A History of Spanish Painting. Volume V A History of Spanish Painting, Volume V: The Hispano-Flemish Style in Andalusia [Reprint 2014 ed.] 9780674422070, 9780674427907

Citation preview

A HISTORY OF SPANISH PAINTING VOLUME V

LONDON : H U M P H R E Y MILFORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY

PRESS

A HISTORY OF SPANISH P A I N T I N G BY

CHANDLER RATHFON

POST

H A R V A R D UNIVERSITY

VOLUME V T H E HISPANO-FLEMISH S T Y L E IN ANDALUSIA

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

HARVARD UNIVERSITY *934

PRESS

COPYRIGHT,

I934

B Y T H E P R E S I D E N T AND F E L L O W S OF HARVARD COLLEGE

P R I N T E D AT T H E HARVARD U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S CAMBRIDGE, MASS., U . S . A .

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF VOLUME V1 /

jlo Iñiguez, D., Dos primitivos sevillanos del tercer cuarto de XV, Archivo español de arte y arqueología, VII (1931), 272. Pedro Fernández, pintor de principios del siglo XVI, A español de arte y arqueología, VI (1930), 73. Un primitivo sevillano, Archivo español de arte y arquet IV (1928), 59-60. ;hot, H., Les primitifs français (with reference to Bermejo arts, December, 1905, pp. 46-47. :elou, C., Noticia de ocho pinturas del siglo XV en la iglesia α Benito de Calatrava en Sevilla, Museo español de antigüe, IX (1878), 269-278. jer, R., La Collection Pacully, Revue de l'art ancien et mo 1903,1, 291-302. pillo y Casamor, T. del., Santo Domingo de Silos, pintura en procedente de la iglesia de su advocación en Daroca, 1 español de antigüedades, IV (1875), 547 - 57 1 · itable, W. G., Catalogue of Pictures in the Marlay Bequest, william Museum, Cambridge, Cambridge, England, 1927 H., TJn document d'art français primitif, Gazette des beaux I 9°5) !> 303-3 0 4· Identification of an Early Spanish Master, Burlington Mag V i l i (1905-1906), 129. Le " Saint Michel" de la Collection Wernher et "l'Introni. de Saint Isidore" du Louvre, Chronique des arts, 1905, p. er, L., Les primitifs français et Verme jo, Les arts, Nova 1905, pp. 33-34. mentas para la historia del arte en Andalucía, Seville: vol. I, vol. II, 1928; vol. I l l , 1931, desdell, W., Another Painting by Bartolomé Verme jo, Burli Magazine, VIII (1905-1906), 282-283. ns-Gevaert, H., Les primitifs flamands, Brussels, 1908especially vol. II, 109-112, for the St. Catherine at wrongly ascribed to Bermejo.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

VI

Flama, La famosa taula de Sant Miquel de Bermejo, Gaseta de les arts, May 15, 1927, ρ. ι. La Pietät de Bermejo a la Seu de Barcelona, Gaseta de les Arts, April 15, 1927, pp. 1-2. Folch y Torres, J., Adquisicions del Museu de Barcelona (two panels by Bermejo), Anuari de l'Institut d'Estudis Catalans, V, 2 (1913-1914), 885-888. Incerteses sobre la taula del martiri de Sant Cugat o de Sant Medí, atribuida a Mestre Alfonso, series of articles in the Butlleti dels M us eus d'Art de Barcelona, beginning November, 1931. Les obres d'art del Castell de Peralada, Gaseta de les arts, OctoberNovember, 1929, pp. 165-177. La restaurado i fotografia de la taula de Bermejo de la catedral de Barcelona, Butlleti dels Museus d'Art de Barcelona, March, J933> PP- 86-90. Gestoso y Pérez, J., Juan Sánchez, Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones, X V I I (1909), 9-16. Pintores sevillanos primitivos, Museum (Barcelona), V I (1920), 135-140. Hollanda, Francisco de, Da pintura antiga, edition of the Castillan translation of Manuel Denis (De la pintura antigua) with introduction and notes by E. Tormo and F. J. Sánchez Cantón, Madrid, 1921. Loga, V. von, Bermejo in Castile, Burlington Magazine, X X I I (1912I 9 I 3).

3 I 5~3 1 ^·

Manjarrés, J. de, Las bellas artes, Barcelona, 1875. Mayer, A. L., Dos tablas primitivas españolas, Arte español, V (19201921), 170-173. Some Recently Discovered Paintings, Burlington Magazine, L (1927), 115-116. Mély, F. de, Bartholomeus Rubeus et Bartolomé Vermejo, Revue de l'art ancien et moderne, 1907, I, 303-307. Méndez Casal, Α., Un cuadro firmado "Juan Núñez, 1525" Arte español, III (1916-1917), 424-427. Monumentos españoles, 2 vols., published by the Centro de Estudios Históricos at Madrid in 1932 (a catalogue of the Spanish monuments that have been declared "national"). W. A. P., A Spanish Madonna and Child of the Fifteenth Century, Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago, September, 1924, pp. .74-75· Pellati, F., Bartolomeus Rubeus e un trittico firmato della cattedrale dì Acqui, Arte, X (1907), 401-408.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

vii

Pemán, C., Un retablo sevillano en la colección Orléans de Sanlúcar, Archivo español de arte y arqueología, VI (1930), 65-70. Pijoán, J., De com la taula de Mestre Alfonso de Sant Cugat va venir al Museu de Barcelona, Gaseta de les arts, November, 1928, 3-4. A Signed triptych by Bartolomé Bermejo at Acqui, Burlington Magazine, X X I I (1912-1913), 17-25. Ramirez de Arellano, R., Artistas exhumados, series of articles in Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones, beginning VIII (1900), 192. _ —— Diccionario biográfico de artistas de la provincia de Córdoba, Madrid, 1893. Guía artística de Córdoba, Seville, 1896. Historia de Córdoba, Ciudad Real, 1915-1919. Romero de Torres, E., Pedro de Córdoba y Bartolomé Bermejo, Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones, X V I (1908), 55-62. Salem, A. R., L' "Ecce Homo" du Palais de Justice de Dijon et la Sainte Face de la Collection Bosch du Prado, Revue de Γ art ancien et moderne, 1930, I, 191-196. Sanpere y Miquel, S., Eis Bermejos de Na Teresa Ametller, Ilustrado catalana, 1914, pp. 283-285. Els Bermejos del Museu de Barcelona, Ilustració catalana, 1914, ΡΡ· 313~32°· Tormo y Monzó, E., Bartolomé Bermejo, Madrid, 1926, reprinted from the Archivo español de arte y arqueología, II (1926). Excursiones en la provincia de Huelva, Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones, X X X I I I (1925), 102-121. Miscelánea de primitivos, Cultura española, I X (1908), 164-169. •——· El "Rubeus" y Bermejo . . . y Núñez el de Sevilla, Cultura española, I (1906), 518-520. ——• La Virgen de Gracia, única obra auténtica de Juan Sánchez de Castro, Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones, XV (1907), 205-215. Tramoyeres Blasco, L., Arte español primitivo en Pisa y Génova, Museum (Barcelona), III (1913-1914), 285-292. Weale, W. H. J., Exposition de peintures des maîtres néerlandais New Gallery de Londres, Revue de l'art chrétien, 1900, p. (for the St. Engracia of Bermejo). Winkler, F., Die spanischen und französischen Primitiven in Gemäldegalerie und im Kupferstichkabinett, Berichte aus preussischen Kunstsammlungen, X L I X (1928), 6-12.

à la 258 der den

CONTENTS C H A P T E R HISPANO-FLEMISH

PAINTING

LVII

AT SEVILLE.

THE

GROUP

OF

MASTERS

M O R E D I R E C T L Y I N D E B T E D TO T H E P R E C E D E N T OF T H E L O W C O U N TRIES

I. The General Characteristics of Andalusian Painting in the Second Half of the Fifteenth Century 2. Pedro Sánchez I

3 5

3. Antón and Diego Sánchez

12

4. Juan Sánchez II

18

5. Juan Núñez

28

6. The Choir Doors at Moguer

31

CHAPTER HISPANO-FLEMISH

PAINTING

AT

LVIII

SEVILLE.

THE

MORE

INDIGENOUS

GROUP

1. Juan Sánchez de Castro 2. Other Paintings of the Indigenous Coterie CHAPTER HISPANO-FLEMISH

PAINTING

LIX

AT CORDOVA

CHAPTER

CHAPTER LIFE

THE

WORKS

60

LX

HISPANO-FLEMISH PAINTING AT CORDOVA.

THE

36 50

MASTER ALFONSO

. . .

LXI

OF B E R M E J O

103

CHAPTER OF

81

LXII

BERMEJO

1. Authentic Works 2. Doubtful Works

115 195

3. Works Wrongly Attributed to Bermejo

208

C H A P T E R

L X I 11

BERMEJO'S T R A I N I N G , C A R E E R , S T Y L E , A C H I E V E M E N T , AND I N F L U E N C E

214

χ

CONTENTS APPENDIX

ADDITIONS

TO V O L U M E S

I-IV

Catalan Romanesque Frescoes

237

Catalan Romanesque Panel Paintings

238

The Franco-Gothic Style

239

The Contemporaries of Ferrer Bassa Pedro Serra

248 252

The School of the Serras Borrassá

256 261

Gerardo Gener Other Productions of Borrassá's Circle

264 270

Jaime Cirera

276

The Master of St. George and his School Other Catalan Paintings in the International Style Pedro Nicolau and Andrés Marzal de Sas

276 278 280

The " D é t e n t e " of the Germanic Tendency at Valencia The Catalan Influence in Valencian Territory Majorca

292 292 296

The Aragonese Counterpart of the Manner of Guimerá

300

Nicolás Solana The Master of Argüís The Retable of Torralbilla

306 310 312

The Indigenous Group in the Aragonese International Movement . Castilian Frescoes in the International Style. Sansone Delli . . .

313 317

The School of Nicolas Francés

. .

321

Juan de Flandes

324

The School of Fernando Gallego Hispano-Flemish Painting at Burgos Hispano-Flemish Painting at Toledo. Pedro Diaz de Oviedo Other Hispano-Flemish Paintings

324 326 334 338 342

ADDITIONAL

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

OF N A M E S

INDEX

OF P L A C E S

The Luna Master

FOR V O L U M E S I - I V

OF A R T I S T S

. . . .

343 349 352

LIST OF I L L U S T R A T I O N S Figure

Pag'

1. Pedro Sánchez I.

Entombment.

2. Pedro Sánchez I.

Veronica.

3. Pedro Sánchez I.

Crucifixion.

Museum, Budapest

6

P r i v a t e Collection, Italy ( ? ) . . . Galerie Heinemann, Munich (?)

4. Pedro Sánchez I. Crucifix and Saints. Lázaro Collection, Madrid 5.

Circle of Pedro Sánchez I. London

6. A n t ó n and Diego Sánchez.

Pietà.

T o m a s Harris

13 V i a Dolorosa.

Fitzwilliam Museum, 15

Crucifixion.

8. Juan Sánchez II (?).

Cathedral, Seville

Deposition.

9. Circle o í Juan Sánchez .II (?). Seville 10.

17

Museum, Bilbao Dormition.

19

P r i v a t e Collection, 21

Circle of Juan Sánchez II (?). V i a Dolorosa, Centre of Retable. Collection of D o n Alfonso de Orléans, Sanlúcar de Barrameda

11. Juan Núñez.

Pietà.

9 11

Collection,

Cambridge, England 7. Juan Sánchez II.

7

Cathedral, Seville

23 27

12. School of Seville. Annunciation and N a t i v i t y , Paintings on a Door. Sta. Clara, Moguer

33

13. Juan Sánchez de Castro. L a Virgen de Gracia. Cathedral, Seville

37

14. Juan Sánchez de Castro (?). M a d o n n a and Saints. S. Isidoro del C a m p o , Santiponce

43

15. Juan Sánchez de Castro (?). Alcalá de Guadaira

Nativity.

45

16. Juan Sánchez de Castro (?). Madrid

St. Michael, from Zafra.

17.

Sta. M a r í a del Águila, Prado, 47

Circle of Juan Sánchez de Castro. Sts. A n t h o n y A b b o t and Christopher, Section of Retable of the Military Orders. Provincial Museum, Seville

18. Pedro Sánchez II.

Patrocinio de la Virgen.

logical Museum, Seville 19. Pedro Sánchez II (?). 20. Pedro de Cordoba. 21.

57

M a d o n n a and Angels.

Annunciation.

Pedro Fernández de Cordoba.

51

Municipal ArchaeoSta. Clara, Moguer

Cathedral, Cordova . . . .

Nativity.

Pickman

59 61

Collection,

Seville

65

22. School of Cordova. St. Nicholas. Provincial Museum, Cordova .

71

23. Marcellus Coffermans.

73

Dormition.

Cathedral, Seville

Lamentation over the D e a d Christ.

. . . .

24.

Bartolomé Ruiz. Lisbon

Museum,

25.

Diego de Pareja. Daniel and H a b b a k u k , Section of Predella of . Retable. Sta. María, A r j o n a

75 79

xi i

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

26. Master Alfonso. Martyrdom of St. Cucufas. Museo de la Ciudadela, Barcelona

83

27. Master Alfonso. Warrior Saint. Muntadas Collection, Barcelona 28. Bermejo.

Sto. Domingo de Silos.

Prado, Madrid

85 117

29. Bermejo. Charity, Detail of the Panel of Sto. Domingo de Silos. Prado, Madrid

118

30. Bermejo. Hope, Detail of the Panel of Sto. Domingo de Silos. Prado, Madrid

119

31. Bermejo. Prudence, Detail of the Panel of Sto. Domingo de Silos. Prado, Madrid 32. Bermejo.

121

Resurrection, Section of Predella.

Colegiata,

Daroca

128

33. Bermejo. Episcopal Saint, Section of Predella. Colegiata, Daroca

129

34. Bermejo.

133

St. Engracia.

Fenway Court, Boston

35. Bermejo. St. Michael. Collection of Lady Ludlow, London . . .

137

36. Bermejo. Pietà. Collection of Don Miguel Mateu, Peralada . . .

143

37. Bermejo.

144

Pietà.

Cathedral, Barcelona

38. Bermejo. Detail of Flowers in Pietà. Cathedral, Barcelona . . . 39. Bermejo.

St. Jerome, Detail of Pietà.

146

Cathedral, Barcelona . .

147

40. Bermejo. Detail of Landscape of Pietà. Cathedral, Barcelona . .

149

41. Bermejo.

151

Detail of Landscape of Pietà.

Cathedral, Barcelona

42. Bermejo. Noli me tangere in a Window of the Cathedral, Barcelona

153

43. Bermejo.

Veronica.

Museum, Vich

44. Bermejo.

Madonna and Donor.

45. Bermejo.

Dormition.

46. Bermejo.

Descent into Hell.

155

Cathedral, Acqui

Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Berlin

159 . . .

171

Museo de la Ciudadela, Barcelona

174

47. Bermejo. Entry of the Patriarchs into Paradise. Amatller Collection, Barcelona

175

48. Aragonese Copies of Paintings by Bermejo. Parcent Collection, Madrid

183

49. Bermejo.

Epiphany.

Cathedral, Granada

50. Bermejo.

Detail of Epiphany.

185

Cathedral, Granada

189

51. Bermejo (?). Detail of Panel of St. Martin and the Beggar, Section of Retable. Colegiata, Daroca

198

52. Bermejo (?). Detail of Panel of St. Sylvester, Section of Retable. Colegiata, Daroca

199

53. Bermejo (?). Madrid

203

Madonna from the Almenas Collection.

Prado,

54. Queen Isabella, sometimes attributed to Bermejo. Royal Palace, Madrid

207

55. Hispano-Flemish School of Andalusia. La Virgen del Pópulo. Offered for sale at the Anderson Galleries, New York, in 1925 .

229

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 56. Hispano-Flemish Madonna.

xiii

Art Institute, Chicago

232

56A. Bermejo. Detail of Repainted Flagellation of St. Eulalia. Ana, Barcelona . . ;

Sta. 233

57. Franco-Gothic School of Catalonia. St. Helen, Centre of Cycle of Frescoes. Cathedral, Tarragona

240

58. Franco-Gothic School of Catalonia. St. Helen Ordering the Consignment of the Jew to a Well, Section of Cycle of Frescoes. Cathedral, Tarragona

241

59. St. Margaret's Encounters with the Dragon and the Demon, Section of Retable. Parish Church, Vilovi

244

60. St. Martin and the Beggar, Section of Frontal. Juñer Collection, Barcelona

245

61. Circle of Ferrer Bassa. Retable of St. Sylvester. Parish Church, San Sebastián de Montmajor

249

62. School of Catalonia, Fourteenth Century. Panel of a Retable. 63. Pedro Serra.

St. Vincent, Central

Diocesan Museum, Barcelona

Crucifixion.

251

Abadal Collection, Vich

64. Pedro Serra (?). Sts. Paul, Matthew, and Thaddaeus. Lille

253 Gallery,

254

65. School of Jaime Serra. St. Bartholomew, Centre of Retable. Diocesan Museum, Tarragona

255

66. Master of Albatárrech. Sts. Peter and Catherine, Section of Predella of Retable. Museum, Vich

258

67. School of Pedro Serra. Section of Predella.

Fragment of Scenes from the Passion, Cirera Collection, Majorca

259

68. School of Pedro Serra. Pentecost. Diocesan Museum, Barcelona .

261

69. Borrassá. Christ and St. Catherine, Section of Predella. Private Collection, Barcelona

262

70. Borrassá. Martyrdom of St. Andrew. Bosch Collection, Barcelona

263

71. Workshop of Borrassá. Barcelona

265

Section of a Predella. Juñer Collection,

72. Gerardo Gener. St. Bartholomew Preaching, Section of Retable. Cathedral, Barcelona 73. Gerardo Gener. Epiphany, Section of Retable.

Cathedral, Bar-

celona 74. Gerardo Gener (?).

268 269

Crucifixion.

Private Collection, Gerona (?)

271

75. Circle of Borrassá (?). Annunciation, Centre of Retable of St. Gabriel. Cathedral, Barcelona

272

76. Circle of Borrassá (?). Agony in the Garden, Section of Retable of St. Gabriel. Cathedral, Barcelona

273

77. Circle of Borrassá (?). St. Stephen, Centre of Retable. Museum, Barcelona

275

Diocesan

xiv

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

78. Cirera (?).

Crucifixion.

Museum, Vich

277

79. School of Catalonia (?). St. Martin from Teyá. Diocesan Museum, Barcelona

279

80. Spanish School of the First Half of the Fifteenth Century. Sections of Retable: 1, Nativity of the Virgin, Lady Lever Collection, Port Sunlight; 2, Presentation of the Virgin, formerly in the Demotte Collection, Paris

281

81. School of Catalonia. Detail of Crucifixion from Retable of Sts. Martin and Ambrose. Cathedral, Barcelona

283

82. Andrés Marzal de Sas (?). Madonna and Angels. Private Collection, Barcelona

285

83. Workshop or Circle of Nicolau and Marzal de Sas. Annunciation of St. Anne. Cathedral, Burgo de Osma

287

84. Workshop or Circle of Nicolau and Marzal de Sas. St. John Baptist, Centre of Retable. Parish Church, Rodenas . . . .

288

85. Workshop or Circle of Nicolau and Marzal de Sas. Section of Retable. Parish Church, Rodenas

289

Crucifixion,

86. School of Nicolau and Marzal de Sas. Sts. Michael and Catherine. Episcopal Palace, Teruel

290

87. School of Nicolau and Marzal de Sas. The Monte Gargano Episode, Section of a Retable of St. Michael. Formerly in the Ouroussoff Collection, Vienna

291

88. Domingo Vails. Central Panel of Retable of Virgin and Baptist. Parish Church, Barranco de San Juan 89. Domingo Valls.

Pietà.

293

Juñer Collection, Barcelona

297

90. School of Borrassá in the Maestrazgo. Pantocrator, Centre of Retable. Parish Church, La Albareda

299

91. School of Majorca. St. Helen and the Jew, Section of Predella. Museo Arqueológico, Palma

301

92. Sts. John Evangelist and James Major, Section of Predella of Retable.

Parish Church, Retascón

93. Juan de Levi.

Arraignment of St. Peter.

302 Museum, Vich

. . .

303

94. Nicolas Solana. Two Apostles, Centre of Retable. Juñer Collection, Barcelona

305

95. Signature of Nicolás Solana on the Panel of the Two Apostles in the Juñer Collection, Barcelona

307

96. Nicolás Solana. Crucifixion, Pinnacle of Retable. Juñer Collection, Barcelona

308

97. Nicolás Solana. Angel, Fragment of Retable. William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art, Kansas City, Missouri

309

98. Master of Arguis. Retable of St. Anne. Juñer Collection, Barcelona

311

99. School of Aragon. Madonna of Mercy. Episcopal Palace, Teruel .

314

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

xv

ico. School of Aragon (?). Madonna of Mercy. Cathedral, Teruel .

315

101. Sansone Delli (?). St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata, Fresco on Tomb, S. Francisco, Avila

319

102. School of Nicolas Francés. Sts. Andrew, Jude, and John Evangelist, from Retable of Villalobos. Meersmann Collection, Granada

322

103. School of Nicolás Francés. St. Bartholomew, from Retable of Villalobos. Borchard Collection, New York

323

104. Juan de Flandes. St. Andrew. Provincial Museum, Salamanca .

325

105. School of Fernando Gallego in the Province of Palencia (?). Mass of St. Gregory. Formerly in the Chalandon Collection, Paris .

327

106. The Burgos Master (Alonso de Sedano?). Sebastian. Cathedral, Palma

329

Martyrdom of St.

107. School of Oña. St. Paul, Section of Predella. Collection of Jesse Isidor Straus, New York 108. Master of the Large Figures. Crucifixion, Section of Retable. Recently removed from the Ermita de S. Vítores to the monastic church, Oña 109. Master of the Large Figures. Moses Receiving the Law, Section of Retable. Recently removed from the Ermita de S. Vítores to the monastic church, Oña School of Burgos. Madonna and Angels, Section of Retable. Parish Church, Sotillo de Rioja i n . The Luna Master (?). St. Anne, Virgin, and Child, Section of Retable. Parish Church, Berlanga de Duero 112. The Luna Master (?). Sts. Catherine and Barbara, Section of Retable. Parish Church, Berlanga de Duero

331

333

335

no.

113. Pedro Diaz. Fragment of a Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, Section of Retable. Nuestra Señora de Romero, Cascante

336 337 339 341

THE HISPANO-FLEMISH STYLE IN ANDALUSIA

CHAPTER LVII HISPANO-FLEMISH PAINTING A T SEVILLE. GROUP OF MASTERS MORE

THE

DIRECTLY

I N D E B T E D TO T H E P R E C E D E N T OF T H E LOW Ι.

