^^Las Provincias," 1 9 4 1 , pp. 9 9 - 1 0 7 . In a few instances he has slightly modified in the two articles the opinions that he expressed in the epitome, but I take the articles to embody his ultimate judgment. 3 P. 644. " P. 788.

APPENDIX

759

three sections of a predella of St. Dominic in the Provincial Museum at Valencia,' which he has felicitously discovered to have once constituted a section of the retable over the high altar of the Valencian church of Sto. Domingo and to have been painted probably before 1 4 0 3 ; and the Madonna formerly in the Gualino Collection at T u r i n . He is probably right in placing in this category also the earlier sections in the conglomerate retable in the Ermita de S. Sebastián at Puebla de Vallbona,® but the liberal repaint deters me from a final agreement with his opinion. He has some hesitation in claiming as Nicoláu's autographic production the altarpiece of the Salvator Mundi at Rubielos de M o r a . He holds that Nicoláu executed in collaboration with an assistant or assistants the retable of the Madonna of the M i l k that has passed from the Romulo Bosch Collection ' to the Museum at Barcelona, another retable of the Virgin in the Gallery at Kansas City,® the panels of St. Bartholomew and the Nativity of the Virgin in the Mateu Collection, Barcelona, and the Resurrection in the Higgins Collection at Worcester, Massachusetts. T h e scattered components of the retable of B u r g o de Osma ' he removes from the category of Nicoláu's own works to the account of a talented pupil, suggesting that we perhaps ought to recognize as parts of the same, original assemblage the Dormition of the Lucas-Moreno Collection at Paris and the Coronation in the Brummer Gallery at New Y o r k ; "

and to this pupil he ascribes also the

panel of the Burguera Collection at V a l e n c i a . " One of Saralegui's most signal achievements is the isolation of the distinguished personality in Nicoláu's f o l l o w i n g whom he calls the Master of the Martin de T o r r e s Family.

T h e capital piece of the Master is the triptych of Sts. Martin, Ursula, and

Anthony Abbot in the Provincial Museum, Valencia, which supplies the artist with his sobriquet because there can scarcely be a doubt that it was ordered c. 1 4 4 3 by a Berenguer Martin de T o r r e s . "

Under this painter's aegis he places a group of works that

I had classified in the same general phase of the Valencian school and in some instances had even timidly suggested might be creations of the triptych's a u t h o r . "

From his

list I am now quite ready to accept as by the Martin de T o r r e s Master : the three narrative compartments and the two bits of guardapolvos

in the Provincial Museum, Valen-

cia, which have come to be generally acknowledged as sections of the retable that included the triptych;

the predella wrongly attached to the retable of the Holy

Cross in the same Museum

and believed by Saralegui to be actually a further part

of the altarpiece commissioned by Martin de T o r r e s ; and the three episodes of the ^ See my vol. H I , pp. 1 0 4 - 1 0 6 . F o r the other paintings mentioned in this whole sect-on of the present appendix, the indices of my former volumes may be consulted unless specific references are given in mv notes. « V o l . I V , p. 580. ' V o l . H I , p. 75. In another article {Archivo esfañol ¡¡e arte, X V , 1 9 4 2 , p. 244, η. 2 ) he has suggested that the assistant here may have been M a r z a l de Sas. ® Once also 'η the Bosch Collection at Barcelona: see my vol. I V , p. 576. ' Vol. V , p. 284. F o r the necessity now of sepa-i-ating the Salvator Mundi at Bilbao from the B u r g o de Osma series, see below, p. 769. " Vol. V I I , p. 788. " Vol. V I H , p. 6-14. ' - ' V o l . V , p. 292. Vol. H I , pp. 94 ff. ' " V o l s . V , p. 292, and V I , 566. Vol. V , p. 282.

7бо

APPENDIX

Monte Gargano story from the legend of St. Michael formerly in the Ouroussofï Collection at Vienna.'® He advances the hypothesis that these episodes may have been lateral sections in an altarpiece of which the effigy of St. Michael at Edinburgh was a part, but, although I am strongly inclined to concur in his assignment of this St. Michael and of the St. Bartholomew at Worcester, Massachusetts, to the Martin de Torres Master, caution prevents me from giving absolutely unconditional adhesion to the two attributions. I am more willing than Saralegui himself to give to the Master the retable of St. Barbara and the panel of St. Christopher from the Rómulo Bosch Collection at Barcelona,''' explaining the somewhat greater technical hardness by the "restoration" to which the paintings have been subjected and elucidating the closer approximation to the manner of Pedro Nicoláu by the supposition that they were executed early in the Master's career. The acceptance of these two works from the Bosch Collection as by the Martin de Torres Master would carry with it the Entombment in the Provincial Museum at Seville. Saralegui reserves judgment on the delicate question whether the author of the retable of St. Barbara, who, in my opinion, is the Martin de Torres Master, could have painted the altarpiece of the Baptist at Rodenas,'® which, as now proved to have been done for the Ocón family, would be dated at least as late as c. 1420 and therefore probably after Nicoláu's death; but, although the styles are very closely affiliated, the Rodenas panels seem to me to possess a character sufficiently diverse to compel us to postulate execution by some other individual in Nicoláu's following. The only further point at all worth mentioning in which I find myself even in the slightest disagreement with Saralegui is the difficulty that I experience in perceiving any very intimate relation to the Martin de Torres Master in the panel of the Trinity in the Museum at Vich.'' As a mere addendum to the Spanish scholar's articles I make bold to suggest the possibility — but no more than the possibility — that we ought to recognize as a late work of the Martin de Torres Master the impressive Entombment in the church of El Puig. When I wrote my third volume,^" I had already discerned some degree of relationship, and further study has revealed to me other affinities. The head of the Saviour is virtually identical with that of the dead Christ in the predella wrongly attached to the retable of the Holy Cross; the face of the taller, standing woman (the Virgin?), with its peculiarly pointed nose, is repeated in the sorrowing Mother of the predella, and there are several other such feminine countenances in the Master's output, as in the cases of the figure in the first row of the congregation in the pinnacle depicting St. Martin's mass from the altarpiece that gives the painter his name and the two erect ladies in the compartment from the same source representing a miracle of resuscitation ; the Nicodemus at Our Lord's feet has his counterparts in the old man looking out at us in the scene of St. Barbara's baptism and in the aged councillor behind the magistrate in the episode of her arraignment ; and even the distinctive and memorable representation of the Magdalene in front of the tomb is approximated in the boy standing upon a ledge at St. Martin's mass and in the St. Margaret in the predella of p. 2 9 1 . ' ' V o l . HI, pp. 75-78. ' ® V o l . V, p. 284, and for the dating Saralegui's article in the Almanaque de "Las Provincias," 105-106. '«Vol. ΠΙ, p. 106. - P. 93·