COUNTRIES

T H E G E N E R A L C H A R A C T E R I S T I C S OF A N D A L U S I A N IN T H E

SECOND H A L F

OF T H E

FIFTEENTH

PAINTING

CENTURY

the second half of the fifteenth century, Seville continued to enjoy the eminence that she had earlier acquired as a centre of Andalusian art, but the surprising phenomenon is the emergence of the Cordovan school to an equal or almost equal position. Upon the painting of both cities the Flemish modes exercised a powerful formative influence, although this influence was less pervasive in Seville than in Cordova or in Castile and Leon. Perhaps if more of the pictorial production of Seville in this period were extant, we should discover that the local masters succumbed further to the fascination of the Low Countries, but we are obliged to base our judgment upon the evidence that we possess. Since the proportion in the subsequent destruction of Gothic pictures would be the same in the south as in the north, the paucity of Andalusian paintings preserved from the second half of the fifteenth century, as compared with the ample remains in Castile and Leon, would imply that the output of the southern section of the peninsula continued, as in the earlier Gothic era, to be relatively meagre; but, in compensation, the Andalusian masters more generally signed their pictures. Inasmuch, however, as at Seville so many of them belonged to the Sanchez gens and possessed even identical first names, this habit avails us less in distinguishing personalities than might have been expected. T h e reforms instituted in the painters' guild at Seville in 1480 in the direction of stricter requirements for entrance, better training for aspirants, and a DURING

4

SEVILLE

higher valuation of works of a r t 1 apparently did not have their full effect until the sixteenth century, when the city began to assume the leadership that she was to exercise in the Golden Age as the seat of the most influential school in the peninsula. One reason for the lesser vitality of the Flemish strain may have been that the Belgian and Dutch painters who visited Spain seldom strayed to such a distance from the court as to educate many of their Andalusian colleagues and that the earlier products of the Flemish school were not commonly exported so far south to serve as models. In general, we do not come upon paintings from the Low Countries existing in Andalusia until we meet works of the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century that have been mentioned in volume I V — David's Madonna in the church of the Sacro Monte at Granada, the same subject, perhaps by Joos van Cleve, in Nuestra Señora de la Oliva at Lebrija, and the retables in Sta. Iñés, Seville, at Marchena, and at Ecija. Isabella's collection of Flemish pictures was not presented to the cathedral of Granada until 1505, too late to have trained the southern masters who now concern us in the foreign methods. A t Seville, by the side of the imitations of Flemish painting there existed a more indigenous style but slightly affected by the achievements of the Low Countries. It was partly a local development, maintaining the artistic tradition of the first half of the century and conceivably, though far from surely, influenced by the contemporary production of Catalonia and Valencia, to which it affords close analogies. There are no means of determining whether any significance in this regard should be attached to the presence of a pair of Catalan painters in the city, Juan, mentioned as a resident in 1449, and Francisco, paid in 1465 for work in the cathedral. 2 A Diego Sanchez de Valencia was on the stricter side in the quarrel about the reform of the guild in 148o.3 Even the painters who felt more intensely the spell of the Low Countries were so far imbued with the local aesthetic atmosphere that their creations may be distinguished with relative ease from those of the Hispano-Flemish school in 1 For a detailed account of these changes, see A. L. Mayer, Die Sevillaner Malerschule, 3-5. 2 Gestoso y Pérez, Diccionario, II, 25. ¡ Ibid., 97.

SEVILLE

5

Castile. A s the Sevillian school now began to wield maturer technical methods, it evolved more and more the artistic proclivities that were to culminate in Murillo. Inklings of a bland sweetness we have already discovered in the earlier history of the school; 1 and the tendency to a smooth placidity that in the second half of the fifteenth century marks the group of painters less vitally indebted to the L o w Countries lays its gentler touch also upon the Flemishized coterie. Another aspect of the Sevillian love of softness was a predilection for the blurred effects of chiaroscuro that the Italians describe by the adjective sfumato. 2.

PEDRO

SÁNCHEZ

I

T h e logical order is to consider first the masters who were the most devoted upholders of the Flemish standard. O f those whose names we know, the man with whom we may most surely connect the largest number of works (even so, a paltry few) is one of two painters called Pedro Sanchez, both of whom are fortunately definite personalities to us. So far as biographical data go, their signatures do us very little good, since a consideration of either Pedro at once lands us in the tangled jungle of the numerous recorded painters of the period with the surname Sanchez, many of whom had the same respective Christian names and at least two of whom were dubbed Pedro. 2 When the student finds in contemporary Sevillian documents mention of a Juan, a Diego, or a Pedro Sánchez, he can seldom be certain that the notices refer to the specific artist so called whom he chances to be investigating. T h e fundamental piece of the Pedro Sánchez now in question, to which all other attributions must be referred, is a signed Entombment in the Museum of Budapest (Fig. i). Although the date m a y well be See m y vol. I l l , p. 298. For the ascertained facts about the painters named Pedro Sánchez, see Gestoso, op. cit., II, 101-102, and I I I , 81 and 398; also Documentos para la historia del arte en Andalucía, II, 107 and 109. I do not know how far we are justified in differentiating them, as Gestoso does, by the parishes in which they lived, for the same man might have moved from one district of Seville to another. T w o of them mentioned in 1510 as each having a different wife must certainly have been separate individualities. Nor is there any criterion for deciding whether either of the painters whose works have been recognized was the Pedro Sánchez de Castro (a brother of Juan Sánchez de Castro?) mentioned in 1480 or the Pedro Sánchez de Parrales mentioned in 1518. 1

2

6

SEVILLE

as late as c. 1500, the basic influence is still that of Roger v a n der W e y d e n , however much the author m a y h a v e benefited also by the sight of the achievements of such other Flemings as H u g o van der Goes. T h e types should be compared especially with those of Roger's Escorial Deposition. T h e vessels for the ointment on the pavement in front of the sepulchre incorporate

FIG. I. PEDRO SÁNCHEZ I.

ENTOMBMENT.

MUSEUM, BUDAPEST

both the delight and the skill of the L o w Countries in the rendering of objects of virtu. In likening the face of the man lifting Christ's body to the countenances of Quentin M a t s y s , M a y e r m a y not intend to suggest a familiarity on the part of P e d r o with his production; in any case, such a thing would push the picture — in far-away Andalusia — to at least as tardy a year as 1510, i. e., further into the sixteenth century than would be

SEVILLE

7

allowed by the style, which betrays a lack of ease and primitive limitations that can hardly be explained by the mere fact of provincialism. These strictures upon Pedro's attainments do not mean that he is an artistic nonentity. Albeit a secondary master, he is yet the head of a shop and no mere assistant in an atelier. Not only has he a thoroughly adequate control over drawing and modelling, but he has introduced into the background a

FIG. i. PEDRO SÁNCHEZ I. VERONICA. PRIVATE COLLECTION, ITALY (?) (From "Dos tablas primitivas españolas" by A. L. Mayer )

delightful bit of landscape, cut by prettily winding roads. In contrast to his Flemish models, he reveals the Spanish mediaeval tendency to reduce a composition to a formal design, in this instance a compact rectangle. But he does more than this: he cannot help giving expression to his Sevillian temperament in a smoothness and serenity that soften the manifestation of grief in visage and gesture to a quiet and dulcet melancholy.

8

SEVILLE

Despite the calm that broods over the panel, a rather grim intensity of character marks the Nicodemus (or Joseph of Arimathaea) at the foot of the sarcophagus, and justifies us in ascribing to this Pedro Sánchez rather than to the other a veronica, of similar asperity, which is now or was in Italian private hands, signed with an abbreviation of the name like that of the Budapest Entombment (Fig. 2). Mayer surmises that the author took the idea from a woodcut by Dürer, which he describes as an Ecce Homo, probably referring to the veronica ascribed to Dürer in the Grüninger missal of 1493. He can hardly have in mind the less analogous head of Christ on the title-page of the grosse Passion or in the scene of the Ecce Homo or of the saints with the sudarium in the kleine Passion, a dependence upon any one of which would carry the picture's date to 1510 or after. B u t a dozen other German or Flemish renderings of the theme might just as well have furnished a prototype. T h e only reason for preferring to consider Dürer as the model is the ease with which prints were disseminated and the popularity of these productions of his throughout Europe. As a matter of fact, it is not necessary to seek at all a foreign source for Sanchez's inspiration in this gruesome subject for which the Spaniards betrayed a special predilection, and it would be hard to find a more esoterically Iberian countenance both in ethnic type and religious passion. In the earlier volumes of this series we have seen indigenous specimens of veronicas of Christ at Alcover and Palma, and, not to speak of Bermejo's versions at Vich and Granada, we shall soon come upon an example at Seville itself by Juan Sanchez de Castro dated in 1471 long before the vogue of Dürer could have penetrated the peninsula. It is easy to agree with Mayer in the assignment both to Pedro Sánchez and to a later moment in his career of the Crucifixion last known to me as in the Galerie Heinemann at Munich (Fig. 3). T h e identity of authorship with the Budapest Entombment lies on the very face of the picture, but may be verified by a comparison of the heads of Christ in each example and of the man at the left end of the sarcophagus in the Entombment with the first large countenance at the left of the cross. T h e space is once more filled with a serried mass of figures, here built up into symmetrical groups beside the

FIG. 3. PEDRO SÁNCHEZ I. CRUCIFIXION. GALERIE HEINEMANN, MUNICH (?)

IO

SEVILLE

cross as an axis; but the symmetry is saved from the pitfall of monotony by turning the thief and mounted horseman at the right towards us and the corresponding figures at the left in the opposite direction. In a similar fashion Velazquez varies the arrangement of the two horses in the celebrated composition of Las Lanzas. With the characteristic mediaeval Spanish sacrifice of realistic representation to design, the neck of the horse at the left in Pedro's Crucifixion is elongated and twisted into a curve as arbitrary as one of El Greco in order to balance the posture of the horse at the right and in order to create a properly arched line rounding out this part of the compositional pattern. One of the factors that mark the Crucifixion as a late work is the advance from the Gothic scrawniness of the nude in the Entombment to an almost Italianate realization of the anatomy and beauty of the undraped body in the Christ and thieves upon the crosses. Y e t the presence of an Italian strain in Pedro Sánchez is not so clearly demonstrable as to justify Tormo's appeal in his case to the Neapolitan hypothesis. 1 Another token of lateness is the more unified and impressionistic, though no less entrancing, bit of landscape that the crowded emphasis upon the figures allows us to see, in comparison with the more scrupulous Flemish definition of each detail in the setting of the Entombment. Internal evidence also imposes the ascription to Pedro Sánchez of a large panel in the Lázaro Collection, Madrid, depicting, now against a gold-brocaded background instead of a landscape, the Crucifix flanked at the left by the Virgin, St. John Evangelist, and the Magdalene and at the right by Sts. Peter, Augustine, and Anthony Abbot (Fig. 4). Repaint has partially obscured the parallelisms, but the type of Christ still tallies exactly with Pedro's canon, the Virgin is much the same person as in the Entombment, and the orphreys of St. Peter's chasuble have the same curious look of plates of jewelled metal as the adornments of the costume of the man at the foot of the sarcophagus in the Budapest panel. T h e figures are aligned in one of Pedro's customary formal arrangements, and the same temper of placidity hovers over the sorrow of Our Lord and 1

Jacomart,

43, and my vol. IV, pp. 55 ff.

SEVILLE His saints. The Gothic anatomy of the sacred body would indicate a date about contemporary with that of the Entombment. If the critic does not venture an attribution to Pedro Sánchez

FIG. 4.

PEDRO SÁNCHEZ I. CRUCIFIX AND SAINTS. LÁZARO COLLECTION, MADRID (Photo. Ruiz Vernacci)

himself, he must place at least in that master's immediate vicinity a Pietà, set between effigies of Sts. John Baptist and Anthony of Padua, which was last seen by me in the possession of Tomas Harris at London (Fig. 5). The Flemish prototypes

12

SEVILLE

are adapted to the unmistakably Sevillian conceptions of the sacred personages, and the brocades, especially in the tunic of St. John Evangelist, are of the character encountered in the southern rather than the northern school of Hispano-Flemish painting. It is the nature of the Virgin's head and of its coverings that suggests, among the masters of Seville, Pedro Sánchez as the most analogous artist in his representations of Our Lady in the Budapest and Lázaro pictures; but even in these details the parallelisms do not reach identity, and it would be difficult to find the mates of the other participants in the scene among his extant figures. The composition of the central group in the Pietà of Juan Núñez is very similar, but the types of Christ and the Virgin are less like those of the Harris panel than are the corresponding forms of Pedro Sánchez. The haloes are of the peculiar sort with pearled edges that are encountered in certain Hieronymite paintings of the school of Segovia; 1 were they, in Spanish iconography, a prerogative of the Order of St. Jerome, and was the Harris panel, then, done for the great Hieronymite institution of Santiponce? 3.

ANTÓN

AND

DIEGO

SANCHEZ

With more reason than in the case of Pedro Sánchez we may indulge ourselves in surmises in regard to which of the several painters called in the documents Antón and Diego Sánchez are to be identified with the pair 2 thus entitled who signed the Via Dolorosa in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, England (Fig. 6). Two masters named Antón Sánchez de Guadalupe and Diego Sánchez were paid on June 17, 1487, at Malaga for painting a view of this newly recovered c i t y ; 3 and this instance of their partnership suggests that there may have been another which resulted in the picture now under consideration. The Sevillian documents of the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century show a father and a son named Antón Sánchez de Guadalupe, and the style of the painting would 1

See vol. I V , p. 456. The abbreviation for Antón or Antonio until recently had been wrongly interpreted as standing for Juan. 3 For a quotation of the entry in the book of accounts of Isabella's almoner, Pedro de Toledo, see Archivo español de arte y arqueología, I I I (1927), 3 1 . 2

Fig. J.

CIRCLE OF PEDRO SÁNCHEZ I.

PIETÀ.

TOMAS HARRIS COLLECTION, LONDON (Courtesy of Mr. Harris )

i4

SEVILLE

point to the father who belonged to the fifteenth century and was dead by 1506. 1 Diego Sánchez is the first of the twain mentioned in the document of Malaga, and, although the de Guadalupe is added only to the immediately following name, Antón Sánchez, it would be naturally understood as applying to both artists. There is but one Diego Sánchez de Guadalupe recorded, and he is not mentioned until 1527,* perhaps at too late a date to have been the collaborator in our picture unless he lived to a very old age. Conceivably the painter of Malaga and the author of the Cambridge panel was some other Diego Sánchez than a Diego Sánchez de Guadalupe; but Gómez-Moreno 3 indulges merely in a guess when he would make of him the most prominent painter of this name and surname at the end of the fifteenth century, Diego Sánchez de Parias, possibly a son of the artist who will subsequently concern us, Juan Sánchez de Castro. Since one report 4 specifies that the panel came from Belalcázar in the extreme northern corner of the province of Cordova and another merely says vaguely a religious institution in the same province, the logical supposition would be either the celebrated castle of the military Order of Alcántara or the convent of Sta. Clara, both at Belalcázar, if any credence is to be given to such statements of provenience. The Flemish ingredients are very vital factors in the picture, but it is highly doubtful whether Constable 5 and Von Loga are right in denominating Jerome Bosch as the chief source. His influence is not chronologically impossible, for the panel may have been executed as late as c. 1500, and the two putti who form a part of the decorative scheme in the Gothic arch painted to frame the subject at the top may derive from the Italian Renaissance rather than from Gothic miniatures. Elements that might appear to have their origin in Bosch, such as the violent caricaturing of Christ's foremost tormentor (who even has a wart on his right eye), are paralleled in other Flemings and their Spanish imitators, so that one may question whether 1

Gestoso y Pérez, Diccionario, I I I , 391-394 and 399-400. Ibid., I I , 96; notices of painters called Diego Sánchez in addition to those given by Gestoso may be found in Documentos para la historia del arte en Andalucía, I I , 105-106. 3 Archivo español de arte y arqueología, I I I (1927), 359. 4 Gestoso y Pérez in Museum (Barcelona), V I (1920), 136. 5 Catalogue of the Marlay bequest to the Fitzwilliam Museum, p. 64. 2

SEVILLE

15

the authors were familiar with Bosch's productions. Their acquaintance with the art of the Low Countries may indeed have been in part at second hand, since their types possibly incorporate the influence of the Gallego shop, a relationship that would be quite comprehensible if Antón Sanchez ever lived at Guadalupe from which the family must originally have hailed. T h e attenuated canon of the physiques and the facial

FIG. 6. ANTÓN AND DIEGO SÁNCHEZ. VIA DOLOROSA. CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND

FITZWILLIAM

MUSEUM,

traits resemble those of the Gallego atelier, and the awkward articulation of the limbs joins with the exaggerated phase of the characteristic elongation to suggest specifically the Ciudad Rodrigo retable 1 as one of the Sevillian masters' models. Even the Bosch-like executioner is closely analogous to the bravo at the Saviour's right in the Ciudad Rodrigo version of the Via Dolorosa. One cannot, of course, trace to Gallego precedent alone the introduction of subordinate incidents and figures in 1

Vol. I V , pp. 138 ff.

ι6

SEVILLE

smaller scale into the background, here the group of mourning women and the procession of the condemned thieves to Calvary. No one who was not immediately cognizant of real Flemish achievement could have painted with such consummate skill Our Lord's grey robe or the plant of thistles in the left corner. The Fleming for whom the authors show most admiration, rather than Bosch, is Dierick Bouts, who likewise provided the chief foreign stimulus for Fernando Gallego. Such a type, for example, as that of the soldier who tugs upon the rope about Christ's neck is repeated again and again in Bouts's productions. Yet the sources are translated into terms that are not only indigenous but more than usually personal. The hackneyed theme is restated with a new composition in which St. John buttresses the Saviour's falling body with one hand while with the other he endeavors to hold the cross's weight away from his Master. A dramatic and violent pendant to the gentle Apostle is created by the brutal executioner who on the other side strikes Christ a powerful blow on the cheek. The main episode, indeed, is treated with a blunt and savage vigor quite out of harmony with the generally mild tone of Sevillian art. Some might wish to read what they would be pleased to call an Iberian fanaticism into the almost homicidal mania impressed upon the visage of the executioner who deals the blow. In any case, the Spanish note is less rudely sounded in the conspicuous brocade of St. John's mantle, unusual in this scene of the Passion, and in the prominence of the soldiers' ostentatious armor, accented, like the haloes, by gilt embossing. Despite the harshness of the executioners, in the faces of Christ and St. John we begin to get the peculiarly Sevillian sfumato modelling in light and shade. The shields are enlarged into great decorative masses in the composition, the one at the right formally balancing the next one towards the left. The naïve archaeology of the period has perhaps sought in them to resurrect fantastically the targes of the Romans, and has embellished the edges of the pair just mentioned with antiquarian inscriptions. On the example at the left, the legend reads Sanadores 1 (sic = 1 The third letter of Sanadores looks like an M, but the presence of the same character in the Johanes (sic) of St. John's halo shows that it is intended for an N.

FIG. 7.

JUAN SÁNCHEZ II.

CRUCIFIXION.

CATHEDRAL, SEVILLE

(From " Juan SUnchez" by J. Gestoso y Pérez)

18

SEVILLE

Senadores) Pueblos, i. e., senators and peoples, probably meant to reproduce the Latin Senatus and PopuÌus; the sense of the letters on the example at the right, neither I nor, so far as I know, anyone else has been able to make out. A further peculiarity in artists who in so many other respects were gifted and intelligent is the diminutive disproportion — a common defect in the art of the time — with which the line of trees and the enclosed cemetery in front of the walls of Jerusalem are rendered. 4.

JUAN

SÁNCHEZ

II

The confusion created by the fecundity of the Sanchez gens in artists at this period is rendered more desperate by a signed work of a Juan Sanchez different from the painter of the less Flemish group, Juan Sánchez de Castro, who will occupy us on a later page. Only a revelation from heaven could tell us with which of the painters named Juan Sánchez in the documents we here have to do, but for the sake of convenience we will call him Juan Sánchez II. In the picture in question, a Crucifixion in tempera, now in the Sacristía Mayor of the cathedral at Seville (Fig. 7), the principal Flemish source of inspiration was perhaps Dierick Bouts, but the foreign borrowings are so reinterpreted in the Spanish idiom that the exact prototypes are largely veiled. The items to be set down to the Flemish account are the composition of the group of the swooning Virgin, the Magdalene, and St. John at the left of the cross, the stark gauntness of the Christ, the rather elaborate modelling in chiaroscuro, and, above all, the landscape conceived and perspicuously rendered in the delightful mode of the Low Countries with its prettily painted town, water, and miniature citizens. The clerical donor, as so curiously and frequently in Spanish painting of the epoch, especially at Seville, is executed less carefully than the other sections and, in contrast to the power of real Flemish portraiture, shows little progress beyond the attainments of the international movement in this phase of art. The Spanish atmosphere is cast over the picture by the conspicuous embossing of the haloes and of the pilgrim's shells worn by Santiago who presents the donor, by the brilliant red and gold fabric of the saint's cope, by the morose mysticism and the

FIG. 8. JUAN SÁNCHEZ II (?). DEPOSITION. (Photo. Linker)

MUSEUM, BILBAO

20

SEVILLE

thoroughly Iberian character of his bearded head, and by the accentuated suffering stamped upon the Saviour's countenance, prophetic of the sinister and forbidding statues of the Crucified with which the churches of the peninsula were to be filled in the seventeenth century. Bertaux's 1 ascription to this Juan Sanchez of a Deposition in the Jado Collection of the Museum at Bilbao (Fig. 8) has much to recommend it. T h e closest point of contact is the impressive similarity of the Sts. Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathaea lifting Our Lord down from the cross to the dour Santiago of the Seville Crucifixion. T h e other parallelisms might be more evident if the original lines in both panels had not been dimmed by the injuries of time, in the case of the Seville picture first by repainting and then by its not too skilful removal. Y e t even as it is, the two representations of the swooning Virgin are closely akin in the small, thin face drawn with anguish, in the helplessly pendant arms, and in a quite meridional emphasis upon the expression of agonized grief. The upturned profile of the holy woman at the extreme right in the Jado picture is like that of St. John at the extreme left in the Seville Crucifixion, and the countenances in general exhibit the Morellian peculiarities that Mayer notes in the latter panel •— the little eyes and the fine mouth. Although the sky has been metamorphosed into brocaded gold, the hills and town beneath it would not shame Juan Sánchez II or disaccord with the kind of landscape that he uses in the Crucifixion. T h e most tangible point of difference is in Christ's visage and the modelling of His body, but the vaporous effects in the rendering of His form in the Seville panel may result from a layer of repaint that has not been cleaned away. T h e medium, however, appears to be oil rather than, as in the Crucifixion, tempera, and I should not quite venture absolutely definite concurrence with Bertaux in his attribution. Even if the tonality recalls Bermejo, who issued from the school of Cordova, the tentative ascription to Pedro de Cordoba on the tag that the picture bears in the Bilbao Museum has no further justification. T h e proximity of Juan Sánchez II is certainly the most congenial environment for a well executed panel of the Dormition 1

In Michel's Histoire, IV, 2, p. 899, n. 1.

FIG. 9.

CIRCLE OF JUAN SÁNCHEZ II (?).

DORMITION.