APPENDIX

761

the St. Barbara retable. We could resort to the hypothesis of an early date for the Entombment in the Seville Museum in order to explain the absence of entire agreement with the panel at El Puig. If we turn to Morellian considerations, we find in the panel the upper part of the ear delineated in the fashion followed by the Martin de Torres Master; but its lower part is treated in a somewhat different way, and, if one refuses to grant a single artist such latitude in details and deems that the other analogies do not sufficiently counterbalance this divergence, the next line of defense would be that the Martin de Torres Master powerfully influenced the painter of the • Entombment. In any case, the certain works by the Master impart the general effect of having been produced at a slightly earlier moment in the fifteenth century than the picture at EI Puig. I have been led to revert to this picture because there was once in the Demotte Collection at Paris a panel of the Lamentation over the Dead Christ manifestly executed by its author, whether or not he is to be equated with the Martin de Torres Master. I know the Lamentation only in a reproduction (Fig. 3 1 1 ) and have been unable to find its present abode; but even the evidence visible in the photograph is quite enough to fix the attribution. The correspondence in theme accentuates the similarity, and we now come upon such absolute identities as those existing between all the holy women and between the Nicodemus ( ? ) at the upper right in the Lamentation and the figure in whom we have wished to recognize this personage in the Entombment. Moreover, the gold background presents the same anomaly in Valencian art of the period as the Entombment, a patterning throughout its expanse instead of only at the borders. The Magdalene, at Christ's feet, looks as if, like a few other passages in the picture, she had been altered somewhat by restoration. The young, bearded man with uplifted hand, through his resemblance to such figures as the victim of the arrow in the Ouroussoff cycle of the legend of St. Michael, creates another link with the manner of the Martin de Torres Master. Don Diego Angulo has generously sent me photographs of two of the works to which he referred, without publishing illustrations, in an article on Primitivos valencianos en Madrid in the Archivo esfañol de arte/'^ The shape of the panel of the Flight into Egypt in the Ceballos Collection (Fig. 3 1 2 ) , the figuration of the haloes and gold background, and to a certain extent even the facial types arouse the suspicion that it might be a further section of the now dispersed retable by one of Nicoláu's followers that has left us two similar narrative scenes at Burgo de Osma,^^ but a more attractive surmise would appear to me an assignment to the Martin de Torres Master. In the case of the bust of the Virgin in the convent of Sto. Domingo el Real at Madrid (Fig. 3 1 3 ) , even the slight evidence afforded by so small a picture seems sufficient for an attribution to the shop of Nicoláu rather than of Marzal de Sas but not for a decision between the master himself and one of his assistants or successors. Since the convent is an ancient foundation, there is the possibility that the picture was actually executed for this destination, with the corollary that the vogue of the Valencian school at the beginning of the fifteenth century had spread not only as far as Burgo de Osma and Cuenca " but to Madrid itself ; but it is quite as likely that the bust of the Virgin - XIV ( 1 9 4 0 - 1 9 4 1 ) , 85. ^^ See above, p. 759. ' ^ V o l III, pp. 40-42.

FIG. 311. T H E MARTÍN DE TORRES MASTER(R). LAMENTATION OVER THE DEAD CHRIST. FORMERLY IN THE D E M O T T E COLLECTION, PARIS {Courtesy

of the Trick Art Reference

Library)

FIG. 312. SCHOOL OF PEDRO NICOLÁU. FLIGHT INTO EGYPT. CEBALLOS COLLECTION, MADRID {Courtesy

of Don Diego

Angulo)

APPENDIX

7б4

w a s cut out of a l a r g e r panel and at a later date merely b r o u g h t f r o m V a l e n c i a to the convent by a nun w h o had joined the D o m i n i c a n O r d e r or by some other piously minded person. A v e r y similar small veronica of O u r L a d y , with an A n n u n c i a t i o n on its reverse, has recently been presented to the P r o v i n c i a l M u s e u m at V a l e n c i a by a private donor. S a r a l e g u i , to whose a l r e a d y o v e r t a x e d generosity I o w e the photographs, is inclined to ascribe the c h a r m i n g panel to Pedro N i c o l á u , and adduces some grounds, u n f o r t u n a t e l y

FIG. 3 1 3 .

P E D R O N I C O L Á U OR A

BUST OF T H E VIRGIN.

DOMINGO EL REAL, (Courtesy

FOLLOWER.

C O N V E N T OF

of Don Diego

STO.

MADRID Angulo)

not determinative, f o r supposing that it derives f r o m the Carthusian monastery Valdecristo, near S e g o r b e ;

of

but, w h i l e r e c o g n i z i n g the intimate affiliations w i t h the

master's style, I myself should cast m y vote f o r an attribution to his school, not so much because I am troubled by the d i a p e r i n g of the w h o l e g o l d b a c k g r o u n d of the A n n u n c i a t i o n , in distinction f r o m N i c o l á u ' s usual practice of t o o l i n g only the borders, as because it seems difficult to believe him capable of even the slight modification of his feminine type that the V i r g i n A n n u n c i a t e displays to us. He and his immediate f o l l o w e r s must have made a specialty of such veronicas, f o r See his article. De iconografía

medieval,

in Arte español,

X V ( 1 9 4 4 ) , 49-65.

APPENDIX

765

Saraleg;ui points out to me in a letter that we must assign to exactly the same category as the examples at Madrid and Valencia the panel of the Durrieu Collection published as of the school of Avignon in Michel's Histoire de l'art, IV, 2, p. 7 1 4 , fig. 476. THE

OLLERÍA

MASTER

I had long known through my friendly correspondence with Saralegui that he had succeeded in defining also the personality of a Valencian painter of the early fifteenth century who did not, however, belong to Nicoláu's immediate circle but whom he believes to have been a pupil of the Gil Master; ' and, since he has now divulged his achievement in a long footnote in his formerly mentioned article in the and later in a special article in the Archivo

Almanaque

de arte es-pañol^ I am at liberty, without

plagiarism, to set the painter in my own register of mediaeval Spanish artists. We may christen him the Ollería Master from the town that has provided us with his principal extant work, sections of a retable in the Diocesan Museum at Valencia.^ I am glad to subscribe to the three other attributions that Saralegui makes to him. The first case is that of the repainted Madonna of Mercy in the Prado,'· for which he suggests the interesting possibility of having once constituted the central compartment of the Ollería retable itself. Since the Madonna comes from the castle of Montesa, the home of the Military Order of that name, and since the sections in the Diocesan Museum, Valencia, carry the Order's heraldic insignia, Saralegui rightly deduces the likelihood that the retable originally embellished some chapel in the castle, before it was taken to Ollería. The second work is the panel in the attic of the altar of S. Luis Beltrán in the cathedral of Valencia,' the enigmatical subject of which the Spanish scholar seems also to have deciphered.® Apparently it depicts the martyrdom of the rarely encountered Cistercian saints, converted from Islamism, Bernard of Alcira (not the great Bernard of Clairvaux) and his two sisters, Gracia and Maria. When we come to the third production in Saralegui's list, we encounter again a whole retable, the specimen in the sacristy of the church at Pego that in volume IV ^ I was obliged to leave without a parent. Every compartment contains replicas of the Ollería Master's curious, unmistakable, and not too skilfully rendered types, particularly of his angels and acrimoniously scowling older men. THE

GIL

MASTER

There was once in the Aubry Collection at Paris a panel of the Crucifixion ( F i g . 3 1 4 ) which adds another work to the count of the Gil Master, whose personality we first isolated in volume VII ' and whose possible identity with the Maestro del Bam' See below. ^XV ( 1 9 4 2 ) , 244-261. ^Vol. I l l , p. 32. 4bid., pp. 4 1 - 4 3 · 5 Vol. IV, p. 582. ® See his article in the Valencian newspaper. Las Provincias of August 12, 1939, of which he has kindly sent me a copy, and also his note 10 in Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones, L ( 1 9 4 2 ) , 1 2 2 . ' Pp. 602-604. • Pp. 790-793·

APPENDIX

7б6

bino Vispo we debated in v o l u m e VIII.^ T h e s u f f e r i n g Redeemer and the thief at the right repeat his customary types f o r these figures, and both thieves are posed e x a c t l y as in the Crucifixions of the H o l y Cross retable and of the p a i n t i n g in the possession of M r . T o m a s H a r r i s at L o n d o n . T h e b a c k w a r d s w o o n of the V i r g i n is also reiterated in the H a r r i s version of the theme. leled in the Christ of the Noli York.

T h e hirsute head of the thief at the l e f t is p a r a l -

me tangere

b e l o n g i n g to the Hispanic Society at N e w

T h e St. John E v a n g e l i s t has a countenance that is one of the most easily recog-

FIG. 3 1 4 .

T H E GIL MASTER.

CRUCIFIXION.

IN T H E A U B R Y C O L L E C T I O N ,

FORMERLY

PARIS

nizable marks of the G i l Master's style, e m e r g i n g , f o r instance, in the St. Vincent of the Hispanic Society and in the cleric beside the altar f r o m w h i c h St. M a r k is d r a g g e d a w a y in the retable at Onteniente.

T h e i l l - f a v o r e d visage of the man in a brocaded

g a r m e n t at the extreme right of the composition is likewise a commonplace in his output. A

f r a g m e n t of one of his predellas, w i t h Sts. Peter, T h o m a s , and

Bartholomew

seated in s u m m a r i l y sketched landscapes against g o l d b a c k g r o u n d s , has strayed the Reber C o l l e c t i o n at Lausanne

(Fig.

315).

into

He alone models faces of just the

^ P p . 6 4 7 - 6 5 2 . S a r a l e g u i {Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones, L, 1942, p. 1 1 9 ) r i g h t l y suspects that the C r u c i f i x i o n f o r m e r l y in the H i g g s Collection at N e w Y o r k m a y have been the pinnacle of the retable of St. M i c h a e l at L y o n s .

FIG. 315. T H E GIL M A S T E R . APOSTLES, SECTION OF P R E D E L L A . R E B E R COLLECTION, LAUSANNE

768

APPENDIX

curious sort represented in the St. Peter, as, for example, in the St. Giles of the Metropolitan Museum, New Y o r k , but the St. Bartholomew is almost as distinctive, finding a counterpart, among many other instances, in the Christ of the Dormition in the Onteniente retable. An Apostle at the left in this Dormition exhibits the curling lock on the forehead that is more characteristic of the Catalan Rubio Master ^ but may be seen likewise on the Sts. T h o m a s and Bartholomew of the Reber panel. THE