PRIVATE COLLECTION, SEVILLE {Photo. Arxiu

Mas )

11

SEVILLE

in a private collection at Seville (Fig. 9), but it is hard to believe that he was actually the author. Possibly the picture remains to us only in part, for it displays no more than the head of the bier with the upper part of the Virgin's body, Our Lord receiving her soul, St. John holding the taper of the ritual, and the busts of two other Apostles. Here, as usual, the HispanoFlemish style is enlivened with garments of gold brocade. It is the ascetically wan and wasted figures of Our Lady and St. John and the somewhat sfumato technique in which they are rendered that incorporate the most tangible analogies to the manner of Juan Sánchez I I , and it is in their forms also, as well as in the little angels who flutteringly accompany Our Lord, that the indebtedness to the Low Countries is most unmistakable. Because of his haircut and cap, the one of the two other Apostles who is at the right has a deceptively Italianate appearance, but his principal interest is that, with his back towards us, he suggests certain figures in the retable of Alanis, which is probably by a member of the other, more indigenous coterie at Seville, Juan Sánchez de Castro. Vague analogies in types suggest that Juan Sánchez I I may have been the teacher of the painter responsible for a retable of the Passion in the Collection of Don Alfonso de Orléans at Sanlúcar de Barrameda. The Via Dolorosa at the centre (Fig. xo) is flanked at each side by two compartments, one over the other, at the left the Agony in the Garden and Flagellation and at the right the Crucifixion and Pietà, the last overwatched by St. Francis who at the same time receives the impress of the stigmata. The middle panel once bore at the bottom a now almost totally obliterated inscription which may have been the signature and which, from the vestiges of letters, Pemán guesses may have spelled Diego Sánchez. The entirely diverse style, however, precludes Pemán's other surmise, the author's identity with the Diego Sánchez of the Cambridge Via Dolorosa, even if, with the Spanish critic, we take into account the possibility that his manner might have varied when he worked alone and apart from his associate, Antón Sánchez. Diego Angulo, 1 with his usual acumen, has discovered what really differentiates the 1 Quoted by Pemán in his article in the Archivo español de arte y arqueología, V I (1930), 68.

FIG. IO. CIRCLE OF JUAN SÁNCHEZ II (?). VIA DOLOROSA, CENTRE OF RETABLE. COLLECTION OF DON ALFONSO DE ORLÉANS, SANLUCAR DE BARRAMEDA (Photo. Arxiu Mas )

24

SEVILLE

Sanlúcar altarpiece from the other Hispano-Flemish paintings of Seville round about the year 1500 •— the influence of the Dutch Master of the Virgo inter Virgines, an acquaintance with whom in the peninsula is demonstrated also by the well known panel of the Annunciation in the Alba Collection at Madrid. 1 A multiplicity of elements reflect this orientation of the Sevillian painter — for instance, the short stature and often childlike quality of the actors, the type employed for the Virgin, the face of the Saviour in the Flagellation, the profile and indeed the whole character of the maid to whom St. Peter makes his denial in the background of this scene, and the more than ordinary predilection for scattering subordinate episodes through streets, secondary rooms, and passages of the landscapes seen in the distance. In his backgrounds the author shows an appreciation, exceptional for the period, of the dimming effects of aërial perspective; and if otherwise he does not rise in craft above the technical mean of his rivals — and he certainly does not fall below this mean — he possesses, in any case, the distinction of a quite unexpectedly piquant and homely imagination embodied in the episodes of the settings and perhaps again witnessing to his Dutch relationships. Some of the women, still within the gate of Jerusalem, have had to carry or lead their infants with them in order to escort Our L o r d on the W a y of Sorrow; amidst the cavalcade who issue from another portal of the city ride the Jewish clergy, haughty in their Christian mitres; and serried ranks of soldiery guide our eyes on to the hill of C a l v a r y (girt by a delightful inlet of the sea!), where two of the painter's characteristic boy-men are digging the hole for the cross encompassed by the implements of their humble profession. With a completely new version of the common theme, an ugly, hook-nosed J u d a s stands under the lintel of the door to the Garden of Olives and points the w a y to his military companions, one of whom bends round the j a m b and peeps furtively at their sacred Victim. In the incident of the denial the maidservant lets her broom rest as she listens to St. Peter tell his lie with expressive southern gestures, and the cock is already perched without the window in wait to do his prophetic crowing. 1

Vol. IV, pp. 27 and 81-84.

SEVILLE

25

Affiliations with the manner of Juan Sánchez I I or at least with the Sevillian school are perhaps to be discerned beneath the ruins of the much discussed panel of the Pietà on the left wall of the church of S. Juan de los Reyes at Granada. The resemblances in Juan Sánchez I I are found particularly in the Crucifixion of the cathedral at Seville and in the Jado Deposition. The Granada painting derives its fame from the presence, in smaller scale, of the Reyes Católicos as donors kneeling at either side with their patrons, the two St. Johns, Ferdinand on the left beneath the Baptist, Isabella on the right beneath the Evangelist. The depredation does not seem to be so rrtuch occasioned by repaint as has been commonly stated, but by blackening and dirt, which have largely obliterated the color. It is possibly the retouching that has made the portraits look weaker and more Italianate than the rest of the picture, although the Ferdinand appears to be more intact. In any case under the wreck there lies a good Hispano-Flemish picture that cannot have been executed more than a few years after the Christian subjugation of the city in 1492. The elements that most insistently declare allegiance to the art of the Low Countries are the types and triangular composition of the Virgin and dead Christ, the form of St. John Evangelist, and the landscape. The adaptation of the established Flemish composition for the Pietà is here closer to that of the Sanlúcar triptych than to the versions by Juan Núñez, Bermejo, and Francisco Chacón. 1 Although it must have been painted subsequently to Bermejo's great Barcelona Pietà of 1490, it is more primitive in manner, particularly in the unusually defective anatomy of the nude Saviour. The trite arrangement for the central subject constitutes no definite link with Chacon's treatment in the Escuelas Pías of the same town of Granada, and it is difficult to discern any detail in the work that would even hint at an attribution to him. The best part of the picture is the rather ample and pretty landscape, which includes a walled and turreted city that we might more readily interpret as Granada, were it not for the presence of a sail-dotted lake. Somewhat anomalously for an Hispano-Flemish production, no brilliant brocades are visible, at least in the present condition of the 1

See vol. IV, pp. 398-400.

26

SEVILLE

panel; but the haloes and edges of the garments were originally gilded. Because the Reyes Católicos are depicted in the painting, their half-mythical court-artist, Antonio del Rincón, was, of course, suggested by the elder generation of critics as the author; but I cannot see that even so accurate a modern scholar as Bertaux had any very valid reason for assigning it to the school of Cordova rather than to that of Seville. Although the former town enjoys a closer geographical proximity to Granada, Ferdinand and Isabella in 1487 employed two Sevillian masters, Antón Sánchez de Guadalupe and Diego Sánchez, to sketch for them their newly reconquered domain of Malaga, 1 and a Juan Sánchez Izquierdo mentioned in the record of a business transaction of 1499 as then residing in Granada might be surmised to belong to the school of Seville not only by reason of his membership in the Sánchez clan but also because the other party in this transaction was the Sevillian painter, Diego Sánchez de Parias. 2 This surmise is now confirmed by the publication of two further records that place Juan Sánchez Izquierdo in Seville in 1496, on July 3 hiring houses and on July 4 receiving, from the painter Diego Sánchez (de Parias?), 3 six cows. GómezMoreno 4 wonders whether he could not have been the author of the panel in S. Juan de los Reyes, as well as of two other works commissioned by Ferdinand and Isabella for Granada but now repainted beyond all recognition of the originals, the Virgin of Mercy (also with portraits of the two sovereigns), done in 1495 over the Puerta de Elvira, and the Virgin of the Rose, a free adaptation of the Sevillian Virgen de la Antigua, 5 moved from the Puerta de Bibarrambla to the Provincial Museum. T h e vague analogies to Juan Sánchez II that we have noted at the beginning of the discussion in the Pietà of S. Juan de los Reyes stir another query: if Juan Sánchez Izquierdo painted the Pietà, could he be identical with Juan Sánchez II? See above, p. 12. Gestoso, Diccionario, III, 394, under the entry, Diego Sánchez de Parias. 3 Documentos para la historia del arte en Andalucía, II, 106. In the first entry he is called merely Juan Izquierdo. 4 Archivo español de arte y arqueología., III (1927), 360. s Vol. III, pp. 198 ff. 1

2

SEVILLE

28

5.

JUAN

NUNEZ

T h e one extant signed work of Juan Núñez, the small Pietà in the Sacristy of the Chalices in the cathedral of Seville (Fig. 11), has the double interest of constituting a pronounced example of the Flemish influence and of having suggested to certain critics a possible relationship of its author to Bermejo. Drawing his material from Bermúdez and from Gestoso's Diccionario, Mayer 1 has compiled the known facts of his career, which begin in 1480 with his adherence to the reforms of the painters' guild, but the German critic points out that the later mentions of 1525 and 1534 may very well refer to another artist of the same name. 2 The majority of the documentary notices are barren entries in regard to financial transactions in his purchase of real estate and the like, but Bermúdez records important works of his that have disappeared. The recent publication of further Andalusian documents by the University of Seville has added the information that, like other mediaeval artists, he did not disdain an artisan's tasks but contracted on June 18, 1501, to paint and gild eight carved processional candlesticks for the Confraternity of St. Eloy. 3 The traits in the Pietà derived from the art of the Low Countries need only to be catalogued: the medium of oil; the types of the Virgin, the emaciated Christ, and, at the left, St. Michael; the triangular mass created by the outspread garments of the mother and the outstretched body of the Son; the crumpled design of her drapery; the meticulous painting of St. Michael's armor; and particularly the landscape. T h e only very Spanish element is the brilliancy of the brocade in the dalmatic of St. Vincent at the right. The figure of the dwarfed clerical donor is executed with even less advance in knowledge over the similar personages of the international style than the corresponding figure in Fernando Gallego's Weibel Pietà, and in general the only excellencies that Juan Núñez here reveals he seems to 1 Die Sevillaner Malerschule, 17-18. H e confuses, however, Juan Núñez with the Antonio Núñez who worked at Moguer in 1496: cf. below, pp. 34-35. 2 See below, p. 30. 3 Documentos para la historia del arte en Andalucía, II, 106-107.

SEVILLE

29

have derived from his Flemish prototypes. Moreover, unless the defects are due to unskilful restoration, he falls behind the majority of his compatriots in imitating the Flemish models. He makes a poor show, for instance, of simulating red velvet in St. Vincent's dalmatic (if velvet be really intended). St. Michael's cope betrays an analogous ugly red, but perhaps the most attractive thing in the panel is the rather pretty painting of the feminine saints in the orphreys of this vestment. Three elements might be taken as evidence of some sort of connection with Bermejo, who probably inaugurated his career in the related school of near-lying Cordova: the triangular composition of the group of the Pietà, together with the Virgin's garb, is repeated in Bermejo's painting of 1490 in the cathedral of Barcelona; the buildings in the backgrounds of both pictures are somewhat the same; and St. Michael carries a peculiar round shield with a hemispherical crystal in the centre, which is closely paralleled in Bermejo's great representation of the archangel now at London. But the triangular disposition is so frequent a factor in Flemish renderings of the theme that both Núñez and Bermejo might have derived it from the Low Countries independently of each other, and it recurs, for example, in the triptych of the Passion at Sanlucar de Barrameda and in the panel in S. Juan de los Reyes at Granada. The similarities in Our Lady's dress may likewise be explained by separate borrowings from northern models. The arrangement of hills dotted with towns and castles does not sufficiently duplicate the background of Bermejo's Pietà to countenance the theory of interrelationship. If there were any real reason for seeking a source in Seville for such general factors as the composition of the central group and the landscape, the Harris panel belonging to the circle of Pedro Sánchez would have been as likely a source. The nearest approximation to anything like actual proof of an affiliation of Bermejo and Núñez is the parallelism of the two shields, but bucklers of mirror-like centres are a commonplace of Flemish painting, from which either Andalusian master might perhaps again have derived the idea separately. The St. Michael in the Last Judgment by Petrus Christus in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Berlin, for example, brandishes a shield with a glass centre. Even though Isabella's collection

30

SEVILLE

was not installed in the cathedral of Granada until 1505, Nunez and Bermejo might have seen, before it reached Granada, the altarpiece belonging to the school of Bruges in the later fifteenth century of which two panels are preserved in the Royal Chapel, a St. John Baptist and a St. Michael 1 whose targe has likewise a reflecting centre of steel or glass. The similarly armed archangel by Juan de Flandes in the cloister of the Old Cathedral at Salamanca was probably executed too late to have influenced either of the painters now in question. We shall find,2 indeed, other such bucklers wielded by St. Michael and his angels in a somewhat earlier painting of the school of Seville itself, the example from Zafra now in the Prado, for which again it is not necessary to predicate any connection with Bermejo. In view of all these analogues, the shield does not compel the belief that Núñez and Bermejo were familiar with each other's works. Vague likenesses in their manners would be explained if it were possible to substantiate Tormo's supposition that they both obtained their training at Naples, but the entire absence of any specifically Italian traits in Núñez renders the theory yet more dubious than in the case of Pedro Sánchez.3 Even if the relation between Núñez and Bermejo could be granted, it would still be necessary to decide which of these contemporaries learned from the other. The Annunciation published by A. Méndez Casal from a Spanish private collection 4 and signed " J u a n Núñez, 1 5 2 5 , " is a work of the full Renaissance and so cannot, on any possible theory or stretch of the imagination, have been painted by the author of the Pietà. It thus demonstrates the existence of a second and later Juan Núñez, who may or may not have been a son or relative of the first or the artist mentioned in the records of 1525 and i534- s Other productions of this J u a n Núñez I I may be recognized in the Iglesia de la Caridad at Sanlúcar de Barrameda, but the discussion of his personality will fall naturally within a subsequent volume of the present series. 1

Cf. Gómez-Moreno in Gazette des beaux arts, 1908, I I , 306-308. 3 See below, p. 49. See above, p. 10. •t Arte español, I I I , 424-427. s See above, p. 28. 2

SEVILLE

6.

THE

CHOIR

DOORS

31 AT

MOGUER

One of the last exponents of the Flemish tradition at Seville, before its fusion with the first omens of the Italian Renaissance, was the rustic and feeble artist who about 1500 painted on leather the decoration of two doors in the coro of the conventual church of Sta. Clara at Moguer. T h e subject of one door is v e r y definitely an early representation of the Immaculate Conception in distinction from the mode, customary at the time, of symbolization of the theme b y investing the A s s u m p tion or Coronation with the insignia of M a r y ' s purity and honor. 1 Such a direct artistic statement of the m y s t e r y was, indeed, natural in Andalusia, which from the first was a centre of propaganda for the exaltation of the pious opinion into a dogma. T h e clothing with the sun is indicated by a mandorla of alternating pointed and flaming rays encompassing the Virgin, w h o suckles the Child and holds in her right hand the rose of Sharon or the rose plant in J e r i c h o ; 2 " t h e (crescent) moon is under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars." A pair of angels trumpet forth her glory in the two upper spandrels; the lower left corner is occupied b y St. R a p h a e l leading St. T o b i a s , both designated b y inscriptions; and the corresponding space at the right b y an angel clasping one end of the moon and bearing a scroll upon which is poorly spelled the phrase, " Conceptio tua, Dei genetrix, V i r g o . " B o t h the relation of St. R a p h a e l to the Immaculate Conception and his anomalous attribute of a decapitated male head are hard to elucidate. T h e pendant angel at the right is guessed b y T o r m o 3 to be Gabriel, probably for no other reason than the juxtaposition. T h e space of the second door (Fig. 12) is divided into two compartments, containing, above, the Annunciation, and, below, the N a t i v i t y . T h e backs of both doors are painted at the centre w i t h a large sacred monogram between, at the top, an escutcheon of the instruments of the Passion, and, at the bottom, a secular shield that varies from door to door. 1 See vol. I V , p. 470. A n even more elaborate and very definite representation of the Immaculate Conception is included in the Hispano-Flemish retable of Artajona in 2 Ibid., p. 440, n. 3. Navarre (ibid., p. 440). 3 Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones, X X X I I I (1925), 109, n.

32

SEVILLE

Tormo assigns these Moguer paintings to the school of Pedro de Córdoba 1 perhaps because the Annunciation resembles in composition Pedro's well known panel in the Cordovan cathedral and because the Nativity is a somewhat less exact counterpart of the version of the subject in the Pickman Collection, Seville, which at the time when the Spanish scholar wrote was generally and wrongly believed to have been executed by the same Pedro de Córdoba. But the Nativity is so much more faithful a reproduction of the absolutely Sevillian rendering at Alcalá de Guadaira, which is perhaps the work of Juan Sánchez de Castro, that it is patent that the Moguer painter was actually basing himself upon this or an affiliated prototype: he even copies both St. Joseph's divided beard, which had so long a Sevillian tradition behind it, and the transformation of the shepherds in the right background into children, now increased in number and depicted, in the spirit of genre, as engaged in a kind of excited romp. Although all Annunciations at this period are very similar to one another, the parallelisms in detail in this instance make it quite possible that the Moguer painter had seen Pedro de Cordoba's picture; but there is nothing peculiarly Cordovan in his manner, and the striking affinity of the St. Joseph in type to the corresponding figure in the Nativity of Alcalá de Guadaira reveals that his stylistic associations, as was to be expected from Moguer's geographical situation, were rather with the school of Seville. For once, Tormo could not have looked very closely, for he attributes to Pedro de Córdoba or to this hypothetical Moguer disciple a Last Supper in the convent that manifestly belongs to the early Renaissance. The types in the paintings of the doors are more largely impregnated with Flemish qualities, particularly the Gabriel of the Annunciation and indeed all the other angels, than in the more indigenous coterie at Seville, in which the Alcalá picture must be classified. The skies, perhaps through Flemish influence, are blue, but the Spanish love of opulence has turned to gold both the tunics and copes of the Virgin and Gabriel in the Annunciation (although the gilt has been partly worn away by time) and has endowed even the Child held by Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception with a gold brocade the pattern 1

Ibid.y and p. no.

FIG. 12.

SCHOOL OF SEVILLE. ANNUNCIATION AND NATIVITY, PAINTINGS ON A DOOR. (Photo. Arxiu

STA. CLARA, MOGUER Mas )

34

SEVILLE

of which is ostentatiously large, out of all proportion to the prerogatives of infancy. It goes without saying that bold brocades of a peculiarly Sevillian design decorate the mantles of all the actors, and it is perhaps the luxuriant Andalusian milieu that explains the unusually huge floral motif distinguishing the tunic as well as the cope of the immaculately conceived M a r y and that spreads a similar ornamentation even over the under-vestures of the Virgin in the Annunciation and Nativity and the costume of St. Joseph. A Sevillian document of 1494 1 supplies us with the names of two artists then active upon such decorative paintings in Sta. Clara at Moguer either one of whom may or may not have been responsible for the embellishment of the two extant doors. According to this document (which is difficult to interpret because it presupposes as a basis a related legal deed that has not been published), the goldsmith, Manuel Ruiz, and the painter, Juan de Robleda, seem to take upon themselves the obligation into which another painter, Antonio Núñez, had entered to carry out certain ornamentations of an organ built by the painter, Pedro de Trujillo, all of these artists being citizens of Seville; or it may be that they are merely releasing him from his part in the commission that they had all three agreed to execute; or that, for some reason which we do not know, they are buying him off from his contract with Pedro de Trujillo and imply nothing as to their own assumption or continuation of the task; or that Pedro de Trujillo did not build the organ but was only the master-craftsman in its decoration. Inasmuch as Antonio Núñez and Juan de Robleda were evidently little more than artisans occupied at Moguer not in doing monumental pictures but in embellishment of ecclesiastical furniture, it becomes quite possible that one of them would have executed the similar and virtually synchronous painting of the two doors, the craft of which, with its spineless delineation of form, is far from that of a true master; but there is no valid way of determining which of the twain we should select for the doubtful honor. Tormo 2 picks Juan de Robleda, evidently because he interprets the document to mean that this craftsman actually 1 1

Gestoso, Diccionario, II, 84. Op. cit., 109, η.

SEVILLE

35

did the adornment of the organ, and so perhaps also the doors of the coro·, but we have already seen that the exact elucidation of the document is a problem. In any case, Antonio Núñez may have done some work upon the organ before he abandoned the commission, and, even if he never put his hand to the organ, the mere fact that he had been proposed for the undertaking proves what Tormo apparently does not realize, i. e., that he was the same kind of decorative painter as Juan de Robleda and thus could himself have executed the doors either before or after the business of the organ. Indeed another extant record 1 embodies the information that in 1496 he contracted to carry out some kind of painting in Sta. Clara of Moguer the nature of which is unfortunately not specified, and his activity in the guild of painters at Seville 2 would imply a greater artistic prominence than that enjoyed by Juan de Robleda. As a matter of fact there is no reason why the author of the pictures on the doors should not have been even Pedro de Trujillo, who is called a painter in the document, who may have been only the organ's chief decorator and not its builder, and who in any case might have exercised the pictorial profession on other furniture of the church than the organ. There are, moreover, additional claimants for the authorship quite outside this interlinked group of artists — a Pedro Dorma and a Pedro Fernandez who on October 3, 1502, contracted to paint a beam for the convent. 3 If this Pedro Fernández perchance worked on the doors, he could not conceivably be identical with the Pedro Fernández de Cordoba, who is now known to have executed the Pickman Nativity formerly attributed to Pedro de Cordoba. The Moguer Pedro Fernandez is probably the painter who continues to be mentioned in Sevillian documents in 1504 as pardoned for wounding a man in a broil and in 1508 as agreeing to pay for some canvases, 4 and he may be the same as the homonym registered by Gestoso on page 326 of the third volume of his Diccionario. Gestoso, op. cit., III, 369. * Ibid., II, 67. 3 Documentos para la historia del arte en Andalucía, « Ibid., 107 and 108. 1

II, 107.

CHAPTER LVIII HISPANO-FLEMISH PAINTING A T SEVILLE. MORE INDIGENOUS I.

JUAN

SANCHEZ

DE

THE

GROUP CASTRO

THE other coterie of Sevillian painters in the second half of the century seem largely unconscious of Flemish achievement, and their style, as in eastern Spain at this epoch, is rather a broadening and an amelioration of inheritances from the cramped manner of the international movement. A t their head stands Juan Sánchez de Castro, who, amongst the multiplicity of documentary references to painters called Juan Sánchez, can with certainty be identified only with the one having the " d e C a s t r o " attachment, mentioned in 1478 as occupied in the Alcázar and in 1480 among the reformers of the guild. Bermúdez, however, comes to our aid by carrying his activity back as far as 1454, the date of a non-extant, signed retable by him in the chapel of St. Joseph in the cathedral of Seville (if Bermúdez actually read Juan Sánchez de Castro instead of merely Juan Sánchez); and the repainted St. Christopher in the church of S. Julián at Seville 1 extends his lease of life to at least 1484, the year that he has inscribed upon this fresco together with his signature. Of his three preserved, signed works, the undated Virgen de Gracia also once in S. Julián but now in the Vestuario of the cathedral (with the signature no longer visible) gives the most adequate touchstone by which to test his accomplishments (Fig. 13). Even this has suffered much from the injuries of time (always, nevertheless, a kinder enemy than the restorer), especially in the obliteration of the donor who knelt below St. Peter to the left of the Virgin and from whose mouth proceeded an inscription with a prayer that still remains. Mayer is not 1 While the book is in press I learn that the church was burned in the spring of 1932.

SEVILLE

37

quite right in excluding all Flemish influence, for, in order to cast the Virgin's robe in a great triangular expanse, to delineate its folds, to pucker her wimple and the Child's tunic, and to create the pairs of miniature angels who hold the tiara above St. Peter and, on the other side, the cardinal's hat above St.

FIG. 13. JUAN SÁNCHEZ DE CASTRO. LA VIRGEN DE GRACIA. CATHEDRAL, SEVILLE

Jerome, the artist must have given at least a passing glance at the productions of the Low Countries. Y e t the foreign modes did not interest him vitally. He sticks to the medium of tempera, and he has succeeded in evolving an essentially indigenous expression, in which the harshness of the Low Countries has been absorbed into a bland serenity that recalls the manner of

38

SEVILLE

those Italian masters of the Quattrocento who did not cultivate sternness and virility. The Italian and international seed implanted in Andalusia during the earlier period has developed independently into a mature product not too different from the result in Italy itself. Whether or not Juan Sánchez de Castro was an actual pupil of the master of the Patio de los Evangelistas at Santiponce, he grew out of the international milieu of this artist as truly as Huguet in Catalonia emerged from the Franco-Flemish atmosphere of the Master of St. George. Mayer has noted the resemblance of the St. Jerome to his seated counterpart in the cloisters of Santiponce, and indeed both St. Jerome and St. Peter are obviously descendants from the types in general of the Santiponce master and from those of the illuminator, the Master of the Cypresses, who was affiliated or even identical with the author of the Santiponce frescoes.1 The St. Peter, for instance, is somewhat like the St. Matthew from Santiponce now in the Provincial Museum of Seville, and St. Jerome displays the flowing, divided beard that is a trade-mark of the Master of the Cypresses. Assisted by a few more suggestions from Flanders than the Catalonians of the second half of the fifteenth century cared to adopt but by scarcely more than we meet at Valencia, Juan Sánchez expanded the international manner at Seville to a more adult expression, performing the same office as Huguet and Jacomart on the eastern littoral. The gilded embossings of haloes and orphreys, the gold and red brocade of St. Peter's cope, and the conspicuousness of the large gold pattern in the Virgin's blue mantle combine with the formality of the composition to emphasize the decorative effect that the Spaniards sought to a more definite degree than either the Flemings or Italians. The same embellishments contribute also to creating an effect of Spanish opulence. Here, even in one of its sweetest Sevillian moods, Spanish painting, as always, has the heavier and solemner harmony of an organ rather than the lighter and more vibrant notes of the string instruments of Italian art. The hues are not brilliant but sober, especially in St. Peter's inner vestment and in the fabric of the ponderous gold brocade that serves as the Virgin's tunic under her mantle, but it is hard to determine 1

See vol. I l l , pp. 322-323.

SEVILLE

39

whether the sombre background of the whole picture be original or not. For the realization of his not very high ambitions, Juan Sánchez de Castro, though in no sense a great master, possesses an adequate draughtsmanship and control over his brush. The Flemish reminiscences, however slight, would probably date the Virgen de Gracia somewhat after the lost retable of 1454. The fresco of the customarily gigantic St. Christopher on the right side of the church of S. Julián at Seville, signed and dated 1484, embodies so traditional a theme that the painter would not have had much chance to express in it his individual characteristics, and, to complicate matters the more, subsequent restorations have largely obscured the original handicraft except in the head. The structure of the head and the intensity of the eyes create a resemblance to the masculine saints who stand beside the Virgen de Gracia. No acquaintance with Flemish art, at least in the present condition of the fresco, is definitely revealed. The frequent companion of St. Christopher's effigies, his friend the hermit, appears in dwarfed proportions at one side with his lantern, but, according to an iconography not encountered in northern Spain, the giant carries in his belt two of the pilgrims, again in diminutive size, whom it was his function to transport across the stream. In the church of Sta. Maria at Arcos de la Frontera may be seen what looks like a copy or rather adaptation of this St. Christopher, executed in the late sixteenth or the seventeenth century. The Collection of the Conde de las Torres de Sánchez-Dalp at Seville contains a small panel of a bust of the Salvator Mundi clad in red and holding a globe upon which are inscribed Juan Sánchez de Castro and the date 1471. The painter is perhaps aping the tricks of Flemish expertness in representing a town as reflected in the globe, and the technique in general, especially the chiaroscuro, incorporates a greater interest in the precedent of the Low Countries than the master betrays in his other two signed works. On the strength of the signature painted on the wall in front of the Virgin's prie-Dieu there has been generally ascribed to Juan Sánchez de Castro a fresco of the Annunciation in the Patio de los Muertos at Santiponce, in which the subsequent

4

o

SEVILLE

perpetration of a door has cut away Our Lady's head and all but the beginning of the left part of her body (leaving principally her clasped hands), and some other form of destruction has done away with most of the rest, preserving only the upper half of St. Gabriel's form, the tiling, a bit of the wainscoting between the two figures, St. Mary's desk, and the usual pot of lilies. T h e abbreviated and obscurely written signature is ordinarily interpreted as Juan Sánchez, pintor; but the elucidation of the letters and symbols is a very uncertain affair, and one might perhaps extract from them the name, Juan Fernandez Sánchez (although in that case the Fernández would not be abbreviated in the same way as in the Nativity by Pedro Fernández de Córdoba in the Pickman Collection at Seville). Even if the reading Juan Sánchez, pintor, is granted, there is no apparent reason for selecting as the author, from the abundance of painters so entitled that Seville can muster in the fifteenth century, the individual who adds De Castro to his other names. This identification goes back at least as far as Ceán Bermúdez, who understands Pacheco 1 to refer to Juan Sánchez de Castro, when, writing his Arte de la pintura in the early seventeenth century, Pacheco mentions the signed Annunciation at Santiponce; but Pacheco simply gives the signature as it has usually been read, Juan Sánchez, pintor. If we confine ourselves to the witness of the signature, the author might just as well be the Juan Sanchez II, the painter of the Crucifixion in the cathedral of Seville, or any of the several other contemporary masters with the same appellations; and the only valid stylistic evidence that the dilapidation has spared to us in the lower folds of the angel's draperies is far from conclusive. If the folds belong at all to the second half of the fifteenth century, their more Flemish character would point to Juan Sánchez II rather than to De Castro; but since they might easily be conceived to have been inspired by the Franco-Flemish international manner out of which grew the fully developed painting of the Low Countries, some Juan Sánchez of the first half of the fifteenth century is by no means a logical absurdity. 2 T h e Apostles that F.d. of Madrid, 1866, II, 159-160. See my vol. I l l , p. 324. ' For Sevillian painters named Juan Sánchez and active in the first half of the century, see Gestoso, Diccionario, II, 98. 1

SEVILLE

41

Pacheco mentions as simulating embroidery on the orphreys of St. Gabriel's mantle are so far obliterated as to yield no stylistic information. T h e scant circumstantial evidence is of little aid in the solution of the problem. T h e unforeshortened tiling on the floor of the chamber in which the salutation is imagined as occurring and its lozenge pattern are more consistent with the earlier date, but they would not be isolated phenomena in the painting of the later fifteenth century. 1 T h e pure design in the frescoed dado of the Patio de los Muertos continues the mudéjar patterns found in the same place in the Patio de los Evangelistas, where the extensively preserved mural paintings with human figures are confessedly works of the first half of the Quattrocento; 2 and yet, per contra, the other frescoed figures that are left in the Patio de los Muertos 3 belong to the Hispano-Flemish period. Vandalism of another and more fatal kind, total repainting, has destroyed the evidence in a second work at Santiponce, ascribed to Juan Sánchez de Castro on stylistic grounds, a panel of the Madonna and Child enthroned between Sts. Barbara and ( ?) Catherine 4 now over the altar in the sepulchral chapel called the Panteón (Fig. 14). T h e countenances are entirely spoiled, but what other traces of the original emerge would tend to confirm the guess that Juan Sánchez de Castro was the author. T h e Virgin's mantle spreads forth and falls in almost the identical capacious but languidly graceful folds that clothe Our L a d y of Grace in the cathedral, and the Child, toying with the leaves of a book but, as in the cathedral panel, fully clad, is an even more persuasive factor, in the shape of His body, head, and hands, for supporting the attribution. H e has j u s t that quality of the Infant held by Nuestra Señora de Gracia which can be described only by the Spanish phrase, muy mono. One senses pleasantly also the placid mood of the more indigenous coterie in Sevillian painting of the second half of the fifteenth century, no more than lightly touched by the rigor of Flemish types or the perturbation of Flemish draperies. I t is not necessary to interpret the simulated carvings of lions on the throne 1

See below, p. 54.

2

See ray vol. Ill, pp. 318 ff.

s Ibid., pp. 323-324. 4

She has no other attribute than the sword.

42

SEVILLE

as inspired by the painting of the Low Countries. The embossings of the cathedral panel, however, are absent; the background, at least in the present condition of the work, is a brocade (originally gold ?) not unlike those that set off the frescoed saints of the earlier part of the century in the Patio de los Evangelistas at Santiponce. It is always agreeable to have the authority of the great and never sufficiently lamented French scholar, Bertaux, behind one, and with this potent support I am readier than I perhaps otherwise should have been to ascribe to Juan Sanchez de Castro the retable over the high altar of the parish church at Alanis, far north of Seville in the mountains on the borders of the province of Badajoz. If it was painted by him, it is his most ambitious and important extant achievement. Inasmuch as the church is dedicated to Our Lady of the Snows, the lower row of paintings enshrines scenes from the Virgin's life, the Annunciation, Nativity of Christ, Epiphany, and Purification, flanking at the centre a lovely statue of the Madonna and Child belonging to the same period. The upper row of paintings consists, at the middle, of a smaller Crucifixion and, at the sides, of four large and even grandiose full-lengths of Sts. Peter, John Baptist, John Evangelist, and Paul, clad in heavy and magnificent draperies and represented (with the possible exception of the first) as standing against arches. The scenes in the predella, at the sides of the tabernacle, are the Last Supper, the Crowning with Thorns, the Deposition, and the Resurrection. The uprights are carved with synchronous figures of saints, and a small, modern statue of St. Anthony of Padua plays the part of an interloper between the Crucifixion and the sculptured Madonna and Child. The backgrounds of the paintings are of gold, diapered, for the most part, with varying patterns of squares, and gold profusely accents the garments. Certain parts vividly recall passages in the authenticated Virgen de Gracia. The St. John in the Deposition is like the Madonna herself in the panel of the Seville cathedral; the St. Joseph in the Epiphany and again in the Purification repeats the St. Peter; the first kneeling Magus is the counterpart of the St. Jerome; and the adoring angels in the Nativity belong to the same company as those bearing the headgear of the Apostle and the Cardinal who

SEVILLE

43

accompany Our Lady in the Seville panel. Gabriel, in the beautiful version of the Annunciation, might conceivably be interpreted as remotely inspired by the precedent of the Low Countries, but in general definitive Flemish traits are as con-

Fic. 14.

JUAN SÁNCHEZ DE CASTRO (?). MADONNA AND SAINTS. S. ISIDORO DEL CAMPO, SANTIPONCE

spicuous by their absence as in the other works that we have brought into connection with Juan Sánchez de Castro. If the Alanis retable is his creation, it affords an opportunity to estimate his ability as a story-teller, and he does not emerge from the test with great distinction, however impressive and at the

44

SEVILLE

same time charming he may be as a decorator, monumental composer, and delineator of separate figures. There is little of novelty or of piquancy in the narrative scenes, except that he has a trick of occasionally turning the back of an actor to us and of oddly concealing his head at the same time beneath a covering, as in an Apostle in the Last Supper, who disappears completely under a cowl, and in one of Our Lord's tormentors in the Crowning with Thorns, whose pate is entirely hidden by a helmet. To this bravo and his companion the painter manages to lend more than usual interest. The Purification comprises the curious Spanish iconographical detail of one participant kneeling, 1 in this instance the prophetess, Anna. Without too many qualms one might perhaps accept Gestoso's 2 attribution to Juan Sanchez de Castro of the Nativity (Fig. 15) built into a composite altar at the east end of the right aisle in Sta. María del Águila at Alcalá de Guadaira; but many considerations recommend a non-committal attitude. The ultimate derivation of the long-tressed Virgin from the school of Tournai and the Flemish puckering of the drapery on the angel making the proclamation to the shepherds in the background render unthinkable Mayer's ascription to the master of the Patio de los Evangelistas at Santiponce, who is an exponent of the Italianate and international manner of the first half of the fifteenth century; 3 but the German critic's contention contains a kernel of truth in that the Alcalá Nativity shares with the Virgen de Gracia by Juan Sánchez de Castro the traces of tutelage under the master of Santiponce. St. Joseph appears to be descended from this master's masculine type with divided beard, and in features, particularly in forehead and nose, he virtually reproduces the St. Jerome who accompanies the Virgen de Gracia. Further arguments for naming Juan Sánchez de Castro as the author are the rather exact similarity of the dainty Infant to the Child held by Our Lady of Grace and of the fluttering angel to the celestial spirits in the panel of the Seville cathedral. Y e t the draperies of these spirits are crimped in more minute folds than in the Alcalá picture, and one cannot quite reconcile the two types of the Madonna. The technique 1 2

See vols. I l l , p. 129, and IV, pp. 1 1 2 and 198. Diccionario, II, 100. a See vol. I l l , p. 326.

46

SEVILLE

in the Seville picture is everywhere a little finer, and it is somewhat hard to believe that the competent artist who painted this picture could have made the shepherds into such children, however naively charming, as they appear in the Alcalá Nativity or could have depicted the posture of prostrate awe in one of them so clumsily. Both the Virgin and St. Joseph are oppressed beneath ostentatious red and gold brocades in which the Andalusians revelled as much as the mediaeval painters and patrons of the rest of the peninsula, and in the case of the Virgin the pattern is spread out for our delectation, according to the frequent practice, in conventional frontality. The background is incised, as in the Alanis retable, with a diaper of small, ornamented rectangles. 1 As a purely tentative proposition, awaiting confirmation or refutation by subsequent critics, I myself should like to suggest the assignment to Juan Sánchez de Castro or his immediate circle of a painting the unusual beauty and significance of which have been enhanced by its accessibility to general knowledge in the Prado, the St. Michael acquired by the Museum in 1925 from the Hospital of S. Miguel at Zafra and transferred to canvas (Fig. 16). The propriety of such an alignment for the picture is chiefly argued by the virtual repetition of the angels accompanying the Virgen de Gracia in the multitude of heavenly beings who combat the entanglement of lesser demons while St. Michael at the centre lays hold " o n the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan." The practical identity extends from the types and draperies to the actual reiteration of the highly individual postures of violent and convulsed agitation. There are no other angels in Hispano-Flemish painting quite analogous to these miniature-like representations about the Virgen de Gracia and in the Zafra picture except the examples depicted by Jorge Inglés; 2 but the parallelism is closer between the specimens of the Zafra canvas and the Virgen de Gracia, and Zafra lies near enough at the north to Seville to have engaged the services of a prominent Sevillian master, 1 I have never been able to obtain, despite constant endeavor, even a photograph of the Assumption shown in the Exposición Histórico-Europea at Madrid in 1892, which Don Diego Angulo ascribes to the author of the Alcalá Nativity or to a very intimately related hand {Archivo español de arte y arqueología, IV, 1928, pp. 59-60). » Vol. IV, pp. 65 ff.

Fig. I6.

JUAN SÁNCHEZ DE CASTRO (?). ST. MICHAEL, FROM ZAFRA. PRADO, MADRID

48

SEVILLE

whereas it would be hard to find a case of a Castilian painter's employment in Andalusia, except the court-artist, Francisco Chacón, who very naturally was sent, probably by the sovereigns themselves, to decorate the newly Christianized Granada. 1 The Andalusian prettiness and placidity of the archangel, moreover, would be difficult to reconcile with the asperity of Jorge Inglés; but, although we have so little left of the surely authenticated production of Juan Sánchez de Castro with which to compare St. Michael's countenance, it quite harmonizes with his bland standards. The affinity of the angel in the N a t i v i t y of Alcalá de Guadaira should also be brought into the reckoning. If the technical performance in certain details of St. Michael's costume, especially in the exquisite patterns wrought upon the shield, is somewhat superior to the capabilities revealed by the scant remains of Juan Sánchez de Castro, there is no reason for denying to him the competence to achieve such an artistic leap in an ethereal subject in which many another master has surpassed himself. M y own convictions, however, are not strong enough to press the attribution beyond the opinion that the picture belongs to the same class of painting as the output of Juan Sánchez de Castro. It is doubtful whether we should be helped in naming the master if the inscription on the sword were more clearly legible, for we have already been perplexed by the difficulty of deciding whether the legend on the sword in the retable of Sts. Mark and Catherine in the cathedral of Sigüenza refers to the possible author, Antonio Contreras, or to the blade-smith. 2 So far as one can see at present, there are six or seven letters in the inscription, of which the first four are possibly Μ Ν Υ I; but if we take into account the difficulty of Gothic epigraphy, it is not out of the question that all but the last one or two letters were meant to spell M I C H A E L . Another solution would be that the legend was merely decorative, without the intention of any meaning. T h e omission of the halo betokens a somewhat more vital Flemish influence than is encountered in Juan Sánchez de Castro's canon. Although the type for St. Michael is eventually derived from the school of Tournai, it is mollified to appeal to south-Spanish taste. The principal seat of the emulation of 1

Vol. IV, p. 397.

2

Ibid., p. 462.

SEVILLE

49

the Low Countries' skill is in the scrupulous painting of the archangel's almost foppishly elaborate armor, the glinting light and reflections upon it, and the jewels with which it, as well as his cape, is profusely studded. José Ramón Mélida 1 believes that he can distinguish, mirrored in the boss of St. Michael's shield, the stock theme of mediaeval literature, the dispute of an angel and demon for a soul. It is hard to be sure that this boss is glass rather than burnished steel; the umbones of the bucklers held by some of the lesser angels in the picture are almost certainly intended to represent the former material, and in any case the general nature of all the shields provides still further analogues, beside that of Juan Nunez, to this detail in Bermejo's great rendering of the theme. The posture and gestures of St. Michael are not sufficiently similar to those utilized by Bermejo to make it necessary to postulate that he was familiar with the Zafra version. The nearest Flemish analogue to this version is not the St. Michael in the Last Judgment by Petrus Christus in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Berlin, which apparently was in the Iberian peninsula from the beginning, 2 but the figure of the archangel in the Van E y c k example of the same theme in the Hermitage at Petrograd, which cannot be traced to an existence in Spain before the year 1845.3 Both the Zafra and Christus St. Michaels carry a cross, but the parallelisms in pose and costume are more exact in the other instance. The troups of smaller angels may also be taken in type from Jan van E y c k rather than from the Master of Flémalle. The intertwined swarm of lesser demons surrounding Beelzebub and confounded by the celestial cohorts are conceived and even executed, as well as the dragon himself, in the sharply eerie mode of Jerome Bosch, but the picture, which can scarcely be placed later than c. 1480, dates from too early a moment to permit any of his works to have become known to the Spanish artist. I should like to have unearthed some German print that would have explained, as a model, the distinctly northEuropean grotesquerie of the feeling of Walpurgisnacht embodied in this infernal mob, but, with m y present knowledge, I can ascribe it only to the author's unusually powerful imagi1 2

Catálogo monumental, Provincia de Badajoz, II, 458. See my vol. IV, p. 25. s Ibid., p. 21.

ζο

SEVILLE

nation in the realm of the monstrously bizarre. Despite all the reminiscences of the art of the Low Countries, the tonality of color is reduced to the favorite light brown of the HispanoFlemings. A final painting that has been ascribed to Juan Sánchez de Castro on internal evidence, the enthroned St. Peter in the Sacristy of the Chalices in the cathedral of Seville, must be definitely discarded from our present count as a production of the early Renaissance. Ι.

OTHER

PAINTINGS

OF T H E

INDIGENOUS

COTERIE

Despite the many parallelisms, it would be a bold critic who would definitely venture to assign to Juan Sánchez de Castro the panels in the Provincial Museum of Seville depicting eight large effigies of saints and constituting what is called the picture of the Military Orders because they once formed a retable or section of a retable in the now suppressed church of S. Benito de Calatrava at Seville, which in the nineteenth century was handed over to the Military Orders of Spain. The saints represented, as now arranged in the Museum, from left to right, are: Anthony Abbot, Christopher (Fig. 17), Catherine, Sebastian, Andrew, John Baptist, Jerome, and Anthony of Padua. T w o or three factors in the iconography deserve passing comment. Christopher's belt contains two miniature personages that are not so obviously pilgrims as in the fresco by Juan Sánchez de Castro in S. Julián. T h e y carry objects that, except for a pot or kettle, are difficult to recognize. Could these personages be representatives of the industrial guilds? T h e similar iconography would be a better argument for the authorship of Juan Sánchez de Castro, if it were not possible that the two small forms were a regular element in the Andalusian mode for representing this saint. The anomalous attribute on his left arm, which Mayer describes as a millstone, may be meant for the fiery stool of torture upon which he was placed. In distinction from the fresco in S. Julián and by a strange departure from the mediaeval norm, the Christ-Child is depicted as entirely nude except for the collar of the flying mantle about His neck. T h e limitation of the names of the continents inscribed upon the

Fig. 17.