T h e pages of this History

RETASCÓN

of Spanish

MASTER

Painting

have abundantly demonstrated how

often I have been indebted to suggestions from the outstanding scholar, Don Leandro de Saralegui, and now his guidance has led me to the solution of a problem that has been troubling me f o r many years. In a footnote to the first of his definitive articles on Pedro Nicoláu ' he relates the Salvator Mundi in the Museum of Bilbao to the series of panels from the life of the Virgin distributed through several European and American collections in regard to the classification of which I have long wavered between the Catalan and Aragonese schools; ^ and pursuing this hint, I have made the comparisons, with the resulting conviction that the attribution must be made categorical. T h u s stimulated to a renewed study of the panels from the life of the V i r g i n , I have arrived at quite as positive a belief in what I set down in volume V ^ as a possibility and in volume V I I I ^ as a probability, namely, that they were executed by the author of the retable at Retascón in A r a g o n . Before we proceed farther, we had best amass at least a few of the most telling factors of internal proof f o r the attributions. We have noted in previous volumes the tendency in the panels from the life of the Virgin as well as in the retable of Retascón to precisely the same sort of most capricious stylization. In both sets of paintings there appear many instances of the same incredibly long, thin necks, of heads upturned at the identical, pertly whimsical angle, and of the same sharp-nosed masculine countenances schematized into grim scowls and sourness of expression derived, as we shall find, from the Valencian painter, Andrés M a r z a l de Sas. In the cases where women are introduced, they are generally and oddly represented as " p e a k e d " and rather prematurely old. Often we discover actual reiteration of the types. T h e St. J o h n in the Dormition and in the predella at Retascón, f o r example, equals the Gabriel in the Annunciation belonging to Jacques Seligmann and Co., New Y o r k ; the angel at the lower left of the Retascón Coronation is the same person ; the Baptist in the Retascón predella reproduces the Christ of the Betrayal in the Muntadas Collection, and the Santiago of this predella is but slightly differentiated; ^ the St. A n d r e w of the predella is not varied f r o m the figure of St. Joachim in the Presentation of the Virgin now in the Hovey Collection at Pittsburgh; and the excited Prophets on the throne of the central M a donna at Retascón, with their beards conventionalized to a sharp point, duplicate the ^ See above, p. 744. ' Boletín de la Sociedad ^ Vol. V I I I , p. 644. З Р . 278.

Española

de Excursiojtes,

X L I X ( 1 9 4 1 ) , p. 89, n. 27.

' For illustrations of the St. J o h n and Santiago of the Retascón predella, see vol. V , p. 302, fig. 92.

APPENDIX

769

man holding a torch in the upper right corner of the Muntadas Betrayal, the Amos in the lower left section of the upright attached to the Nativity of the Virgin at Port Sunlight, and the Prophets on the pinnacles of the entrance to the T e m p l e in the Hovey panel of her Presentation.

A m o n g minor details of correspondences, we may

mention the fact that the cresting over the portal of the T e m p l e in this Presentation and over the dado of the chamber of the Seligmann Annunciation is virtually repeated above the parapet behind the saints in the Retascon predella; and just the same species of strangely and irregularly veined marble is employed f o r the pavement in this predella and again in the Annunciation. T h e r e are no photographs of the compartments in the Retascon retable that parallel in theme those of the other series and so would a f f o r d the opportunity for compositional comparisons, but even the inadequate illustration of the scenes of the Dormition and Coronation that I herewith publish ( F i g . 3 1 6 ) demonstrate the entire community of style with the pieces scattered through private collections. I may well be pardoned for having at first assigned the Salvator Mundi at Bilbao merely to the circle of Pedro Nicoláu and Andrés M a r z a l de Sas,® since the figure embodies one of the Retascon Master's types that are most patently and directly dependent upon those of the latter artist. A striking example is provided in the works ascribable to M a r z a l de Sas by the Apostle in the upper right corner of the Incredulity of St. T h o m a s in the cathedral of Valencia; but the visage in the Bilbao panel is made a little sharper and more forbidding exactly as in the Christ of the Muntadas Betrayal and the Baptist of the Retascon predella, and the seal is put upon the attribution by the emergence, in the two diminutive worshippers (or donors), of precisely the same individuals, with scrawny necks, as the Gabriel of the Seligmann Annunciation and the embraced youth in the lower left corner of the Hovey Presentation. M a n y more items of proof could be added, if they were necessary: f o r instance, the mode of delineating the peculiarly protruding toes; in the hand of the Saviour holding the book and in both hands of the central Madonna at Retascon, the same exaggerated aspect of the spidery fingers

that were common in Spanish painting of the period ; and, above all, the

Morellian detail of the emphasized tragus of the ear, as in the Christ of the Muntadas Betrayal and the St. Andrew of the Retascon predella. F r o m my first acquaintance with the panels from the life of the Virgin now so widely scattered in Europe and America, I am glad that I did not f a i l to discern the affiliations with M a r z a l de Sas.' Practically all the types and stylistic characteristics manifestly declare that M a r z a l actually trained the Retascon Master. Besides the analogies to which I have already referred, we may, for instance, specify as types directly lifted from M a r z a l Joachim's attendant in the white hood in the Muntadas Meeting at the Golden Gate, the spectator above the two embracing youths and the lower Prophet on the upright in the H o v e y Presentation of the Virgin, and the Joachim in the Bickerton Expulsion from the Temple. Valencian likewise is the treatment of the gold backgrounds, which at Retascon are tooled only at the borders and in the Bilbao picture with half-crosses. We thus have finally reached the solution of the question of ® V o l s . I l l , p. 3 3 0 , and I V , p. 5 7 1 , n. i (where I was w r o n g in my guess that the Salvator Mundi might have come from the B u r g o de Osma retable done in the shop or immediate circle of Nicoláu: cf. above, p. 7 5 9 ) . ' V o l . I V , p. 566.

FIG. 316. T H E RETASCÓN M A S T E R . DORMITION AND CORONATION, SECTIONS OF R E T A B L E . PARISH CHURCH, RETASCÓN

APPENDIX

771

the Retascón Master's origins and geographical activity.

A pupil of M a r z a l de Sas,

he proves to be, as Saralegui suggests, one of the several artists who demonstrate the wideflung popularity of the Valencian school or at least of Va'.encian models, stretching as f a r as the retable of Pedro Nicoláu's shop f o r B u r g o de Osma in Castile and winning f a v o r particularly in the Maestrazgo and A r a g o n .