CIRCLE OF JUAN SÁNCHEZ DE CASTRO. STS. ANTHONY ABBOT AND CHRISTOPHER, SECTION OF RETABLE OF THE MILITARY ORDERS. PROVINCIAL MUSEUM, SEVILLE (Photo. Arxiu

Mas )

52

SEVILLE

globe that He holds to Asia, Europe, and Africa does not date the painting before the discovery of America, which even after 1492 would have been conceived as a part of Asia. Another iconographie curiosity is the representation of the Infant Saviour, a vision of whom St. Anthony of Padua enjoyed, like a large badge on the right side of his Franciscan habit. In the Harris Pietà of the circle of Pedro Sánchez I, the Child is similarly depicted in the centre of his robe. The general manner is certainly like that of Juan Sánchez de Castro, and there are even such specific links with his works as the analogy of the St. Anthony Abbot to the St. Jerome of the Gracia panel, of the St. Jerome of the Military Orders to the Alcalá St. Joseph, the resemblance of the whole saintly aggregation to the upper tier of grandly conceived figures in the retable of Alanis, and the reappearance, in the gold backgrounds, of De Castro's ingeniously and delightfully varied rectangular patterning. Certain traits would imply a partial dependence upon the author of the frescoes in the Patio de los Evangelistas at Santiponce, although the evidence is by no means so patent as in the productions that I have connected with Juan Sánchez de Castro. The St. Catherine is vaguely reminiscent of this virgin's effigy in the Santiponce cycle; the St. Jerome has the characteristic divided beard; but the St. Sebastian varies widely from the virile figure at Santiponce, and, in general, the smooth placidity of Sevillian art, as embodied in the retable of the Orders, is very different from the energetic international manner of the Santiponce frescoes. The two little, half-caricatured personages in St. Christopher's belt are still distinctly international in aspect and forestall a dating much after 1450, but they recall rather the international forms of the Catalan Master of St. George or those of Valencia. The style is as essentially local as that of Juan Sánchez de Castro. It takes sharp-seeing eyes — eyes perhaps that discern what they wish to discern rather than what is really present —· to detect here any effectual traces of an acquaintance with the art of northern Europe. Certainly Sentenach has slight justification for finding a relation to the picture in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, that gives the contemporary German Master of the St. Bartholomew Altar his name: the only parallelisms

SEVILLE

53

are the quite fortuitous alignment of a row of saints and the employment of brocades for the costumes. I t would be hazardous, on the other hand, to deny that here and there the Spanish painter was actuated by dim remembrances of German pictures that he had casually regarded, impressing on the older heads of Sts. Anthony Abbot, Andrew, and Jerome something of a Teutonic severity and casting the draperies occasionally, as on the Sts. Anthony of Padua and Christopher, in a Teutonic or Flemish pattern of contorted and crumpled folds. We may well question whether in the three older and hirsute saints there is any such direct relation to the Baptist of the Van Eyck altar at Ghent as in Luis Dalmau's St. Andrew. The foreign touch in the painting is a slight one, at the most, and even Jacomart, whom the author most resembles, was under more essential obligation to the Low Countries. The general analogy to the style of the eastern Spanish littoral, indeed, is more tangible even than in the case of the other works in the circle of Juan Sánchez de Castro. The brocades are so like those of Catalonia and of Jacomart that, bringing into the reckoning the other parallelisms, one could dogmatically assert here an influence of eastern Spain, were it not that critics are beginning better to understand that similar racial characteristics and similar cultural conditions produce analogous artistic results without interdependence. Yet there is no reason for scouting the possibility that the retable of the Military Orders was executed by the Juan or the Francisco of Catalonia or the Diego Sánchez of Valencia who were active in Seville in the second half of the fifteenth century. The author exhibits even something of the Catalan interest in the psychological differentiation of heads. Like so many Sevillian paintings of the epoch, in types and tonality of color the retable irresistibly but in all probability accidentally reminds one of Italian work of the Quattrocento. The Spanish passion for opulence is brought into striking relief by the greater mass and prominence of the brocades, even on the ascetic St. John Baptist, as compared with their restrained employment in the picture by the Master of the St. Bartholomew Altar. In the brocades, red, green, or black is combined with gold. I t is doubtless because of this Iberian sensitiveness to decorative values that even at so late a period in the Middle

54 SEVILLE Ages the painter sacrifices an endeavor at perspective to the ornamental expanses created by the unforeshortened Moorish tiling upon which he stands some of his saints. 1 The general mediaeval Spanish success in the attainment of monumentality is realized in a superior degree, partly through the aid of the bulky and widespread garments in which the saints are clad. The style embodied in the retable of St. Thomas in the baptismal chapel of the church of Salvator Mundi at Carmona is apparently a late survival of a manner corresponding to that of Juan Sánchez de Castro. The large central panel displays the scene of the Incredulity, and the smaller lateral compartments unfold the following episodes from the Apostle's life: his delivery of the dream-provoking palm-branch to the bridegroom in the presence of the bride's royal father; his distribution of the treasure intended for the construction of the palace to the poor and afflicted; his consequent imprisonment by King Gundaphorus; one of his miracles of healing, perhaps the restoration of sight to the Indian lady, Syntice; his conversion of Syntice's friend, the illustrious Mygdonia; and his overthrow of the idol. Gold adorns the haloes and the hems of the garments. The feeling throughout the altarpiece is still very Gothic, particularly in the principal compartment, where the bodies of Our Lord and St. Thomas and the latter's red mantle are thrown into the mannered and agitated curves that one would naturally connect with the capricious calligraphy and tendency to caricature in the draughtsmanship of certain phases of the international movement. The two heads and the feet likewise assume Gothic contours. The nude of Christ's body (beneath a golden cape) is one of those pitifully gaunt and emaciated forms in which the late Gothic sculptors and painters of Europe appear to have taken an unwholesome delight. The anatomy is untouched by the new realism of the Low Countries, and it would be more difficult to discover Flemish influence in the picture than in the production of Juan Sánchez de Castro. One might hypnotize himself into discerning an acquaintance with Flemish precedent in the folds of St. Thomas's mantle in the principal scene, but they would be quite conceivable within the limits of the international style. The lateral compartments 1

See vol. IV, p. 548.

SEVILLE

55

are perhaps slightly weaker in execution, although the three beggars who receive the saint's alms are rather impressive figures; and the romantic opportunities offered by St. Thomas's florid oriental legend are in no sense realized. A t first sight these compartments seem somewhat later than the central panel, but careful scrutiny elicits the conviction that they are of the same period and same painter or at least shop. T h e actors, for example, are again descendants from international types. All this would point to such a persistence of the international manner as we encounter in Juan Sanchez de Castro, and indeed the Saviour in the Incredulity is very like the Christ of the Resurrection in the retable of Alanis. T h e costumes in the smaller narrative sections, however, forbid a date before c. 1500 or even Mayer's suggestion, c. 1510, 1 and there is in addition a certain lack of youthful vigor that betokens the senility of a stylistic tradition. T h e author should be thought of as some belated follower of that phase of the more indigenous Sevillian manner which had been earlier represented by Juan Sanchez de Castro. Certainly the altarpiece of St. Thomas reveals no trace of the Renaissance the first reverberations of which were already beginning to be felt in Andalusia. Even the architecture of the church that constitutes the setting of the Incredulity is as Gothic as the sacred figures that it enshrines. As there is a Juan Sánchez in each of the divisions of Sevillian painting at this period, so we find a Pedro Sánchez not only among the imitators of the Flemings but also in the more indigenous group. T h e latter, whom we may distinguish by the numeral II and who is very much the inferior of his homonym, is known to us through his signature of a painting on canvas in the Municipal Archaeological Museum of Seville (Fig. 18). The subject is a version of a theme which was frequent in the art of the Maestrazgo during the fifteenth century and which is sometimes described in Spanish as the Patrocinio de la Virgen — Our L a d y pleading for sinful mankind with her Son to restrain the darts of His anger. The Andalusian picture is one of the renderings of the subject that is manifestly derived from a passage in St. Dominic's life in the Golden Legend, where he enjoys a vision of the Virgin deflecting the darts by presenting 1

Die Sevillaner Malerschule,

31.

56

SEVILLE

to Our Lord both him and St. Francis as missionaries to restore humanity to righteousness. 1 She appears at the lower right of the picture with her hand stretched over the two kneeling patriarchs of the orders of friars, and she is balanced at the left by St. Andrew. Christ, with the three spears mentioned in the Golden Legend in His right hand, occupies the upper centre, girt in a nimbus of gold-red seraphim (conceived as winged infants' heads), which is supported by other miniature angels depicted at full length in dalmatics. There is an extensive resort to scrolls inscribed in Spanish with sentiments suggested by the remarks of the actors in the version of the Golden Legend. The one that proceeds from Christ's mouth says: "Your sins with great voices 2 rise to heaven making outcries: wherefore it is meet to wound you and destroy the whole world." Our Lady protests: " M y Son, may their sins be forgiven by you: I ask your royal majesty to have pity on them." The scrolls accompanying Sts. Dominic and Francis incorporate directions to them: "Dominic, go through the world preaching and correcting sins," and, "Francis, with your most pleasant words correct abominable evils." The iconographie interest, indeed, is much greater than the aesthetic, although the craft is slightly superior to that of the Moguer doors 3 and the forms a degree more substantial. In this countrified work of Pedro Sánchez II, no real evidence is forthcoming that the author was familiar with the Flemish school, for the St. Andrew does not resemble the Van Eyck type for a bearded man closely enough nor the Virgin the ladies of Tournai with sufficient definiteness to establish a relationship. The flying angels are still international rather than Flemish, and there is, as a matter of fact, nothing in the picture that could not be explained by descent from the Andalusian style of the first half of the century. Although a certain dryness in the draughtsmanship might betoken a date towards 1500, yet the landscape still abides by the international standard of a 1 See vol. I V , p. 606. Some scholars believe that the idea of the Virgin's defence against the darts of God's anger became popular through St. Bernardine's preaching at the beginning of the fifteenth century: cf. P . Perdrizet, La Vierge de la Miséricorde, Paris, 1908, p. 122. 2 Reading boces (= voces) instead of Gestoso's luces. s See above, pp. 3 1 - 3 5 .

SEVILLE

57

haphazard spotting with disproportionately small details, a preposterously diminutive castle between Sts. A n d r e w and Francis, an ermita at the upper right, and at the left one of the

FIG. I 8. PEDRO SÁNCHEZ II.

PATROCINIO DE LA VIRGEN.

MUNICIPAL

ARCHAEOLOGICAL MUSEUM, SEVILLE (Photo. Arxiu

Mas)

p r e t t y accessories in which the internationalists had delighted •— a bridge over a stream. T h e towers of the castle and chapel are accented with gilt, and the Virgin's blue cape is embellished with a gold pattern that is peculiarly Andalusian, a flower con-

58

SEVILLE

ventionalized into the form of a hand-grenade. Embossing is restricted to the dots in the haloes of Christ, St. Dominic, and St. Francis and to the rays in those of the Virgin and St. Andrew. B y reason of the archaic qualities, Diego Angulo 1 dates the painting in the third quarter of the fifteenth century and tentatively identifies the author with the Pedro Sanchez to whom payments for pictorial work are recorded in I454 and 1462. 2 The angels who accompany the seated Madonna and Child in a panel in the convent of Sta. Clara at Moguer (Fig. 19) are so similar to those of Pedro Sánchez I I in type and vestments of dalmatics that one might almost venture the attribution to this master, were it not that complementary evidence is destroyed by a well-nigh total repainting and that the original execution in the Moguer picture, so far as it still remains visible, is of a somewhat higher grade. 3 The two lower angels, engaged in adoration, have suffered from the general modernization of the panel. In the upper pair, who spread the tapestry behind the Virgin and are more intact, the rather Flemish effect, as in the case of their mates in the canvas of the Municipal Museum at Seville, may derive quite as well from the international movement out of which the style of the Low Countries had grown as from this style as it had crystallized into mature shape with the Van Eycks and the school of Tournai. They are, indeed, not far advanced beyond the standardized angels that the international movement had set about its Madonnas of the indigenous coterie in Aragon. The countenances of the Mother and Child have been sweetened by the retouching beyond all recognition of the originals. It is hard to determine whether the infant Christ always grasped the pomegranate that He now holds, but the ostentatious and peculiarly Andalusian pattern in the brocade of Our Lady's mantle looks as if it at least followed the pristine lines. 1

Archivo español de arte y arqueología, V I I ( 1 9 3 1 ) , 272. Gestoso, Diccionario, I I , ι ο ί . > I am glad to find that Diego Angulo — separately from me — has arrived at the same collocation of the Moguer Madonna (op. cit., 2 7 1 - 2 7 2 ) . 2

Fig. 19. PEDRO SÁNCHEZ II (?).

MADONNA AND ANGELS.

STA. CLARA, MOGUER (Photo. Arxiu Mas )

CHAPTER LIX HISPANO-FLEMISH PAINTING A T

CORDOVA

THE principal reason that the Hispano-Flemish school of Cordova occupies so many chapters in this volume as to appear one of the most important artistic centres in the peninsula is that I have decided, perhaps rather arbitrarily, to include within its boundaries Master Alfonso and Bermejo, although all their extant works come from other regions of Spain; but a review even of the preserved material from the very city and territory of Cordova, whether we consider the pictures that have long been known or those that have recently come to light, demonstrates that the local school was almost as productive as that of Seville and in quality surely its dangerous rival. The works that remain to us demand scrupulous study because it may have been in the midst of the artistic atmosphere which they crystallize that the really distinguished masters Alfonso, Bermejo, and Alejo Fernandez learned at least the rudiments of their profession. One of the things that makes for the comparatively high quality of Cordovan painting at this period is a greater vitality of the Flemish strain than at Seville. It is discouraging to have to begin the structure of the Cordovan Hispano-Flemish school that we shall attempt to rear by partially demolishing what has hitherto been used as its cornerstone, the personality of Pedro de Córdoba; but there is no help for it, since we must definitely knock off all attributions that have been made to him except the altarpiece of the Annunciation in the cathedral of Cordova (Fig. 20), not only signed but revealed by the accompanying inscription at the bottom to have been finished in 1475 for the canon Diego Sanchez de Castro, probably the larger of the two kneeling clerical contemporaries at the lower centre of the panel who is presented by Santiago. We are left to amuse ourselves with guessing whether the balancing and somewhat smaller figure, patronized by St. John Baptist, is a relative or friend of the canon or, since the signa-

FIG. 20. PEDRO DE CÓRDOBA. ANNUNCIATION. CPhoto. Arxtu

Mas)

CATHEDRAL, CORDOVA

62

CORDOVA

ture stretches forth beside him, the master himself if perchance he was an ecclesiastic. Pedro de Cordoba paints with the attention to the literal fact that is to be expected of a provincial artist, however gifted. For instance, God the Father, casting His rays upon the Virgin, is baldly conceived as a kind of pope viewing the scene from a window. The peculiar treatment of the Annunciation itself may be caused by Pedro's naïveté, by the originality of his imagination, or by the definite recollection of a mystery play. The locality is an elevated dais, or, as Mayer calls it, a stage, beneath which in the foreground, like spectators of a sacred drama, there kneel, together with the donors, the six saints designated in the inscription as sharers in the honor of commemoration with the Incarnation •— Barbara, Ives, James Major, John Baptist, Lawrence, and the pope, Pius I. The inclusion of Sts. Ives and Pius is curious and must denote an unusual name for the second donor or special devotions of both clerics. The Flemish ingredients are more significant than in any of the contemporary masters of Seville. I t is perhaps necessary to postulate an acquaintance with the school of Tournai in order to explain such elements as the type of the Virgin, with her straight and flowing locks; but in view of Bermejo's admiration for Jan van Eyck, it is more important to single out for notice in Pedro de Cordoba, who may have influenced Bermejo, an unmistakable dependence upon the patriarch of Flemish painting. The broadly expanded and majestically loose draperies of the Virgin and Gabriel are more like those of Jan van Eyck than those of the Master of Flémalle, whether or not the Annunciation of the Ghent altar was the immediate source of the composition, which was a commonplace of Flemish and Spanish iconography in the fifteenth century. I am even willing to derive the type of the angel directly from Van Eyck. In any case, the two donors are manifestly conformed to his perspicuous mode of portraiture, and their lovely draperies, executed with an illuminator's exquisiteness, again reflect the Van Eyck precedent. The row of saints, especially the Pius, are only somewhat less pronounced examples of Pedro's ability to imitate the incisive Flemish delineation of personalities, and the tunics of Sts. Gabriel, John Baptist, and Lawrence are al-

CORDOVA

63

most as delightful passages of the Van E y c k technique as the donors' vestments. He even attains something of the Van E y c k richness of tonality, in contrast to the brightness of the school of Tournai, and he thus again prepared the way for Bermejo. Very few Spanish painters succeeded so delightfully in reproducing the supremacy of the Low Countries in the simulation of domestic accessories. Even Bermejo, who may be here his debtor, scarcely excelled him in this respect. T h e spectator's eye lingers fondly over the charmingly painted appurtenances of the Virgin's prie-Dieu and sideboard, the delicately rendered details of their Gothic carving and of the open-work in the stage, the sacristy in the background with its monstrance, the wooden panelling of the room with its little doors locked or ajar, and the vase for the traditional lilies featured at the foremost projection of the dais and, for the purpose of displaying his craft, exalted by Pedro into a much more elaborate objet d'art than in the customary representations of the scene; but the master does even more than this, stopping to introduce on the tiling in front of Our L a d y as obvious and definite a study of still life, quite anomalous for the period, as we shall meet in Dutch painting of the seventeenth century or in modern French painting ·—• an utterly captivating tray of fruit backed by a carafe and cup and lying upon a cloth which is as much an element in the composition as with Cézanne. T h e Virgin resembles somewhat the Madonna in Antonello's injured altarpiece of 1473 in the Museum of Messina but not enough to demand a resort, particularly in the absence of Italian qualities, to the hypothesis of a Neapolitan training that we shall call into play as a possible solution of the stylistic problems connected with Master Alfonso and Bermejo. T h e Flemish borrowings, of course, are dressed, first, in the usual Spanish fixings. T h e panel must once have been ablaze with gold, whether woven into the brilliant brocades or embossed in haloes, ornaments of costume, and other accessories, but the gold has largely worn away, except on the habiliments of the Virgin, Gabriel, and Santiago. In the lower part of the Virgin's mantle Pedro clings to the old decorative device of Spanish mediaeval painting, presenting the huge floral motif of the brocade in one instance in the most arrant frontality and

64

CORDOVA

quite dissociated from the smaller pattern also used in the fabric. For the door to the sacristy and one of the openings in the sideboard he gives the indigenous tone by employing mudejar arches, and God the Father emerges from the ancient Spanish convention of scallops for clouds. No composition could obey the Spanish laws of symmetry and formality more strictly. The note, however, that most clearly sounds the native mood is a meridional feeling that is more distinct even than in the production of Seville. It was possibly because, like his Andalusian successor, Zurbarán, he can best be described as an unusually talented provincial, that he was prevented by no sophisticated inhibitions from giving unrestricted expression to the innate aesthetic tendencies of his region of the world. Not only has he been more successful than his rivals in embodying the ethos of Andalusia in his types and in infusing them with a southern religious fervor, as, for instance, even the St. Gabriel, whose expression of deep and yearning intensity he has depicted with unexpected skill; but he makes his holy personages look like those statues of saints, decked out in real ecclesiastical vestments, which are such characteristic furniture of Mediterranean churches. The Baptist's mantle is embellished with a peculiarly Andalusian design of diamonds embossed in gold. Although two other works have been assigned to Pedro de Córdoba even on the basis of signatures, both of them must be categorically rejected. One, depicting the rare theme of Christ's farewell to His mother and the other holy women, 1 was formerly in the Pacully Collection, Paris, and is known to me only in a poor photograph; yet even this is sufficient to demonstrate that the picture cannot conceivably have been executed by the Pedro de Córdoba of the fifteenth century but is a thoroughly Italianate production of the sixteenth century. The signature and date at the bottom of the panel are so dim in the photograph that I can make them out only imperfectly. The name perhaps reads Pedro de Córdoba, but, since we shall soon see that the signature on the second panel that has wrongly been attributed to him has been misread, it is possible that here also 1 Mrs. Jameson discusses this theme under the heading Lo Spasimo in her Legends oj the Madonna.

FIG. 21. PEDRO FERNÁNDEZ DE CÓRDOBA. PICKMAN COLLECTION, SEVILLE (Photo. Arxiu Mas)

NATIVITY.

66

CORDOVA

some other appellation is hidden. If the signature is authentic, it must denominate a later artist of the same name. The date looks like 1472, although both Bouyer 1 and Bertaux 2 interpreted it as 1475; but any year in the fifteenth century is out of the question and suggests that the whole inscription may be a forgery. It might, however, be 1522,3 but even this year seems too early for a work already incorporating the modes of the Italian mannerists of the Renaissance. Diego Angulo, who has clarified so many problems in the history of Spanish art, is certainly right in reading the signature on the second picture, a Nativity of Christ now in the Pickman Collection, Seville (Fig. 21), as an abbreviation for Pedro Fernández de Cordoba instead of simply Pedro de Córdoba. 4 Since the stylistic divergence was already such as to invalidate an identity of authorship between the Annunciation and the Nativity, we cannot interpret Pedro Fernández as a fuller form of the name of the painter who signed the panel of the Cordovan cathedral, although the practice of signing in different ways is illustrated by Bermejo. The complete, sonorous appellation with which he labels himself in the Pickman Nativity is, " P e d r o Fernández, son of Juan de Cordoba, painter." It is impossible to recognize in him any one of the painters called Pedro Fernández in the published documents of either Seville or Cordova. When they have defining epithets, such as Pedro Fernández de Peñalosa, he obviously cannot be equal to them, and it goes without saying that stylistic considerations, in addition, separate him from the Sevillian painter of the sixteenth century whose manner we know from authenticated works, Pedro Fernández de Guadalupe. T h e painters listed by Gestoso in his Diccionario of Sevillian artists and by the compilers of the Documentos para la historia del arte en Andalucía under nothing more than the title Pedro Fernández or Ferrández are in one instance too early, and in the others they seem slightly too late in their floruit, although it is conceivable that he might represent a youthful phase of one of them. W e have already noted that we cannot make him equivalent to his Revue de l'art ancien et moderne, 1903, I, 293. Ibid., 1906, II, 425. 3 Y e t C C C C C would be very queer instead of D as a Roman numeral for 500. 4 Archivo español de arte y arqueología, V I (1930), 73. 1

2

CORDOVA

67

homonym who worked at Moguer, if this homonym did the painted doors. 1 The two Cordovan candidates mustered by Ramirez de Arellano 2 in 1490 and 1518 are excluded by their parentage, the first being the son of a Yuste López and the second of a Diego López. No means are at hand for determining whether the father of the author of the Pickman Nativity, designated by the so little distinctive name of Juan de Córdoba, could be the same as the homonym who in 1475 signed a Cordovan statue of the Madonna as responsible for its polychromy but who was perhaps also the sculptor of the figure as well as of other stylistically related works in the city. 3 The Pickman master's paternity furnishes contributory, though not positive, grounds for assigning him to the school of Cordova rather than to that of Seville. But the painting is possibly localized at Cordova and dated by the episcopal escutcheon at the bottom of the panel, the charge of which is a fountain or well. Such a blazon can hardly constitute aught else but armes parlantes. There were no bishops at Seville in the latter part of the fifteenth century on whose names the fountain could be an heraldic pun, and only two candidates appear at Cordova, Francisco Sanchez de la Fuente, who held the see from 1496 to 1499, and his successor from 1499 to 1505, Juan Rodriguez de Fonseca. Since the complicated, quartered blazon of the latter, famous prelate, who was afterwards bishop of Palencia, is well known (appearing, for instance, on the trascoro of the cathedral of Palencia) and contains no fountain, he is removed from the reckoning, and the choice, therefore, would seem of necessity to fall upon the former. Inasmuch, however, as it is just possible that the picture came from an Andalusian see other than Cordova or Seville or that it might have been ordered by the high placed abbot of some monastery, one would like to confirm the identity of Francisco Sánchez de la Fuente as donor by discovering an undoubted example of this fountain as his escutcheon. The various heraldic authorities whom I have petitioned have not succeeded in finding such an example; Diego Angulo tells me 1

See above, p. 35. Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones, X (1902), 134 and 136. 3 See the article on Juan de Cordoba in the Thieme-Becker Lexikon.

2

68

CORDOVA

that he has never been able to see clearly the carved stone specimen in the prelate's chapel in the cathedral of Cordova. I am furthermore admonished by this eminent scholar that the branch of the De la Fuente family to which the bishop belonged had an altar in the church of S. Francisco at Seville, which is mentioned by Ortiz de Zúñiga,1 and that thus the panel might have been done for this destination, with the corollary that Pedro Fernández de Cordoba might have been a member of the Sevillian school. We shall see at once, however, that the style itself points rather to Cordova than to Seville. The theme of the Nativity is treated in a formal devotional manner and flanked by two standing saints, at the right a virgin martyr whose attribute of the arrow perhaps identifies her as Ursula and at the left a king (?) who can scarcely be, as he has sometimes been dubbed, St. Ferdinand, since this monarch was not canonized until 1671 and since, so far as I know, he was not represented with the prerogatives of sanctity in Spanish art before his elevation to the honors of the altar. The composition of the Nativity does not resemble the Sevillian examples of Alcalá de Guadaira and Moguer in detail and is no more like them than would be expected from the general analogy of all Flemishized treatments of the subject at this period. With the exception of the royal saint's head (the original effect of which is possibly impaired), all parts of the picture — the draperies as well as the countenances — are executed with that closer parallelism to the exquisiteness of the Flemish miniaturist's touch and with that greater realization of the richness to be derived from oil which are illustrated also by Pedro de Cordoba's Annunciation and which we may therefore suppose to distinguish Cordovan from Sevillian production. The best instance is the whole figure of St. Joseph. The only contemporary work of the school of Seville that approximates these qualities is the Via Dolorosa by Antón and Diego Sánchez. It is this concern with fine craftsmanship that assists in elucidating the problem of Bermejo's origins by suggesting that he might have partially obtained his training in the Cordovan artistic milieu in which Pedro de Cordoba and Pedro Fernández moved, and there is even a certain similarity of facial type be1

Anales eclesiásticos y seculares de Sevilla, Madrid, V (1796), 18.