In previous volumes we

have had occasion to catalogue many examples of this dissemination such as the Sts. Michael and Catherine in the episcopal palace at Teruel,^ the retable of the Baptist by a f o l l o w e r of Nicoláu at Rodenas,' the altarpiece in Sta. Catalina at Saragossa, and the works of the F l o r i d a M a s t e r . " E v e n the A r g u i s Master in A r a g o n , whose style in many respects parallels that of the Retascón Master, displays marked Valencian traits, either because he was influenced by the Retascón Master or because they had been fellow disciples of M a r z a l de Sas. Retascón, near Daroca, in A r a g o n lies not f a r a w a y from Ródenas or from the seats of the F l o r i d a Master's patronage, and the series of the now scattered panels from the life of the Virgin must hail from some town in this southern part of A r a g o n or from the Maestrazgo.

It is even not impossible that the

Retascón Master played some part in the formation of the principal exponent of f u l l y evolved mediaeval painting in the Maestrazgo, Valentín Montolíu. T h e likelihood that the dismembered retable was the result of a commission in the Maestrazgo is strengthened, as Saralegui has pointed o u t , " by his discovery of a w o r k of the artist near that region, i.e., in the Collection of the Marquesa de Benicarló at Valencia, still another section of the retable, a pinnacle of the Vision of St. Joachim to match the pinnacle of the Expulsion from the T e m p l e in the Bickerton Collection. T h e Spanish scholar also stresses the significant compositional similarity to the version of the theme in the A r g u i s Master's retable of St. Anne in the Muntadas Collection.'^ I am strongly disposed to corroborate further the activity of the Retascón Master in southern A r a g o n by assigning to him the complicatedly allegorical panel of the Virgin of M e r c y , said to come from the church of S. Pedro at T e r u e l and now in the episcopal palace of that city, which in volume V " we were obliged to leave anonymous. Repaint probably obscures much of the truth, but it is difficult to explain the physical and facial identity of many of the devotees gathered under the Virgin's mantle with the Retascón Master's peculiar types on any other basis than a unity of authorship.

It

is to be noted also that the queer edifice in which Our L a d y stands betrays the velleity f o r intricate architectural setting exemplified by several of the dispersed panels from the life of the Virgin and that the parapet behind her is adorned with his distinctive mode of cresting. T h e tendency to the Retascón Master's sort of stylization, amounting almost to caricature, in the retable of the Baptist and Stephen from Badalona now in the Barcelona Museum was one of the considerations that formerly

caused me to weigh the possi-

® Vols. V, p. 286, and V I , p. 582. ^ See above, p. 760. Vol. V I I I , pp. 470 ff. " In a letter to me and in an article, Visitando colecciones in Arte esfañol, XV ( 1 9 4 4 ) , 8 2 - 8 4 (with an illustration). " V o l . V , p. 3 1 0 . •^Pp. 3 · 3 - 3 · 6 . See especially my statements in vol. I V , p. 5 6 6 , before I had seen the Retascón retable.

772

APPENDIX

bility of a classification of the panels from the life of the Virgin in the school of Catalonia, but my subsequent research, particularly f o r the present volume, has shown me that the retable from Badalona merely signalizes, within the limits of the Catalan school, a corresponding, yet autonomous evolution. Since Don Manuel Trens, the director of the Diocesan Museum at Barcelona, kindly informs me that San Geloni (north of Barcelona, near Arcnys del M a r ) guardafolvos

is the source of the fragments of the

in this Museum which some years ago

I introduced into the group of

works connected with the Retascón Master and the Badalona retable, their provenience from Catalonia would dissociate them from the Retascón Master, so that I should now be inclined, though not with the entire confidence, to attribute them to the author of the Badalona retable and thus to isolate another painter in the Catalan manifestations of the interntional style, baptizing him the Badalona Master. DOMINGO V A L L S

AND T H E

PAINTERS

OF T H E

MAESTRAZGO

T o the series of Apostles by the interpreter of the Serras' fashions in the Maestrjizgo, Domingo Valls, partially registered in volumes V I ' and V I I

there can be added the

St. James M i n o r lately acquired by Professor Ernest T . De Wald of Princeton ( F i g . 317).

T h e distinguishing attributes of the figure are the fuller's club and the verse of

the Creed, "Qui conceptus est de Spiritu Sancto, Natus ex M a r i a V i r g i n e . " T h e principal investigator of the mediaeval art of the Maestrazgo, Don A n g e l Sánchez Gozalbo, has recently increased his important publications on the subject with a book treating the painters who in the fourteenth and first half of the fifteenth century focused at Morella.^ Considerably augmenting the documents and documentary references that he had before mustered, he traces the detailed careers of several masters whom I have had occasion to mention in former volumes, Guillermo Ferrer, the various members of the Sarreal (also spelled Ç a r r e a l ) f a m i l y , and Pedro Lembri, and he includes others who had not fallen within my scope; but unhappily he has discovered no further evidence that with absolute certainty would establish the artistic personality of anyone in the list by connecting him with an extant work. We can still say only that the painter who at Villahermosa produced retables in the manner of the Serras may have been the Guillermo Ferrer who was active in the region of this town and is definitely recorded to have enjoyed contact with the Serras of

Barcelona.··

Sánchez Gozalbo now publishes the document which with practical surety makes Pedro Lembri the author of the retable at Mosqueruela and which he had hitherto only epitomized.5 It is a contract ® of M a y 2 7 , 1 4 1 5 , with Lembri to do a retable at Castellfort, and the terms demand that its models shall be retables at Cati and Mosqueruela.