CORDOVA

69

tween the Virgin and the St. Ursula of the Pickman Nativity and Bermejo's ladies. One senses also in the St. Joseph and perhaps in the Virgin the Van E y c k strain that we have encountered in Pedro de Cordoba as significant for Bermejo's education. M a n y other factors in the N a t i v i t y imply that Pedro Fernández, although he can no longer be identified with Pedro de Cordoba, belonged to his following or at least his circle. T h e Virgin's brocaded mantle, with its large, flatly presented, and analogously placed floral motif, duplicates the cope worn by Our L a d y in the Annunciation, and the vestures of the two standing saints reveal the predilection for ermine linings exemplified by the St. Ives in the panel of the Cordovan cathedral. T h e Hispanicization of the Flemish sources declares itself in the prodigal display of gilt in the garments and even in the plastering of the stable's two sides with strips of diapered gold. T h e composition is crystallized into an absolute Iberian symmetry, extended to the lines of rocks which frame the valley seen through the central window in the background and on one of which the proclamation to the shepherds is lightly sketched with some understanding of aërial perspective. Internal evidence is apparently responsible for the attribution to Pedro de Cordoba of a panel of St. Nicholas in the Cordovan Provincial Museum (Fig. 11), but this evidence, instead, almost certainly precludes the possibility that it was painted either by him or by the artist whose honors he has absorbed, Pedro Fernández. T h e type of visage is less primitive and Flemish than those of the two Pedros; indeed little or no trace of influence from the Low Countries remains, and in its place there emerges an elegance that may be Italianate. T h e moldings on the pilaster at the left, which is the only piece of architecture visible in the picture, look like bits of Renaissance finery; but, since they can no longer be clearly seen, they are conceivably Gothic, and the panel may be one of the latest examples of the Hispano-Flemish manner in which the justification for the second half of the compound adjective has been expunged by the attrition of the national spirit. In Catalonia and Valencia, where the artistic tyranny of the Low Countries was less oppressive, a similar blandness of countenance occurs even slightly earlier in the saints by Huguet, Jacomart, and

ηο

CORDOVA

their schools, and even at Cordova it is not necessary to interpret this ideal placidity as of Italian origin. T h e indigenous failing for opulence has left little space for anything else but splendor of gold, making the bishop's dalmatic as well as his cope out of this precious material and hanging behind him a brocade of red and gilt thread. T h e inscription on his halo reads: " O r a pro nobis, beate Nico(lae), ut digni efficiamur pr " One may guess that the panel formerly decorated the Cordovan church of S. Nicolás de la Villa; in any case, Ramirez de Arellano 1 ascribes to Pedro de Cordoba two other paintings that he states to have once been in this edifice, to have been sold, and possibly to have found a home in the Louvre. Inasmuch as there are no panels in the Louvre even remotely resembling these early Cordovan works, the necessary conclusion is that the Spanish scholar was misinformed and that the pictures never reached a Paris destination. Lost from the knowledge of the world of connoisseurship, they no longer provide the means for verifying the attribution. T h e Assumption in the chapel of the Sacrament in the church of Santiago at Cordova, which Von L o g a 2 assigns to Pedro de Cordoba's school, is, in reality, a work in the manner of the Flemish Renaissance, probably, however, by a Spanish rather than a Flemish hand. Diego Angulo 3 places the panel in the circle of the archaizing Fleming of the middle of the sixteenth century, Marcellus Coffermans; and, although its full discussion does not belong within the limits of the present volume, I am bound at once to acknowledge that a certain analogy in the types demonstrates the great Spanish critic's discernment. T h e student, for instance, should make comparisons with the Christ of the Agony in the Garden formerly in the Kaufmann Collection at Berlin or especially with the signed Assumption formerly in the Stillwell Collection at New Y o r k ; but the parallelisms do not yet strike me as sufficiently exact to support the theory of the author's tutelage under Coffermans rather than under that of other Flemings active in the second quarter and middle of the Cinquecento, although it is quite possible that he had Diccionario, etc., 126. Die Malerei in Spanien, 58. The panel is no longer in the sacristy, where Von Loga saw it. 3 Archivo español de arte y arqueología, V I (1930), 250. 1

2

Fig. 22.

SCHOOL OF CORDOVA.

ST. NICHOLAS.

P R O V I N C I A L MUSEUM, CORDOVA (Photo. Arxiu Mas)

ηι

CORDOVA

viewed Coffermans's productions with admiration. I have not discovered how early Coffermans's two paintings, the Magdalene in the Bosch Collection of the Prado and the triptych of the Madonna in the same Museum, reached Spain; but that he enjoyed patronage in the peninsula, is proved by the presence, in the Sacristy of the Chalices in the cathedral of Seville, of a work that, so far as I know, has not yet been recognized as his, a Dormition (Fig. 23), based, according to his frequent custom of turning to Schongauer for cartoons, upon the German's familiar print of the theme. T h e one figure that differs in any essential way from Schongauer's prototypes is the frontal Apostle at the upper left, and the variations in the countenance of this figure are repeated with virtual exactitude in another of Coffermans's faithful adaptations of the engraving, the signed example formerly in the Weber Collection, Hamburg, and last reported in the Cremer Collection at Dortmund. T h e existence of the picture in the cathedral of Seville can hardly find any other explanation than that it was executed or bought for this destination during the artist's lifetime. W e have the good fortune to possess still another signed work that probably belongs to the Hispano-Flemish school at Cordova, a Lamentation over the dead Christ in the Museum at Lisbon (Fig. 24). The signature appears in Gothic characters in the lower left corner and seems to be Bartolomé Ruiz, pintor; but there is a flourish over the ui which may be the sign of abbreviation, and in that case the characters, if perhaps ue could be read instead of ui, might stand for Rodriguez. In the school of Seville there is record of painters called both Bartolomé Ruiz and Bartolomé Rodriguez who would correspond with the date that for stylistic reasons must be assigned to the picture, c. 1500 or more probably the first or even second decade of the sixteenth century. Bartolomé Ruiz is mentioned from 1480 to 1500; 1 Bartolomé Rodríguez is known only through his marriage contract of 1501. 2 B u t many factors point rather, for the author, to a Bartolomé Ruiz of Cordova, of whose existence we learn from his wife's will of 1507 3 and who cannot be identiGestoso y Pérez, Diccionario, II, 8g, and III, 388. Ibid., III, 384. 3 Ramírez de Arellano, Artistas exhumados, Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones, Χ (190α), 194· 1

2

Fig. 23. M A R C E L L U S

COFFERMANS.

DORMITION.

CATHEDRAL,

SEVILLE

74

CORDOVA

cal with his contemporary and homonym at Seville, because their wives have different names. In the first place, it is altogether likely that the panel now at Lisbon is the same as one referred to in 1893 and in 1900 by Ramirez de A r e l l a n o 1 as representing the Entombment and signed by Bartolomé Ruiz, as then in the Cepero Collection at Seville, and as having entered the Collection from the house of an old, noble family of Cordova. T h e obstacle to making the identification is that he declares the panel to be inscribed with the date I450 in addition to the signature, so that he naturally connects the painting with an older artist, Bartolomé R u i z of Cordova, stated in 1475 to be the father of a Juan Ruiz, pintor, who in a document of that date acknowledges the receipt of his wife's dowry. 2 N o date, at least any longer, is visible on the Lisbon picture, but the conjunction of the signature and of the subject (since a Lamentation might easily be called an Entombment) is so striking as to make it highly unlikely, by the law of chance, that there once existed another, earlier panel distinguished by this combination. If, then, the Lisbon painting is the same as the one mentioned by Ramirez de Arellano, the date (if it really ever existed) must have been misread, for the internal evidence of the Lisbon painting forestalls a year before the turn of the fifteenth into the sixteenth century. Upon the admission of the identity would follow the provenience from the Cordovan school, unless we are disposed to question the accuracy of Ramirez de Arellano's information in this respect. I t is not absolutely decisive for a Bartolomé R u i z of Cordova rather than a Bartolomé Rodriguez that the Cordovan records happen to preserve no allusion to a painter of the latter name who would suit the bill chronologically, but the documented existence of a Bartolomé R u i z makes him a more logical choice and suggests that the flourish over the second and third letters of the name is no more than a bit of decoration. I f the artist was called Ruiz, could he have known that, from the standpoint of the evolution of the Spanish language, R u i z is in reality an abbreviation of Rodriguez and so have added the flourish? 1 Diccionario biográfico de artistas de la provincia de Córdoba, 233-234; Artistas exhumados, Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones, V i l i (1900), 231. 2 The same as the latter of the two references in the former note.

FIG. 24. BARTOLOMÉ RUIZ. LAMENTATION OVER THE DEAD CHRIST. MUSEUM, LISBON

ηβ

CORDOVA

As in the case of the Nativity by Pedro Fernández, the assignment of the Lamentation to the school of Cordova is bolstered up by stylistic considerations. In the first place, in accordance with Cordovan rather than Sevillian aesthetics, the picture is characterized by a faithful adherence to Flemish precedent and especially to the illuminator's technique of Flemish painting. The general outlines of the composition are duplicated in countless examples of the Low Countries. The most Flemish passage in drawing and execution is found in the body, head, loin-cloth, and shroud of the dead Christ. In the lower left corner rises a plant with red flowers, charmingly rendered in the mode of the author's northern inspirers. The Flemish manner of punctuating the background with subordinate incidents in smaller scale also emerges once more. At the centre stand the three crosses, the two lateral ones still bearing their grim burdens. At the left are three horsemen, one of them careering and brandishing his sword, perhaps conceived, though the actual Crucifixion is now over, as the good centurion pointing out the Son of God. At the right, Joseph of Arimathaea and Nicodemus, stretching a winding sheet over a tomb, seem to be preparing the sepulchre for its sacred consignment. The tonality also has the richer depth of the Cordovan artistic milieu that we shall encounter in Master Alfonso and Bermejo. The actual types of the actors do not resemble very closely those of any other Andalusian master; but they are more similar to the personages of Cordovan Hispano-Flemish painting than to the figures created by the artists of Seville, and the Virgin in particular perhaps acknowledges a distant descent from Pedro de Cordoba. Although the Lamentation remains fundamentally HispanoFlemish, it is obvious from even the most Flemish of the personages that we are in the presence of the last phase of this, the tardiest expression of Gothicism; and some of the constituents suggest to such a degree a familiarity with the Italian Renaissance that the panel can hardly be dated before the first or even second decade of the Cinquecento. If the effects are not due to repainting, the Magdalene, kissing Our Lord's hand, has a kind of Italianate countenance; St. John is even more idealized, with a Raphaelesque cast to his features and the beginning of Raphaelesque rhetoric in his posture. His cape flies out behind

CORDOVA

77

him in an agitateci swirl of the Roman Renaissance, although its texture and its ruddy hue are still painted in the approved mode of the Low Countries. Italianism appears to have touched also the smaller forms in the background, the three cavaliers and, of the Joseph of Arimathaea and Nicodemus, the figure that faces the spectator. It is within the range of credibility that these apparently Italianate elements are in reality the result of a final autonomous development, within the limits of the Hispano-Flemish style, towards a greater blandness and pomposity, corresponding to many instances of an analogous evolution that, in volume IV, we have discovered in Castile; 1 but in the Lisbon panel the approximation to the Italian manner of c. 1500 is so pronounced that it is hard to explain it in any other way than as actual imitation. Nevertheless, the Italian factors have not assumed such definite form as in the first Andalusian pictorial school of the Renaissance, that of Alejo Fernández, and by no means justify us in removing the picture from the Hispano-Flemish group. Many of the old Gothic mannerisms, moreover, linger on — the gaudy, Andalusian motif of a branch of three pomegranates as the pattern of the brocade in the Virgin's blue mantle and the extensive spotting with gold in this very pattern, on the edges of the garments in general, on the Magdalene's whole dress, on St. John's tunic, on the horsemen's armor, as high lights on the figure at the tomb with his back towards us, and for the haloes, all of which have varied, elaborate designs not quite like those that I have met in any other painter of the period. This prodigally lavished gold seems never to have been retouched, and, having been originally of high quality, has dulled with age to a most beautiful tone of burnished bronze. T h e Lamentation maintains the unusually high standard of execution which compensates at Cordova for the paucity of extant examples and which helps to explain the transcendence of Master Alfonso and Bermejo who in all likelihood took their first steps in this school. But save for this technical superiority and save for the very general traits of the whole Cordovan group, such as the richness of tone, there is little in the Lisbon panel nearly enough parallel to Alfonso's and Bermejo's achieve1

For example, in the retable of the Mozarabic Chapel at Toledo: see vol. IV, p. 392.

78

CORDOVA

ments to prove that they were trained in the same artistic environment as its author. The sky, to be sure, is darkened to one of the twilight effects that emerge once more in Bermejo's Acqui Madonna and Barcelona Pietà. Fortunately a closer counterpart of Alfonso's and Bermejo's style emerges in another and probably also late retable, in a chapel at the left of the nave in the parish church of Sta. María at Arjona, east of the city of the Caliphs in the province of Jaén. Although pictorial remains of the Hispano-Flemish school of Cordova are few, they possess, in addition to their skill, the interest of preserving an even larger proportion of signatures than the production of Seville; and the Arjona retable adds to the instances of Pedro de Córdoba, Pedro Fernández, and Bartolomé Ruiz the name of an otherwise unrecorded master, "Diego de Pareja, pintor," written at the bottom of the panel of the Pentecost. Diego de Pareja turns out to be one of the final exponents of the Andalusian adaptation of the Flemish manner, drawing his countenances and shading them in exactly the mode of Master Alfonso and Bermejo and by his high competency revealing to us that it is not necessary to resort to the hypothesis of sojourns in Belgium and Italy in order to explain Alfonso's and Bermejo's mastery, even if perchance we must have recourse to such a theory in order to account for the constituents of their styles. The pieces of the retable that have survived are put together about a painting of St. Jerome executed by some quite secondary craftsman of the seventeenth or eighteenth century. They comprise large vertical panels of Pentecost at the right and the Assumption at the left and, from the original predella, above the St. Jerome busts of Moses and Malachi and, beneath, Daniel and Habakkuk (Fig. 25). Malachi bears a scroll with his celebrated prophecy, " E c c e ego mitto angelum meum" (III, 1); Habakkuk's inscription reads, "Domine, audivi auditionem tuam" (III, 2); and the obscure abbreviations of Daniel's scroll seem to embody some other Latin translation than that of the Vulgate for the phrase from the twenty-second verse of his seventh chapter, "Donee venit antiquus dierum." The style is but remotely connected with the manner of Pedro de Cordoba and Pedro Fernández, and, whether or not of later date, is certainly more mature. The

8o

CORDOVA

Flemish elements, though less distinct, are still very tangible — the angels, for instance, who with a whole orchestra of instruments surround Our Lady in her upward progress, some of the Apostles attendant at Pentecost and the Assumption, however much their ancestry in the Low Countries is mingled with the indigenous strain, and the yet persistent miniaturist technique of the Flemings in the way of painting the faces and the draperies. The general effect is a pictorial mode very much like that of Master Alfonso and Bermejo, even if there is no near kinship of actual types. The parallelism would be more evident and the workmanship would seem of better grade if it were not for the extensive repainting to which especially the two narrative panels have been subjected. The Moses, Malachi, and Habakkuk are largely intact and thus exhibit more clearly Diego de Pareja's claim in style and, to a certain extent, in ability to fellowship with Bermejo. As it is, his quite sophisticated talents still remain visible to us in the dexterity and beauty with which he treats the problems created by the uncommonly elaborate settings that he introduces, whether we look at the landscape of the Assumption with the crowded towers of a populous town rising on the bank of a river that winds charmingly into the far distance or at the perspective of the street and city-gate seen through the portal of the Gothic church in which Pentecost takes place. The carefully worked out ranks of buildings behind the Pentecost, indeed, vividly recall the backgrounds in Valencian paintings of the early Renaissance.

CHAPTER LX HISPANO-FLEMISH PAINTING AT MASTER

CORDOVA.

ALFONSO

MANY readers will doubtless be surprised or even offended at finding comprised in what has usually been judged the mean little local school of Cordova the greatest name in mediaeval Spanish painting, Bermejo, and his nearly as distinguished predecessor or contemporary, Master Alfonso, who would be quite as renowned if his known extant production were not confined to the martyrdom of St. Cucufas in the Museo de la Ciudadela at Barcelona (Fig. 26) and the warrior saint probably from the same retable in the Muntadas Collection of this city (Fig. 27). T h e reason for classifying Bermejo in the Cordovan school is almost a purely formal one. The enigma of his training and the variety of regions in which he labored render it wellnigh indifferent to which of the Spanish schools, from these standpoints, we assign him, and therefore the most sensible policy is to discuss him in connection with the city from which it is definitely ascertained that he had originally hailed, Cordova. W e have, however, already had occasion to observe that Cordova was perhaps a more likely seat of his first lessons than any of the other Spanish centres. The thread that binds Master Alfonso to Cordova is even more tenuous, for, although his art is similar to that of Bermejo and so may be presumed, for the sake of argument, to be Cordovan in source, we have no unimpeachable evidence that he had ever lived in the capital of the Caliphs. A recent discovery, nevertheless, has rendered more visible the thread of connection and justifies still further his consideration at this point in the book. He properly finds his place before Bermejo because the two extant fragments of his retable were painted in 1473 prior to Bermejo's earliest dated work and because he preceded him by many years in carrying the new " C o r d o v a n " style to Catalonia.

82

MASTER

ALFONSO

T h e evidence that attaches the picture in the Barcelona Museum to Master Alfonso is not of the best. It is, indeed, doubly conditioned: first, because the attribution rests only on a statement of the ecclesiologically minded traveller of the beginning of the nineteenth century, Jaime Villanueva, 1 which can no longer be corroborated; and, second, because there are gaps in the chain that identifies the Barcelona painting as one of the works to which Villanueva refers. T h e earliest certain date to which we can trace the existence of the painting is 18591860, when it was taken, for safer keeping, from the Ermita de S. Adjutorio, a dependency of the monastic church of San Cugat del Vallès (Cugat being Catalan for Cucufas), to the house of the rector of the church, where in 1907 it was acquired for the Barcelona Museum. 2 In the archives of the church of San Cugat, Villanueva, between 1795 and 1815, 3 saw a series of panels from the life of St. Cucufas, in connection with which he adds: " I find in a note that a Master Alfonso painted them in 1473 for the price of 90c florins"; and it has generally been taken for granted that the painting in the Barcelona Museum, by reason of its subject and provenience, was one of these panels and that, since Villanueva declares them to have formerly hung on the lateral walls of the apse, they originally constituted the apsidal retable. T h e first gap in the chain of evidence is the impossibility of definitely carrying back the panel's history from its presence in the Ermita in 1859-1860 to existence on the walls of the apse in San Cugat at the time of Villanueva's visit; but Barraquer 4 quotes from a history of the modern vicissitudes of the institution by the ex-monk of San Cugat, Felipe de Alemany, to the effect that during revolutionary troubles of 1835 the paintings from the life of the patron of the institution "disappeared" from the edifice, and it may be conjectured that it was at this time that the picture in the Barcelona Museum was housed in the Ermita de S. Adjutorio. If for the moment we pass over Viaje literario â las iglesias de España, X I X , 23. C. Barraquer, Los religiosos en Cataluña durante la primera mitad del siglo XIX, vol. III, Barcelona, 1916, pp. 123-124. 3 Folch, by a clever series of deductions, arrives at these limits for Villanueva's visit: see Butlletî dels Museus d'Art de Barcelona, November, 1931, p. 164. 4 C. Barraquer, op. cit., III, 100. 1

2

Fig. 26.

MASTER ALFONSO.

MARTYRDOM OF ST. CUCUFAS.

CIUDADELA, BARCELONA (From "San Cucufale del Falles" by J. Gudiol)

MUSEO DE LA

84

MASTER

ALFONSO

the considerations by which we may bolster up this conjecture, we have also to deal with the doubt in regard to whether, after all, the picture represents the martyrdom of St. Cucufas and so could have been a part of the assemblage in San Cugat that Villanueva ascribes to Master Alfonso. Sanpere and others have described it as a martyrdom of San Medin, in Latin St. Emeterius, a Christian who was killed by the sword in connection with the execution of the bishop of Barcelona, St. Severus, and who is not identical with the San Medin or St. Emeterius of Leon and Calahorra. 1 The Catalan St. Emeterius also enjoys a cult in the monastic church of San Cugat del Vallès, as having been put to death on the very spot, and the present high altar even contains a small statue of him, which, however, as we shall see, was perhaps brought from the former parish church of the town. A further reason for relating the Barcelona picture to St. Emeterius is the apparently ecclesiastical character of the personage at the left in the group of three spectators, since St. Emeterius is reported to have been slain in the presence of the bishop, St. Severus; but, in distinction from the man being martyred, the questionable prelate wears no halo, and it is highly doubtful whether the three spectators are thought of as parts of the incident or are anything more than such portraits of the artist's contemporaries as are ranged about a sacred theme in Italian art of the Quattrocento. Gudiol, 2 who believes the subject to be the martyrdom of St. Cucufas, considers them officials charged with carrying out the decree of death. In the third head at the right has sometimes been seen a Selbstbildnis of the author, whether conceived as a participant in the scene who bears his facial traits or merely as a personage of the fifteenth century bodily superimposed upon the early Christian event. Over against the remote possibility that the parson-like individual might depict St. Emeterius's bishop, St. Severus, must be set, as an argument opposed to the St. Emeterius theory, the consideration that, although four clerics were butchered together with him, in the Barcelona picture the martyrdom is 1 See the Bollandists, third volume for November, 244, n. 2 (under St. Severus on the sixth of November); and España Sagrada, X X I X , 63. 2 In Museum (Barcelona), II (1912), 444.

FIG. 27.

MASTER ALFONSO.

WARRIOR SAINT.