We cannot entirely set aside the possibility that the works which he was

asked to imitate should have been the achievements of other masters; but by f a r the greater likelihood would be that they were his own creations, and the fact that he is definitely ascertained to have done the (lost) retable at Cati would virtually bring the example at Mosqueruela into the same category. " V o l . V I I , p. 786. ' Pp. 5 6 8 - 5 7 1 . ^ Pp. 7 9 6 - 7 9 7 . ^ See my vols. V I , p. 564, and ^Pintores de Morella, 63 and

^Pintores de Morella, " V o l . Π Ι , p. 1 2 6 . V I I , p. 799. 100.

Castellón de la Plana, 1 9 4 3 .

APPENDIX

773

Records have been unearthed by Sánchez Gozalbo ^ placing at M o r e l l a from 1 3 9 9 to 1 4 0 2 a painter Antonio Gueráu, probably identical with the artist who a f t e r w a r d enjoyed a distinguished position at Valencia but whose personality we have not yet been able to isolate.® T h e M o r e l l a notices antedate by a decade our previous first allusion to him in 1 4 1 1 . In addition to all this, J u a n Puig ' has recently discovered a number of documentary references to the activity of the painters of the Maestrazgo at Cati.

FIG. 3 1 7 . D O M I N G O V A L L S . ST. J A M E S MINOR. DE WALD COLLECTION, PRINCETON (^Courtesy of the

owner)

I T A L O - G O T H I C P A I N T I N G IN

MAJORCA

In Professor Meiss's notable article, by which, as we have seen,^ he makes many significant contributions to our understanding of Catalan painting in the fourteenth century, he successfully applies in M a j o r c a the same process of seeking analogies be' P. 4 0 . ^ See my vol. I l l , p. 94. "^Boletín de la Sociedad CastelÍonense

de Cultura^ X X ( 1 9 4 4 ) , 5 5 - 5 9 .

774

APPENDIX

tween the more monumental artists and the illuminators of manuscripts that yields him such valuable results in Catalonia proper. With acute perception he discerns the intimate connection between the retables of Sts. Quiteria and Eulalia ^ and the miniatures of the Llibre dels Privilegis

de Mallorca,

but, despite the inevitable differences

that would naturally arise when the same artist turned from illumination to the painting of panels, I cannot quite bring· myself to believe that any one of the closely interrelated authors of the miniatures in the Llibre dels Privilegis

actually executed either

of the two altarpieces. JUAN

DE

LEVI

Both of the scholars José M a r i a Sanz and José Galiay ' have recently proposed, on what seems to me inconclusive evidence, to date as early as 1375 Juan de Levi's retable of Sts. Lawrence, Prudentius, and Catherine in the cathedral of Tarazona.^

Their

first argument is that the bishop of the see, Fernando Pérez Calville, remembered late in his life that the date on which he had endowed the chapel containing the retable occurred somewhat before 1 3 7 6 ; but the endowment by no means appears to me to imply that the retable had already been painted. A g a i n , when in 1399 this prelate proclaimed papal indulgences for his chapel, he stated that it comprised three altars dedicated to Sts. Lawrence, Prudentius, and Catherine, but once more without specifying that these altars were then decorated with their retables. A second piece of evidence is found in what Sanz believes to be a decipherable inscription on the banner of the lance of one of St. Lawrence's captors. I very much question whether the capricious characters on the banner were intended to be anything more than a decorative suggestion of an inscription or meant by the painter to be legible, but by some process of divination Sanz extracts from them the interpretation, Ρ ( = finxit)

J L E V Y , even

himself, however, doubting whether the initial should not rather be read G as designating Guillén de L e v i ^ instead of Juan for the author. A f t e r the surname he finds the characters L 2 V, which he explains as 50 ( = L ) , 2 ( = 20), and V ( = 5 ) , adding to 75 and g i v i n g us for the date 1 3 7 5 !

T h i s more than dubious elucidation is out-

weighed by the document telling us that in 1403 Juan de L e v i was doing the retable in question for the bishop, Pérez Calvillo, since it does not seem possible to follow Galiay in twisting the verb to signify, had done. A m o n g the many sins of commission or omission that I discover from time to time in turning over the pages of my former volumes, a specimen of the latter sort is the negligence of which I have been guilty in leaving the retable of St. James M a j o r at Maluenda in the class of the anonymous Aragonese works that belong to the first half of the fifteenth century. T h e inadequate photograph at my disposal when I discussed the altarpiece in volume III ^ was nevertheless perhaps enough to have revealed that it might have been produced in the shop of Juan de Levi, and the better reproductions subsequently made by the Archivo Mas provide potent confirmatory proof for the attribution ( F i g . 3 1 8 ) .

Even more than most masters of the period, Juan de L e v i

^ See my vol. I l l , pp. 1 4 1 - 1 4 4 . ' For ^ See 3 See Pp.

their articles, see the bibliography at the end of the present volume. my vols. I l l , p. 186, and IV, p. 626. my vol. I l l , p. i68. 211-212.

FIG. 318. JUAN DE LEVÍ OR A PUPIL. T H E ARRAIGNMENT OF ST. JAMES MAJOR AND T H E ARRIVAL OF HIS BODY A T QUEEN LUPA'S PALACE, SECTIONS OF RETABLE. STA. MARÍA, MALUENDA {Photo.

Archivo

Mas)

776

APPENDIX

appears to have relied upon his assistants f o r the execution of the vast and m a n y contracts that he accepted, but the M a l u e n d a retable, carried out w i t h more conscientious craftsmanship and in a s o m e w h a t less h i g h l y schematized style than the m a j o r i t y of w o r k s that issued f r o m the atelier, may be guessed to be l a r g e l y the creation of Juan himself or of one of his better collaborators.

Benito A r n a l d i n , w h o f o u n d p a t r o n a g e

in the g e n e r a l region of M a l u e n d a , was a member of his circle,^ but the retable exhibits no specific traits to a r g u e him as the author. T h e six scenes f r o m St. James's story depicted in the lateral sections are : an a n g e l at his command causing a devil to b r i n g the enchanter H e r m o g e n e s bound into the presence of the Apostle, w h o is shown protecting the m a g i c i a n ' s f o r m e r disciple, P h i l e t u s ; St. James d e l i v e r i n g his staff to H e r m o g e n e s as a talisman against demoniacal p o w e r ; the enchanter casting his l i b r a r y into the sea; ^ the Apostle's a r r a i g n m e n t b e f o r e H e r o d ; the double decapitation of St. James and of his sudden convert, Josias; and the bulls c a r t i n g his b o d y into Queen L u p a ' s palace.