MUNTADAS COLLECTION, BARCELONA (Photo. Arxiu

Mas)

86

M A S T E R ALFONSO

single, not wholesale. Folch 1 quite needlessly introduces into the question the mode of execution, maintaining that, whereas St. Cucufas was beheaded, the person is represented in the panel as having his throat cut according to the account of the execution of St. Emeterius. It is true that St. Cucufas, in the Latin story of his death under July 25 in the Bollandists, is stated to have suffered decapitation, that on page 329 of volume X X I X of España Sagrada, Folch's source, the phrase used of his execution is, mandó que le cortasen la cabeza, and that on page 66 of the same volume the verb employed for the martyrdom of St. Emeterius is degollar; but countless instances prove that it is quite as true that neither writers nor painters distinguished between decapitation and cutting of the throat. Folch failed to note, for example, that on the very next page devoted to St. Cucufas in España Sagrada, 330, the manner of his despatching is no longer described as strictly beheading but by the words, le degollaron. Folch adduces the throat-cutting of Sts. Cosmas and Damian in Huguet's retable at Tarrasa, but, although in their lives in the Golden Legend the Latin verb decollare is applied to the act, Fra Angelico in a piece of a predella in the Louvre exhibits them as subjected to decapitation. The Latin verb decollare, indeed, more generally referred to beheading than to the slitting of the throat, and the Spanish degollar also covered both fashions of execution. In the case of another pictorial throat-cutting that Folch mentions, the death of St. Julitta in the retable of the Huguet shop in the Diocesan Museum, Barcelona, the words in the Golden Legend, on the other hand, definitely imply decapitation, capite truncari. What iconographical data, therefore, can be gleaned seem to favor an interpretation as the execution of St. Cucufas, who was, moreover, the more prominent martyr of the region. These data, like the fragmentary evidence for the connection of the panel with the paintings described by Villanueva, we shall attempt to supplement with further contentions to show the probability that the Barcelona picture is the work of Master Alfonso; if, of course, it be granted that the picture was one of those seen by Villanueva, the identification of St. Cucufas becomes virtually certain, since he was the patron of the church and 1

Butlleti dels Museus d'Art de Barcelona, January, 1932, p. 17.

MASTER ALFONSO

87

Villanueva does not allude to episodes from the lives of other saints honored at San Cugat as represented in the ensemble. It goes without saying that the subject itself, St. Cucufas's death, does not establish a provenience from San Cugat, since an episode of his legend might have been ordered for any shrine in the region •— even for the Ermita de S. Adjutorio. If we turn to the supplementary contentions, we find that Folch himself 1 has mustered cogent circumstantial proof indicating that the Barcelona picture was once a part of the retable over the high altar of San Cugat del Vallès and therefore, in all probability, among the panels assigned by Villanueva to Master Alfonso. The architecture of the existing retable is indisputably a conglomeration of fragments from a structure of the second half of the fifteenth century. The decoration by human figures is now wholly sculptural, and the one mediaeval statue which the retable contains, that of St. Cucufas at the centre of the upper section, also belongs to the latter part of the Quattrocento. The other large statue, that of St. Peter beneath St. Cucufas, is a work of the eighteenth century, and the date 1844 on its pedestal would suggest that it was imported in that year from the former parish church of St. Peter in the town, the functions of which the then recently secularized monastic church absorbed. T h e six figures of other saints in the lateral sections of the retable (including the already mentioned St. Emeterius) are smaller, and, since they too were made in the eighteenth century, they probably were likewise transferred from the old parish church to the new site. T h e transfer must have taken place after the visit of Villanueva, who saw only the image of St. Cucufas in the retable. He wrongly dates the retable at the end of the fourteenth century, but the curious thing is that there was a retable of the beginning of the fourteenth century which the example of the fifteenth century, now existing in the reassembled fragments, must have displaced. Most persuasively, partly on the basis of a plausible interpretation of the heraldic shields, Folch argues that the retable of the fifteenth century was built during the incumbency of the abbot, Antonio de Alemany, from 1461 to 1470, and it would have been for this retable that Master Alfonso's paintings were 1

Butlletî dels Museus d'Art de Barcelona, December, 1931, pp. 202 if.

MASTER

88

ALFONSO

executed in 1473, surrounding the extant statue of the titular saint. At what period the paintings were withdrawn and the spaces that they had occupied made into niches for sculptured figures, it is impossible to say, except that it was before Villanueva's visit of 1 7 9 5 - 1 8 1 5 . The reasons for believing that the Barcelona picture once constituted a section of the fifteenthcentury retable are that the wood is of the same kind as the original pieces preserved in the reconstructed example in the church, that the thickness, 15 millimetres, corresponds to that of the panels now used as backgrounds for sculpture in the retable, and that the breadth, 1 3 3 ! centimetres, practically equals the estimated breadth of the painted divisions of the structure, 134 centimetres. Upon this rather imposing array of factual evidence, we may heap several arguments from probability. In the first place, the conspicuous presence of the church of San Cugat as the principal element in the landscape background is a strong but, of course, not absolutely conclusive indication that the panel was originally executed for this edifice. Second, the style of painting quite harmonizes with Villanueva's date, I473, for Master Alfonso's activity. Third, the style is obviously foreign to the Catalan school and related to the Hispano-Flemish manner of western Spain, particularly, it is altogether likely, to that of the Cordovan school; and since we shall subsequently assemble data implying that Master Alfonso came from the western half of the peninsula and even more specifically from Cordova, it is scarcely possible that there should have been two foreigners or two Cordovans, one so distinguished as to have received the commission in San Cugat and the other so distinguished as to have painted the Barcelona panel, working in Catalonia at the same moment. The more logical theory would be that they were identical. Felipe de Alemany, in referring to the disappearance of the St. Cucufas panels from the church in 1835, 1 states that they were executed in oil; and a further argument for believing the Barcelona picture to have been one of these panels is that, although the medium has in the past sometimes been described as tempera, the investigations of the experts at the Museo de la Ciudadela have now definitely revealed the 1

See above, p. 82.

MASTER ALFONSO

89

whole process to be that of oil. The emergence of this fact has the additional interest of furnishing supererogatory proof of the author's foreign provenience, for, whereas in the western part of the peninsula the best Spanish imitators of the Flemings employed oil, the Catalonians did not take to the practice except in so far as they sparingly introduced oil here and there to brighten up draperies and other passages in paintings that were fundamentally carried out in tempera. Finally, the data in regard to the effigy of the warrior saint in the Muntadas Collection and the panel of St. Cucufas's martyrdom are mutually corroborative. T h e first private owner of the warrior saint, now deceased, Don Matías Muntadas, categorically stated that it had once been in the monastic church of San Cugat, and since, as we shall subsequently seek to demonstrate, its style is so homogeneous with that displayed in the martyrdom as to demand an identical attribution, the original presence of the picture of the martyrdom in San Cugat becomes much more probable. Don Matías knew or guessed that the panel of the warrior saint had been one of the two painted doors beside the high altar, objects that were usually executed at the same time with and by the same hand as the retable above the altar; and with this possibility would disappear the doubts stirred in Folch's 1 mind in regard to the likelihood of the inclusion of such a subject in an ensemble of scenes from the life of St. Cucufas. These traditions and conjectures, however, are not sureties and merely heap up the cumulative evidence that the martyrdom belonged to the retable of San Cugat: it is a tenable theory that, although the martyrdom and the warrior saint must be the production of a single artist, the former may have proceeded from a monument that he did in some other place than San Cugat. Y e t the combination of all the various items of evidence in favor of linking the picture of St. Cucufas's martyrdom with the paintings seen by Villanueva at San Cugat far outweighs the uncertainties and practically bridges the gaps in the picture's history from the time that it was executed by Master Alfonso to the moment at which it entered the Barcelona Museum. If we accept it as one of the works that Villanueva recorded, it is 1

Butlleti dels Museus d'Art de Barcelona, November, 1931, p. 167.

go

MASTER

ALFONSO

true that we have no other warrant for ascribing it to Master Alfonso than Villanueva's assertion, which may have been derived from a document that he had seen in the church or from a signature on the retable itself; but the possibility that Villanueva would have made the statement without sound authority is a very remote one, and, all things considered, the circle of evidence for attributing the martyrdom of St. Cucufas to Master Alfonso is so nearly complete that, for convenience sake •— in order to avoid the constant interpolation of a modifying phrase embodying the remaining doubt — we will in this book definitely call the personality responsible for it and for the warrior saint of the Muntadas Collection Master Alfonso. No sooner, however, have we made this decision than we are involved in another problem quite as intricate, the question of who Master Alfonso was. The line of argument by which Sanpere connected him with Cordova was so fragile that it is curious that his surmise should have been partially substantiated by later evidence. Conscious of the rarity of the name Alfonso among persons of Catalan origin and of the anomaly in the sudden emergence of so alien a style in Catalonia, he set to ferreting out of the documents some foreign artist then active in the region who might be supposed to be the painter in question. He succeeded in finding an architect Alfonso of Baena, a town in the province of Cordova, who in 1494 built a charnelhouse for the church of the Merced at Barcelona, and an architect and sculptor Jaime Alfonso whose provenience is not stated in the documents but who in 1468 signed receipts for payment to him for labor in the cloister of the monastery of S. Jerónimo de Vali de Hebrón and in I470 and 1471 for labor in the monastery of S. Jerónimo de Belén or de la Murtra, both of them religious foundations close to Barcelona. He next proceeded to a tentative identification of Alfonso de Baena with Jaime Alfonso, who would thus become a single artist from the region of Cordova, and his ultimate temerity was to guess that the painter Alfonso was a brother or son of the architect and sculptor to whom he gave the composite name of Jaime Alfonso de Baena. Some weak support for his theory of Jaime Alfonso's Andalusian origin he got from the fact that the monastery of Vali de Hebrón received at this time an accretion of a country

MASTER ALFONSO

91

house (converted to religious use) through its donation by its possessor, a Pedro de Tous, who belonged to a Catalan family resident at Seville and therefore might reasonably be supposed to have employed an Andalusian architect for the remodelling. Sanpere might have gone further and bolstered up his contention by pointing out that the painter Alfonso could be conjectured to have had some connection with sculpture and thus with Jaime Alfonso since the retable of San Cugat comprised also at least one carved figure which might have been executed either by Jaime himself or by his hypothetical relative. None of this finespun speculation would have much force, were it not that a recent discovery has rendered the Cordovan theory much more tenable. T h e same document of 1465 that has proved Huguet's authorship of the retable of the Constable 1 records two payments to an Alfonso de Cordoba for work (none of which unfortunately is preserved) in the royal chapel of the Constable at Barcelona, and, since in one of the instances this work is definitely specified as the painting of the vaults, Alfonso de Cordoba was a painter. Inasmuch as the name Alfonso is not commonly encountered among native Catalonians and it is unlikely that two foreign painters of this appellation should chance to have found patronage in Barcelona at the same time, the probability is very great that the artist who in 1465 was frescoing the royal chapel at Barcelona is identical with his homonym who did the retable of San Cugat in 1473 and that consequently Master Alfonso, the author of the panel of the martyrdom, was a Cordovan. N o further grounds beyond Sanpere's guesses justify the assumption of his relationship to the architects Alfonso de Baena or Jaime Alfonso (if the latter does not equal the former). Nor is there any very valid argument either for or against identifying him with two similarly called painters who are recorded in other parts of the realm of Aragon and Barcelona, a miniaturist with the same full name, Alfonso de Cordoba, in the service of Alfonso V at Naples 2 and a Master Alfonso who was employed in the cathe1 J. Pallej á, Lo retaule del Conestable, Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona, X (1921-1922), 402. 2 C. Minieri Riccio, Cenno storico della Accademia Alfonsina, Naples, 1885, p. i , and W. Rolfs, Geschichte der Malerei Neapels, Leipzig, 1910, p. 165.

92

MASTER

ALFONSO

1467. 1

dral of Valencia in It must be acknowledged, however, that few traces of an illuminator's finicality remain in the monumental style of the panels of the martyrdom and the warrior saint. W e are even more in the dark if we seek to recognize the artist of San Cugat in the Alfonso of Spain at the court of Ferrara about 1450,2 for in this case we have not even the local designation " o f C o r d o v a " to go by. T h e Master Alfonso who in 1465 is recorded as living in the quarter of Sta. María del Mar at Barcelona 3 can scarcely be any other than the painter of San Cugat del Vallès. T h e strange and sudden appearance of a style so different from the Catalan norm as that of Alfonso is a further argument for believing him at least a foreigner, if not actually a Cordovan. A chapel in the now destroyed Ermita de Sta. Fe (afterwards called S. Juan) at Barbastro contained frescoes (perhaps representing the life of St. Faith) on which Quadrado 4 read the remains of a signature: ( M A G ) I S T E R A L F O S S D E . . . U B R I D E P I C T O R {mefecit?); but since he does not specify the approximate date of the paintings, there is no way of determining whether they could have been the creation of our artist. If Villanueva was quoting from the actual document in dubbing him Master Alfonso, corroborative proof would be found in the fact that at Barbastro he also signed himself by that title. The name Alfonso is not general in Catalonia, and if he had been active in Catalonia for some time, he might have acquired the habit of using a Catalan form of his name, Alfoss, even when working in the Aragonese Barbastro, which is after all on the border of Catalonia. I can find, however, no town near Cordova or Baena of the name of which . . . U B R I could be a section. T h e problems that surround Master Alfonso's style are in part those that one encounters in endeavoring to account for Bermejo because the two manners are similar. The style is not only new for Catalonia of the fifteenth century, but it is in some respects unheralded even if understood as evolved in Andalusia or in western Spain in general. Fundamentally Hispano1 J. Sanchis S i v e r a , La catedral de Valencia, 528, and his new edition of medievales en Valencia, \~¡1. 2 See m y vol. I V , p. 62. s J. G u d i o l , San Cucufate del Vallès, Museum (Barcelona), l i ( 1 9 1 2 ) , 443. * Aragon (in España, sus monumentos y artes), 1 5 6 - 1 5 7 .

Pintores

MASTER ALFONSO

93

Flemish, it has as precedent in Catalonia only the work of Luis Dalmau and a few other paintings that half-heartedly reflect the achievement of the Low Countries, but both here and in the rest of the peninsula the much increased modelling in chiaroscuro and the powerful vividness with which the incisive realism of Flanders is reproduced in types and portraiture are novel elements that demand an explanation. T h e types of St. Cucufas and his executioner are Flemish in derivation, especially the former who closely recalls the heads and nudes of Roger van der Weyden. T h e unsparing and sanguinary directness with which the decollation is represented may be either Flemish or Spanish. The two angels who bear the saint's soul to heaven are of the Flemish sort, dwarfed in size and clad in puckered draperies. The basket at the left containing the implements of Jack Ketch's trade, three knives and a rope, and the hound in the right foregound embody the Belgians' emphasis upon details of genre and the successful literalness with which they rendered them. The red mantle of the middle spectator, superbly painted in full light and shade, would not be unworthy of the great masters of the Low Countries. The postures and gestures illustrate the characteristic Flemish stolidity and lack of proper articulation. The heads of the three spectators resuscitate and somewhat modernize the best traditions of Van E y c k portraiture; but, inasmuch as certain critics have perceived in them also an Italian strain, these figures force upon us a consideration of that theory of Italian influence which we shall be obliged to face likewise in the case of Bermejo. T h e custom of flanking an episode from sacred story with groups of contemporary and impassive portraits is an Italian peculiarity of the Quattrocento, appearing already in Fra Filippo Lippi and Benozzo Gozzoli and attaining its most extravagant manifestation (after, of course, the date of the San Cugat retable) in Ghirlandaio; but there is no sure evidence that in the Barcelona picture the figures are portraits in the sense that they represent definite persons whom the painter knew, and they may be intended only as actors in the scene treated with realistic individualization. If they are portraits of contemporaries, it is almost necessary to assume that Alfonso had sojourned in Italy, although it is not quite out of the ques-

94

M A S T E R ALFONSO

tion that he might have evolved himself the idea of introducing a group of Spaniards of the fifteenth century, particularly when the appearance of donors in a work of art was so universal a phenomenon. But the introduction of such figures would, after all, imply only a very subordinate influence of Italian art upon him. It would merely indicate from which way one of the winds was blowing and would lead us to see whether we could discern any more vital effects of Italy. I confess that I find it hard to follow the connoisseurs who have perceived these effects. Surely the portraits themselves do not reveal them. The technical methods in their execution are pretty thoroughly Flemish. The types of the man in the red cloak and of the so-called Selbstbildnis are less harsh and physically more agreeable than the Flemish standard, but that might be because Alfonso's models themselves possessed more attractive facial features than the Nordic Flemings and would not necessarily involve an imitation of the handsome personages of Italian art. The red-clad spectator and to a less degree the head at the extreme right closely resemble the productions of Antonello da Messina; but there may be no other reason than the fact that both the Italian and the Spanish master were alike applying Flemish methods to the delineation of more pleasing human beings, and no interinfluence need be postulated. On the other hand, it is to be remembered that Hispano-Flemish artists did not generally take advantage, in their portraits, of the good looks with which their sitters were blessed. It is largely a matter of choice whether one wishes to derive from Italian precedent or the painter's own initiative the greater breadth of execution in contrast to the miniaturist proclivities of the Flemings. The complete substitution of a landscape for a gold background except in the little nimbus that contains the saint's soul may be explained either on an Italian or Flemish basis. Gold, indeed, is allowed rather sparingly in the picture, appearing only in the nimbus, in the saint's halo, and in the outer vesture of the spectator at the left. The church of San Cugat that looms so large at the left of the panel of the martyrdom is defined with a Flemish perspicuity. The rest of the landscape, on the other hand, is somewhat looser in its technical presentation, and, despite the sharp-pointed spire just behind the saint's head,

M A S T E R ALFONSO

95

looks more like the country-side of Italy than that of Belgium; but the latter trait may again be due to the striking similarity of Catalonia to Italy in natural setting. The warrior saint of the Muntadas Collection, however, is relieved against a gold background; and Felipe de Alemany, in recording the loss of works of art from San Cugat in 1835, 1 selects for special mention the brightness of the gilts in the brocades of the garments in a painting of the burial of St. Cucufas's body by his disciples, Sts. Juliana and Semproniana, a work which Alemany knew as then existing in the cloister of the monastery and which he ascribed to the tenth century (!) but which Gudiol 2 reasonably supposes to have been another section of Master Alfonso's retable. The case for Master Alfonso's Italian affiliations is somewhat strengthened by the panel of the warrior saint. The few writers who have referred to this figure have denominated it a St. George, but the absence of the dragon as an attribute suggests the possibility of an identification as almost any other of the canonized soldiers. If one, however, is merely to make a guess, St. George, the patron of Catalonia, would be the most likely candidate. He displays no halo, but it is not so anomalous for such a separate effigy of a saint, under Flemish influence, to be without one as it would be, in the panel of the martyrdom, for Emeterius to possess one and the bishop Severus to lack one, if this panel represented the former's execution.3 No shadow of a doubt can becloud the justness of the attribution to the same hand that painted the martyrdom. The absolute identity of style bursts its way through even the chrysalis of repaint. The young military gallant belongs to exactly the splendid race of the spectators at the martyrdom, exhibiting the very same, full, Flemish realization of the light and shade of nature. He is built according to a like, rather stocky canon for the human form; in the gestures there is no advance beyond the defective Flemish articulation of movement that mars also the panel of the martyrdom; the youth looks out at us with the piercing 1

See above, p. 82. Museum (Barcelona), II (1912), 442, n. 7; see also C. Barraquer, Las casas religiosas en Cataluña, Barcelona, 1906, I, 119, and Folch in Butllet't dels Museus d'Art de Barcelona, November, 1931, p. 166. 3 See above, p. 84. 2

φ

M A S T E R ALFONSO

directness of the outermost spectator of St. Cucufas's decollation; his long, luxuriant, glossy locks duplicate those of the second spectator; and even the features of his visage are an adolescent version of this personage's countenance. Because of his age, the head is even more analogous than those of the onlookers in the martyrdom to the creations of Antonello, who has left a legacy of so many memorable portraits of young men. Yet one cannot but feel that there is more to it than this and that the idealization is here carried to such a point as almost certainly to imply an Italian influence. Bertaux discerns in the armored form "une élégance toute vénitienne," and I find that in the notes which I made before the picture I have set down my feeling that the figure looks forward to Giorgione; but even if a relationship of some kind to Antonello is granted, I should hesitate to assert a Venetian influence upon Alfonso, for, since the Bellini and Giorgione owed much to the Flemish seeds planted by Antonello at Venice, the resemblances may easily have been occasioned, without intercommunication, by the autonomous developments of Alfonso and the Venetians upon the Neapolitan-Flemish precedents that Antonello likewise incorporated. I f we set aside, however, all such questions of exact affiliations, it is hard to avoid the general impression that the youth is conceived in the Italian rather than in the Flemish or even Spanish mode. Yet the Spanish sense has been sufficiently potent to treat the adolescent hero of Christianity as a cult-figure and thus to set him against a gold background, tooled with a pattern of brocade, instead of against a landscape; and once more, as in the costumes, the dog, and the other accessories of the martyrdom, the author has caught the spirit of the Low Countries in elaborating to the last and most entrancing degree both the opulent raiment and the armor. He actually revels in artful contrasts of the soft stuffs and the hard glint of the steel: about the brassart of the left arm he winds one end of a scarf and creates a balance by twisting its other end round the lance or sword that the saint holds upon the pavement in his right hand; and against the yielding richness of the coat, hat, and hair he sets the crisply curving lines of the buckler slung over the knight's left shoulder. Before an intelligent investigation of the problems of Al-

MASTER ALFONSO

97

fonso's origins is possible, it is necessary to note that as an artist he stands head and shoulders above the majority of his HispanoFlemish contemporaries. T h e forms are vigorously modelled in three dimensions. T h e drawing, whether we look at the figures or, in the martyrdom, at the church in the background, is the incisive achievement of a master. T h e crouching or sleeping setter, in particular, is a faithful delineation of a dog's character and posture which is incredible for the fifteenth century and in which both the most significant and the most beautiful canine traits are selected and enhanced. I do not know where to go in the period to find his like. 1 Comrades worthy of him, indeed, scarcely appear, as has been often said, until Velazquez turns his hand to such themes. Alfonso is quite conscious of the new-found power in the vivid presentation of personages, animals, and things, for there seems to be no other reason for the introduction and prominence of the hound (beyond the Flemish cult of genre) except the desire to exhibit his pictorial proficiency; and the choice of three different positions for the spectators, the full face, the profile, and the three-quarters view, betrays the fact that he is making a point of his portraiture. It is enough to say of them that they quite deserve his pride. The young warrior of the Muntadas panel reveals, in the masculine sphere, a felicitous union of charm and strength that is paralleled in this period only by the ladies personifying Virtues on the throne of Bermejo's Sto. Domingo de Silos. The piece of landscape in the martyrdom is almost as surprisingly modern as the dog and strangely prophesies in feeling English landscape of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The most logical order in taking up the problems of Alfonso's origins is to begin at his probable native heath and ask ourselves whether he could have learned his superior style there. The Cordovan school of the period is confined, in its extant representation, to a very sparse number of specimens, but I do not think it inconceivable that an artist of Alfonso's manifest talent could have evolved such paramount craftsmanship working at home on his own initiative. It must be remembered that a painter of gifts almost as great as those of Alfonso, Alejo Fernandez, came out of or at least passed through the Cordovan 1 T h e technique of Pisanello is too primitive to h a v e permitted him to equal Alfonso in this respect.