In m y earlier v o l u m e I w a s p r o b a b l y

w r o n g by a decade or so in assigning the retable to the forties of the fifteenth century, and I should n o w c h a n g e my doubt in r e g a r d to any Italianism in the style to an absolute denial, except in so f a r as one of the sources of the w h o l e

"international

m o v e m e n t " w a s the Italian T r e c e n t o . F r o m J u a n de L e v i ' s atelier there issued also a retable in the church of S. Esteban at Uncastillo, to w h i c h I have never before referred.

St. F e l i x is the sacred personage

honored, and, of the m a n y m a r t y r s of this name, the n a r r a t i v e panels make it clear that here w e have to do w i t h the same F e l i x to w h o m the altarpieces of T o r r a l b a de R i b o t a ' and V i l l a l o b o s ® are dedicated and whose feast occurs on A u g u s t i . T h e subjects are his a r r i v a l by sea in C a t a l o n i a , his distribution of a l m s ( F i g . 3 1 9 ) , preachi n g , imprisonment, d r a g g i n g b y horses, and torture by knives,^ a l l of w h i c h the T o r r a l b a retable includes and at least the m a j o r i t y of w h i c h the V i l l a l o b o s retable once comprised.

T h e disturbing f a c t o r in the identification is that at Uncastillo the saint

is represented as a deacon and not as the l a y m a n that he appears in the t w o other e x a m ples.

N o n e of the literary sources f o r his life k n o w n to me describes him as a c l e r i c ;

but neither do they e x p l i c i t l y deny him this d i g n i t y , and the splendid altarpiece of the sixteenth century in his church at G e r o n a shows that he w a s sometimes conceived as invested w i t h the diaconate.

T h e d i v e r g e n t tradition m a y have arisen t h r o u g h con-

fusion w i t h a second, m a r t y r e d St. F e l i x of G e r o n a , w h o is definitely stated to have been a deacon and was a companion of St. Narcissus.

T h e standing effigy in the

principal compartment at Uncastillo holds in one hand the emblem of a p r o n g e d k n i f e and in the other a book upon w h i c h are written the first t w o verses of the thirty-first 5 Vols. I V , pp. 6 2 9 - 6 3 3 , and V I , pp. 5 9 8 - 6 0 0 . ® W h o is the haloed old man in apostolic costume a c c o m p a n y i n g St. James as he hands o v e r his staff, and w h o are the s i m i l a r l y dressed and haloed p a i r by his side as he watches the destruction of the books? 7 V o l . I V , p. 633. ®Vol. V I I , p. 8 3 1 . 4 on this page.

F o r a b i b l i o g r a p h y of the various saints called F e l i x , see note

^ In the V i l l a l o b o s altarpiece he is h u n g , head d o w n w a r d , f o r this ordeal and in the T o r r a l b a and Uncastillo altarpieces stretched on a table ; but in some of the literary accounts he first suffers the torment of c a r d i n g w h e n suspended and subsequently is torn to pieces by knives, so that it m a y be o n l y this final m a r t y r d o m that is depicted at T o r r a l b a and Uncastillo.

Ftc. 319. SHOP OF JUAN DE LEVI. ARRIVAL OF ST. FELIX IN CATALONIA A N D HIS DISTRIBUTION OF ALMS, SECTIONS OF RETABLE. S. ESTEBAN, UNCASTILLO (^Piloto. Archivo

Mas)

778

A P P E N D I X

P s a l m , beginning·, " I n te. D o m i n e , s p e r a v i , non c o n f u n . i a r in a e t e r n u m . "

On

tlie

balustrade behind h i m his name is inscribed in the curious f o r m , Felizes. THE

LANCA

MASTER

I t has s e v e r a l times happened w h e n I h a v e l o n g

floundered

about in the pursuit of a

picture's c r e a t o r , t r y i n g w i t h o u t conviction v a r i o u s possibilities, that I h a v e f o u n d the reason to be the authorship of some artist whose personality I had not yet isolated. Searches of this sort h a v e indeed p r o v i d e d the occasion f o r the r e n e w e d d e l v i n g into masses of a n o n y m o u s m a t e r i a l a n d h a v e led to the g r o u p i n g of some of this m a t e r i a l together a n d to the consequent extrication of a hitherto u n d e f i n e d painter.

So it has

turned out in the case of a panel in the S o l t m a n n Collection in the Schloss F a l k e n b e r g n e a r G r a f i n g in B a v a r i a ( F i g . 3 2 0 ) .

A t intervals f o r years I h a v e sought to reconcile

its style w i t h some exponent of the " i n t e r n a t i o n a l " m o v e m e n t in one a f t e r a n o t h e r of the s e v e r a l Spanish schools but a ' w a y s in v a i n , until recently, in t h u m b i n g o v e r

files

of p h o t o g r a p h s , I suddenly perceived it to be with certainty the production of the m a n w h o executed the retable of St. M i c h a e l a n d the V i r g i n Daroca.'

now

in the C o l e g i a t a

at

T h u s g u i d e d , I b e g a n f u r t h e r r u m m a g i n g a m o n g other w o r k s in the region

f o r the same hand and h a v e been r e w a r d e d b y d i s c o v e r i n g it in the retable at L a n g a del Castillo,^ w h i c h furnishes us w i t h a neat pseudonym f o r the a r t i s t — - t h e L a n g a M a s t e r . T h e S o l t m a n n panel is an actual replica of the version of the theme in the D a r o c a altarpiece and of its composition, rare in Spain at the period, w i t h the M a d o n n a seated on a cushion placed directly upon the p a v e m e n t in the mode of D o n L o r e n z o M o n a c o . I f this w e r e not enough a n d m o r e in order to establish the attribution, w e c o u l d appeal f o r c o r r o b o r a t i v e p r o o f to the e m e r g e n c e , in the t w o c r o w n i n g angels, of the M a s t e r ' s nervously

alert

and

sometimes almost

phrenetic

types w i t h

flying

locks of

curls,

illustrated, f o r e x a m p l e , by the St. J o h n E v a n g e l i s t in the p r e d e l l a of the D a r o c a retable ( F i g . 3 2 1 ) .

E v e n f u r t h e r verification is f o r t h c o m i n g in the presence of his

l i b e r a l and eery c h i a r o s c u r o , m a r k e d b y s h a d o w s distributed in a r b i t r a r y patches o v e r the countenances, causing d a r k circles about the eyes. T h e recognition of his personality saves f r o m limbo also a f e w separate f r a g m e n t s of retab'es that used to be scattered about the sacristy of the C o l e g i a t a at D a r o c a : the panel of an enthroned, canonized maiden w h i c h I published in v o l u m e I I I ^ and w h i c h is authenticated by such a n a l o g i e s as those e x i s t i n g between her and the V i r g i n

of

M e r c y at L a n g a or between the m i d d l e saint on the l e f t u p r i g h t and the s o r r o w i n g M o t h e r in the L a n g a P i e t à ; a pinnacle of the Crucifixion,'· w h e r e the w o m a n h o l d i n g the s w o o n i n g V i r g i n n o w absolutely repeats the M o t h e r in the L a n g a Pietà a n d w h e r e the St. J o h n E v a n g e l i s t and the centurion are r e c u r r i n g types in his p r o d u c t i o n ; and a c o m p a r t m e n t of an altarpiece depicting an a g e d saint b a p t i z i n g a s o m e w h a t y o u n g e r m e m b e r of the same, sacred c a t e g o r y

in the presence of

a still f u r t h e r

canonized

w o r hy. 5 I am s t r o n g l y disposed to c l a i m likewise f o r the L a n g a M a s t e r a pinnacle ' V o l . I l l , p. 1 9 0 . ^ V o l . V , p. 3 0 4 . T h e p h o t o g r a p h s of the M a s A r c h i v e , taken subsequently to m y visit to the t o w n , r e v e a l w h a t at the time w a s concealed f r o m me by the tabernacle — that the subject of the c o m p a r t m e n t directly under the central St. Peter is the Pietà and tha* the Honors a.'-e not included in the g r o u p p-a»hered beneath the m a n t ' e of the M a d o n n a of M e r c y . з p_ " l'hoîo. Archivo M a s , No. 2 5 7 7 8 C .

= Photo. A r c h i v o M a s , No. 7 3 1 9 0 C .

FIG. 320. T H E LANGA MASTER. MADONNA. SOLTMANN COLLECTION, SCHLOSS F A L K E N B E R G , BAVARIA

FIG. 32 1. T H E L A N G A M A S T E R . ST. JOHN E V A N G E L I S T , SECTION OF P R E D E L L A OF R E T A B L E OF ST. M I C H A E L . C O L E G I A T A , DAROCA (Photo. Archivo Mas)

FIG. 322. THE LANGA M A S T E R ( 0 · NATIVITY. COLLECTION, PARIS

EYMONAUD

FIG. 323. T H E LANGA MASTER. EPIPHANY, SECTION OF R E T A B L E . PARISH CHURCH, LANGA DEL CASTILLO {Photo.

Archivo

Mas)

APPENDIX

783

of the Nativity once in the Eymoniud Collection at Paris (Fig·. 3 2 2 ) .

The Virgin

embodies a rather sullen type that he often affects, with the hair or mantle falling in an abrupt line and concealing a part of the head, as in the holy woman at the left in the Langa Deposition, the Mo.her in the Crucifixion formerly in the Daroca sacristy, and the Soltmann Madonna.

The youthful saint on the frame at the right belongs to

much the same class of human beings. The angel with the banderole possesses another kind of countenance that, as in the youngest Magus of the Langa Epiphany ( F i g . 3 2 3 ) , the Master constantly employs for certain of his actors. We have thus advanced another step in our long and onerous process ® of segregating the various Aragonese painters of the beginning and first half of the fifteenth century. THE

LANAJA

MASTER

In a number of instances in these volumes it has been our agreeable privilege to reassemble divisions of Spanish retables that, ruthlessly broken apart in the world of dealing, had been sold in dissociated pieces, and a panel in the Collection of Miss Florance Waterbury at New York ( F i g . 3 2 4 ) enables us to perform another such act of healing. The subject, the style, and the design in the tooled gold background prove it to have been a section from the retable of St. Stephen by the Lanaja Master or one of his followers two other narrative compartments from which we united in volume VII.' Although, as in altarpieces by Nicolas Francés,^ by the Portillo Master,^ and probably by the Sinobas Master,"· the original retable may have included also scenes from the protomartyr's life upon earth, the two compartments registered in volume V I I have to do with events relating to him after his death, and Miss Waterbury's panel adds a third example to this phase of his story, since it depicts demons attacking the ship in which Juliana, the widow of the senator Alexander, together with her handmaidens, is transporting the chest containing the relics of St. Stephen from Jerusalem to Constantinople, believing that instead she is carrying her husband's body.^ A later moment in the same episode is represented in the retables by the Portillo Master and presumptively by the Sinobas Master, the protomartyr quelling the tumult of storm and flames that the devils have raised. THE

BURNHAM

MASTER

Don Leandro de Saralegui ^ has perceived what was hidden from my dull vision, namely that the painter who was the most lavish of all the lavish Aragonese in ornamentations by embossed gold, the Burnham Master,^ executed the Coronation of the Virgin in the château of Villandry for which I could find in volume V I I I ·' no specific author. The height of the artist's activity probably occurred in the middle of the fifteenth century, but Saralegui's surmise that he lived on into the second half of the