98

MASTER

ALFONSO

school. There are other sudden appearances of giants in the history of art the place and circumstances of whose beginnings are definitely known but whose surpassing attainments are, nevertheless, even more unheralded and more inexplicable than those of Alfonso. An outstanding instance is Goya in the aridity of the Spanish eighteenth century. T h e HispanoFlemish manner was already a well established tradition in Andalusia, more firmly imbedded at Cordova than at Seville, and a man of Alfonso's innate endowment could also have learned much merely from examining some of the works of the great Belgian masters which had been imported into the peninsula and which were of much higher merit than the indigenous painters usually achieved. He would have had to travel, however, in order to see these works, since very few probably had reached the south of the peninsula. 1 T h e qualitative interval that separates Alfonso from his lesser contemporary, Pedro de Córdoba, is not entirely incapable of being bridged, if we do not forget that the former was a genius. Although Pedro's miniature-like adaptation of the Flemish style differs from Alfonso's breadth, yet in the Annunciation, which was executed two years after the Barcelona picture, the heads of St. Pius and of the two donors reveal that he was not immeasurably inferior to Alfonso in vivid individualization, and the multiplied homely appurtenances of the Virgin's house are rendered with something of Alfonso's sense of the beauty of such objects. Despite Alfonso's exalted achievement, Pedro Fernández need not have blushed for the deep and pretty landscape of his Nativity; and we have been amazed by Diego de Pareja's encroachment, both in kind and in degree of excellence, upon the laurels of Bermejo as well as of Alfonso. Without too much of a strain on the imagination Alfonso may be supposed to have had the same training at Cordova as these other masters; the difference would be that, as an artist of larger gifts, he eventually attained to a loftier and more universal pictorial idiom. Some lovers of good painting, however, may feel that, in comparison even with Diego de Pareja, a breath of new and strong life seems to have entered Andalusian art with the 1

See above, p. 4.

M A S T E R ALFONSO

99

achievement of Master Alfonso. If we are unwilling to account for this on the basis of his sheer talent, then we must look to some foreign source for the inspiration. We might resort to the theory which Tormo has proposed as an explanation of Bermejo and which in that connection had already suggested itself to me, the possibility of a contact with the Portuguese school of the fifteenth century. This school, as it remains to us in extant examples, is represented virtually by the work of Nuno Gonçalves alone; but, although built upon the same Flemish precedent, the style of this artist rises to greater aesthetic heights than are embodied in the average production of his Spanish rivals. His manner is not identical with Alfonso's, but, whether or not derived, as has been claimed, from Hugo van der Goes, it reveals certain qualities analogous to those of Alfonso, less meticulous modelling than the ordinary Fleming liked, a strongly masculine draughtsmanship, and a vivid presentation of form and personality. No chronological obstacle stands in the way of an assumption of Portuguese influence, for Gonçalves's activity may with surety be traced from 1450 to 1471 and his celebrated altarpiece of St. Vincent is usually assigned to the years 1458 to 1460. Inasmuch as Alfonso V of Aragon did not die until 1458 and we do not know at what date the painter Alfonso, if he be the same as the miniaturist, went into his service, he might have experienced the invigorating stimulus of Gonçalves or of some now forgotten but similar Portuguese master before he left Andalusia. Geographically, too, Andalusia and Cordova are nearer to Lisbon than is Castile, Aragon, or Catalonia, a proximity that adds its weight to the hypothesis of Alfonso's southern provenience. Portuguese painters might have found employment at Cordova, or Alfonso may have been attracted to Lisbon. Although the presence of two Portuguese painters, Joäo P a y v a and Vasco Fernandes, is recorded at this time in Catalonia by document, it is not likely that Alfonso underwent Lusitanian influence after his emigration to his new home rather than in his postulated birthplace, Cordova, for there is no trace of any effect of the foreign masters upon the indigenous Catalan school. The document in question, of 1459, although it describes them as painters, does not allude to any of their pic-

ΙΟΟ

M A S T E R ALFONSO

torial productions, but P a y v a at Barcelona merely makes Fernandes at Tortosa his procurator for gaining possession of certain of his goods, particularly some instruments for the manufacture of brandy. There is no reason, however, for doubting that they both exercised in Catalonia their principal profession of artists. P a y v a describes himself as coming from the town of Lam ego in Portugal; and, although Vasco Fernandes is not set down in the document as Portuguese, his name and relationship with P a y v a demonstrate him to have belonged to that nationality. He is, of course, not identical with the Vasco Fernandes of Vizeu in Portugal, who belongs to the first half of the sixteenth century and used to serve as a convenient tag for all primitive Portuguese pictures. Nor is there any ground for guessing, with Sanpere, that he may have been the same as a miniaturist Vasco in the service of Alfonso V of Portugal, who is recorded from 1450 to 1455 at Lisbon and who is usually known as Vasco Eanes, a surname that he probably borrowed from his master Gonçalo Eanes. Inasmuch as P a y v a and Vasco Fernandes were already resident in Catalonia before the arrival of the Constable of Portugal to exercise his transitory sovereignty from 1464 to 1466, they cannot have been brought to eastern Spain in his suite. It has already been seen that the existence of Italian elements cannot be so dogmatically affirmed in the picture of St. Cucufas's martyrdom as in the Muntadas panel. If these are really present in Master Alfonso's production, they can hardly have been learned by him during his putative Cordovan training. A more credible explanation would be that hypothesis of a Neapolitan education for certain Spanish painters of the later fifteenth and early sixteenth century which has been discussed in volume IV in the chapter on the dissemination of the Flemish influence in the Iberian peninsula. The coalition of Italian, Flemish, and Spanish factors in the style of the Neapolitan school would explain the component parts of Alfonso's manner, and the analogies to Antonello da Messina, who in all probability also studied at Naples, would thus be further elucidated. If the Master Alfonso of San Cugat could with certainty be identified with the illuminator at the Neapolitan court, Alfonso de Cordoba, his debt to the school of Naples would be definitely established, and, since he may have influ-

MASTER ALFONSO

ΙΟΙ

enced Bermejo, the genesis of this whole phase of Spanish painting would be clarified. The already mentioned Alfonso of Spain at the court of Ferrara is too vague a personality to merit any guesses. If we refuse to descry Italian factors in Alfonso, we can hardly fail to acknowledge them in Bermejo; and, if we are obliged to have recourse to Naples to account for Bermejo, there is all the more reason for seeking in that city also the artistic origins of Alfonso whose production is so like that of Bermejo. One may attempt to explain away the parallelisms to Antonello on the theory that he and Alfonso arrived independently at the same results because they worked on the same Flemish beginnings; but there yet remains the curious fact that they should both have built upon their Flemish foundation in exactly the same way and not like such another Spaniard as Fernando Gallego or such another Italian as Pier di Cosimo, an obstacle that it is hard to surmount unless they be supposed to have come into contact, if not with each other, at least with the same Neapolitan aesthetic atmosphere. Although we shall find an outstanding and surprising example of French influence in Catalonia during the second half of the fifteenth century, the retable of Canapost, and possibly one or two other instances, less pronounced, the analogies of Alfonso to Charonton and Froment are not close enough, except in so far as Flanders is their general creditor, to countenance the hypothesis that the Spanish master had learned his art from them after his arrival in Catalonia. The great Pietà from Villeneuve-lès-Avignon is another question. Some similarities to the style of Alfonso and Bermejo it certainly does exhibit, but again they do not appear exact enough to permit the assumption of a relationship any more than the correspondences in Antonello da Messina are sufficiently decided to support a theory of his influence upon Spain. In the general chapter in volume IV upon the Hispano-Flemish manner I have dared to suggest that the Villeneuve picture may have owed something to the conglomeration of artistic strains that focussed at Naples, and what resemblances there are between this painting and the works of Antonello, Alfonso, and Bermejo may have their raison d'être in nothing more definite than the diffusion, from that city, of a kind of Pan-Mediterranean style. Since the Villeneuve Pietà and perhaps a few other French specimens

I02

MASTER

ALFONSO

of the " N e a p o l i t a n " fashions do not prove the existence of a French school of this cast in comparison with the numerous examples of the combined production of Alfonso and Bermejo, I should prefer, if I have to admit a connection between France and Catalonia, to follow old Sanpere in imagining that the current flowed rather from the southern country to the northern; and there is indeed record of a Catalan and a Castilian painter employed at Avignon in 1476. The Canapost retable undoubtedly establishes the fact of at least one Gallicized painting in Catalonia in the second half of the fifteenth century, but its precedents are not the phase of French art illustrated by the Pietà but rather the phase embodied in Fouquet and the Master of Moulins; and one or even two or three swallows do not make a summer. The pair of celebrated versions of the Pietà in the Frick Collection, although related to the "Neapolitan" manner, approximate less the Spanish manifestations than does the Villeneuve Pietà, and, in any case, since they have not been demonstrated to be French, they cannot be used as evidence for the belief in a whole French school cultivating this manner. We have not succeeded in finding any conclusive solution of Alfonso's origins, but the French theory has revealed less in its favor than the Cordovan, Neapolitan, or Portuguese. 1 1 While the present volume is in press, the great archivist of Barcelona, Duran y Sanpere, with characteristic Catalan generosity transcribes for me a hitherto unpublished Latin document which renders more probable the identity of the Alfonso de Córdoba who painted in the royal chapel at Barcelona with the miniaturist of like name at the Neapolitan court of Alfonso the Magnanimous and which, since the Alfonso de Córdoba at Barcelona is almost certainly the same person as the Master Alfonso of San Cugat, affords further support to the theory of the latter's Neapolitan training. The document, dated December 26, 1476, is Alfonso de Cordoba's marriage contract, and the significant fact in it is that the lady of his choice is of Neapolitan extraction. It may be translated into English as follows: "Alfonso de Córdoba, painter, citizen of Barcelona, son of Pascual Castell of the city of Cordova and of Doña Urraca Sancz, both now deceased, agrees with Brígida, widow of Baltasar Santimari (? in regard to the reading of the surname) and daughter of Paolo di Olesia ( = Alessia ?) of the city of Naples, now deceased, that she is to be his wife, having received as dowry the value of fifty pounds." Brígida may, of course, have long since been domiciled at Barcelona as Baltasar's wife, but there is always the other possibility that her husband was a Neapolitan, that she continued to dwell in the Italian city until his death, and that she then came from Naples to Barcelona to enter upon a second marriage with Alfonso, who, during his previous (hypothetical) sojourn in Naples, may have learned to admire her before she became a widow. In any case, the document would at least add another link, however tenuous, to the supposition of Master Alfonso's Neapolitan affiliations. Furthermore, if the equation of Master Alfonso with Alfonso de Cordoba is correct, we are provided with the names of the San Cugat painter's parents — Pascual Castillo of Cordova (Castell being the Catalan form of Castillo) and Urraca Sanz.

CHAPTER LXI T H E LIFE OF

BERMEJO

ALL our weary speculation upon Master Alfonso's sources may have seemed to the reader unwarranted in face of the fact that only two of his works, however beautiful, are preserved, but it will enable us to set aside much of the hairsplitting with which we should otherwise have been forced to encumber the discussion of Bermejo, whose artistic legacy is fortunately more considerable, since the problems that attach to his production are in part the same. Our first business is to tabulate the only too scanty facts of his biography that, one after the other, research has now brought to light. His Cordovan extraction is certified by the adjective cordubensis affixed to his name in the Latin inscription upon his Pietà in the Barcelona cathedral. If, as Sanpere and Tormo think, this inscription, in Roman capitals rather than in the Gothic script of his signatures on three other paintings, 1 was not concocted by the painter himself but was added by the donor or perhaps even later by someone else, the derivation from Cordova is not the kind of thing that would have been invented by the epigraphist but must be based upon a well established fact. Tormo finds a puzzle in the consideration that the painter Martin Bernat describes^ him as Bartolomé de Cárdenas in the document of 1477 by which Bernat agrees to complete the retable of Sto. Domingo de Silos at Daroca in Aragon, for which in 1474 Bermejo had contracted; but this title tends to confirm Bermejo's origins in the province of Cordova. Cárdenas would seem to be a place-name, and the only town of such an appellation in Spain is in the northern province of Logroño; but on the railway from Madrid to the south there is a station called Venta de Cárdenas at the frontier of the provinces of Jaén and Ciudad Real close enough to 1 Three, if we include among his authentic works the Almenas Madonna, signed merely Bartolomeus·. see below, pp. 203 ff.

I04

BERMEJO

Cordova to have justified the designation of a man who had come from this spot as Bartholomew Bermejo of Cordova. A t present there is no village at the locality, and the Spanish words mean only "road house of Cárdenas"; but, whether or not a settlement existed here in the fifteenth century, a person who had lived in a near-lying farmhouse might have thus acquired a surname, " o f Cárdenas." The custom of taking surnames from places, however, was not so universal in the case of the middle classes, to which the painters ordinarily belonged, as in the case of the aristocrats, and it is quite possible that the phrase has no geographical significance and is merely a family name of some other etymological origin. It is the surname of a large number of distinguished men in the history of Spain, and the point apposite to our purpose is that one needs only to consult a Spanish encyclopaedia to discover that, with one or two exceptions, all these men came from Andalusia. De Cárdenas is then essentially a southern name and thus contributes its bit of evidence in favor of Bermejo's Cordovan provenience. Among this line of celebrities, a clan of painters so entitled enjoyed patronage at Seville contemporaneously with Bermejo (although none of their works have been identified), Cristóbal de Cárdenas, who may be traced from 1473 to 1530, a Cristóbal the younger active 1508 to his death between 1549 and 1555, and Pedro mentioned in 1473. T h e family was represented at Seville as late as the eighteenth century by the sculptor José Cárdenas, a pupil of Pedro Roldán. But Cordova can also muster an artist thus called, Ignacio de Cárdenas, an engraver of the seventeenth century. 1 Were the Cordovan and Sevillian members of the gens related by blood? From which of the cities did they originally derive? Was Bermejo one of the family of Sevillian painters in the fifteenth century and did he then change his residence to Cordova before proceeding north to Aragon and Catalonia? The way is open to almost any conjecture. T h e fact that our artist was still alive in 1495 and perhaps in 1498 makes it impossible to identify him with a homonym, Bartolomé de Cárdenas, also a painter, who in a Sevillian document of September 26, 1480, is mentioned as * Ceán Bermúdez, Diccionario, I, 238, and Ramírez de Arellano, Diccionario artistas de la provincia de Córdoba, 96.

de

BERMEJO

105

already dead, when his wife, a Leonor Núñez, apprentices their son, Cristóbal, whose age is given as about fifteen, to a headdress-maker, Diego González Bonifante. 1 Leonor Núñez is put down as having formerly resided in Toledo, so that her husband may be supposed to have there exercised his profession at least temporarily, even if in the first place he had come from Andalusia. Did this boy become the artist, Cristóbal de Cardenas the younger, whom we have mentioned above? In such dynasties of artistic families, which are encountered everywhere in Europe, the use of the same Christian names from one generation to another and synchronously in différent branches of the clan, for instance Cristóbal and Bartolomé, creates confusion worse confounded. There is, moreover, another angle to the enigma. De Cárdenas is also the title of a noble Portuguese family, and a painter of Portuguese lineage and of exactly Bermejo's name, Bartolomé de Cárdenas, found employment in Castile at the end of the sixteenth and in the early seventeenth century as a follower of Alonso Sánchez Coello. Another set of guesses is thus legitimate. Is the hypothesis of a Portuguese influence upon Bermejo strengthened by the possibility that the Portuguese and Andalusian families were connected by ties of blood? Or did Bermejo, like his namesake of the sixteenth century, belong to the Portuguese family, and did he thence emigrate to Cordova before seeking new pastures for his art in northern Spain ? Because of the Hebrew inscriptions in some of Bermejo's early works, Tormo indulges in the surmise that he may have been a converted Jew, and there are other examples of artistic families of this race in Spain, such as the Levis in Aragon in the early fifteenth century. Not much can be said for or against such a supposition. In view of the hostility with which the Jews were regarded in Spain at this epoch, resulting in their expulsion in 1492 (some time, however, after the pictures in which the Hebrew legends appear were painted), it would perhaps be unnatural for a Gentile to introduce them or to get a Hebrew scholar to design them for him, but a Jewish painter might also avoid them out of fear. It must not be forgotten that Hebrew, as the language of the Old Testament, was sacred 1

Gestoso y Pérez, Diccionario,

II, 23.

ιο6

BERMEJO

also to a pure-blooded Christian. I cannot follow Tormo in discerning in the Jews a peculiar racial physique, marked by heaviness, and in imagining that Bermejo's figures conform to this standard; but the types of his faces, especially in his early works, are often unmistakably Semitic. It is true that other Spanish painters, of Gentile extraction, introduce Jewish physiognomies among the actors in the stories of the New Testament, as, for instance, even such early masters as Jaime and Pedro Serra in the antagonists of St. Stephen in debate. 1 Whereas, however, other Spaniards ordinarily confine such characterization to those whom they wish to stigmatize as odious, Bermejo impresses the Hebrew cast of countenance upon the holiest personages, the Apostles and actually Our Lord Himself. B u t a still more pertinent question now demands our attention : in what sense is the word that appears to be a nickname, Bermejo, attached to him? Bartolomé de Cárdenas was evidently, like so many Italian artists, commonly known by his nickname rather than his real surname, for he is invariably so described in the documents, with the exception of Martin Bernat's above-mentioned allusion to him, and he signs himself on two of his pictures with the Latin equivalent of Bermejo. Vermilion is the English translation of bermejo, and in writing his name on the pictures of the St. Michael of Tous and the Madonna of Acqui the painter turns this into the Latin rubeus (confining himself for the Almenas Virgin, if it is really his work, simply to his Christian name in Latin Bartolomeus). In the Latin inscription on the Barcelona Pietà the word appears in the vernacular as Vermeio. Tormo ingeniously surmises as a reason for the sobriquet the possibility that Cárdenas may have suggested the adjective cárdeno, which signifies one phase of red, i. e., violet, and which may have eventually induced the application to him of the commoner word, bermejo. Other explanations that have been vouchsafed are that he was ruddy of complexion or red-haired. The date of his birth we do not know. His first documented work is of the year 1474, but it is necessary to place certain undocumented paintings a decade or so earlier, let us say in the sixties. If he followed the normal evolution of an artist, he 1

C f . vol. I I , pp. 240 and 256.

BERMEJO

107

would have been in his twenties when he executed these paintings, which bear the unmistakable marks of first efforts, and we should thus arrive at Mayer's proposed date for his birth, c. 1440. It is always possible, however, that, like Raphael's father, he did not develop until later in life, so that he might have been born earlier and in his final period at Barcelona at the end of the century might have been older than fifty or sixty years. The first dated allusions 1 to the painter find him in Aragon and constitute the documentation of the panel of Sto. Domingo de Silos now in the Prado at Madrid. The picture was the central piece of the retable of the high altar in the church dedicated to the saint at Daroca, and on September 5, 1474, Bermejo, then residing in that town, contracted to execute the altarpiece. It appears that, according to the habit of many another master, he procrastinated in fulfilling his obligation, for in an appendix to the contract of 1474, an appendix dated September 29, 1477,2 his friend, pupil, and assistant, the Aragonese painter, Martin Bernat, then at Saragossa, promises to complete, either with or without the collaboration of Bermejo, the parts of the commission that still remain unfinished. The prospect of losing entirely to his companion Bernat the honorarium for the rest of the altarpiece may have frightened him once more into assuming the whole task himself, for in another document of November 17 in the same autumn of 1477 3 Bermejo, also at Saragossa, agrees to respect the liabilities that he had taken upon himself in 1474. Inasmuch as Bernat is mentioned in this legal deed as an agent and surety for Bermejo for receiving the payments, it may be deduced that there had been no quarrel between him and the Cordovan and that he was at this time willing to serve as a docile helper of the master. The central 1 The evidence for bringing him to Aragon at least as early as 1467 will be considered subsequently. 2 N o t September 28, as Tormo has it, if Serrano's Roman numerals are right {Revista de archivos, X X X I V , 1916, p. 485); but Serrano cannot always be trusted in copying numerals. 3 In copying the Roman numeral within the document, Serrano gives it as 1472 (.Revista de archivos, X X X I , 1914. Ρ· 45^)> but in referring to the notary's book from which the contract is taken and in his own heading to the document he rightly states the year as 1477. 1472 is, of course, an impossible date for this second contract since the original contract was made in 1474.

ιο8

BERMEJO

panel is not included in this document among the sections still to be carried out, so that it must already have been done between 1474 and 1477 and thus is proved to be a certain work by Bermejo's own hand. We have no means of knowing whether the other sections were completed, according to the new contracts of 1477 or, if so, whether Bermejo, Bernât, or, as we shall see in a later volume, perhaps Tomás Giner was ultimately responsible for them. With the next and only other series of documents we discover that Bermejo has moved eastward to Barcelona. The publication of Bassegoda's monumental work on the church of Sta. María del Mar at Barcelona now enables us to bring him to this city four years before the formerly first ascertained date, 1490. The Book of Deliberations of this parish records that in i 4 8 6 negotiations were begun with him and with Jaime Huguet that they might paint the doors of the organ, which, however, though not extant, were eventually executed by Pablo Alemany and Rafael Vergós. 1 The formerly first ascertained date occurs in the inscription on the lower part of the frame of the Pietà now in the Sala Capitular of the Barcelona cathedral, which gives the information that the picture was finished by Bermejo at the expense of the archdeacon, Luis Desplá, on April 23, 1490. We have already observed that the Roman capitals in place of Gothic lettering may indicate that the inscription was added by some later personage, perhaps Desplá, who did not die until the Renaissance was well advanced in 1523. The painting was once in the chapel of the Casa de los Arcedianos (House of the Archdeacons) at Barcelona, but no evidence exists to show whether it was merely a part of a retable or itself constituted the whole retable like the Entombment at El Puig near Valencia. The following year, I491, Bermejo appears as connected in some way with a Dutch sculptor Adrián de Suydret. The document says that Adrián, after he has carved a (nonextant) wooden statue of St. James for the nuns of Junqueras 2 at Barcelona, shall be at the disposal and direction of the silversmith Berenguer Palau and of the painter Bartolomé Bermejo. 1

Bassegoda, I , 211-0.1%. Evidently the daughter-house at Barcelona, not the mother-house at the town of this name, near Sabadell. 2

BERMEJO

109

T h e significance of these words is a puzzle. Tormo's first guess that Bermejo may have supplied the sketch for the statue can scarcely be right since Adrian is not required to subject himself to him until after the completion of his work. The Spanish critic's second surmise is more plausible, that Bermejo may have added the polychromy, in which case the silversmith may have applied the gilding. Bermejo also did drawings for a window in the baptistery of the cathedral and for nine windows in the lantern, since on M a y 5, 1495, the glass-worker F^ntanet, who is to translate the sketches into his own medium, receives a paltry sum to pay to Bermejo for them. Only the example in the baptistery, depicting the Noli me tangere, has remained to us. As Bassegoda's discovery makes it possible to assert that Bermejo was in Catalonia four years before the previously established date of 1490, so G u d i o l 1 appears to have extended the painter's sojourn in the province until at least 1498. He states that he found in the Municipal Archives and book of funerals at Vich the evidence that Bermejo was in that city in 1498, employed at some modest pictorial commission in connection with a requiem mass for a queen of Portugal who had been an Aragonese princess, and he supposes that the veronica of the Saviour in the Museum of Vich may have been executed by him at this time. Unfortunately Gudiol does not quote the document or documents, so that it is impossible to say whether the artist's name is there definitely set down as Bartolomé Bermejo or de Cárdenas or whether Gudiol is merely deducing, as others have done with the 1499 document of Saragossa, that a person called in the entry Master Bartholomew or by some other shortened title is the great Cordovan painter. Nor does the Catalan scholar make it clear whether the notice is in a manuscript of the Municipal Archives as well as in the book of funerals or whether he means only that the latter book is in the Municipal Archives, and he fails to specify which is the queen of Portugal in question. 2 Until, therefore, the actual documentary entry is published, a shadow of doubt must enshroud Veil i nou, April, 1921, p. 7. I know of no Aragonese princess who was queen of Portugal and died at this time; and it must have been a commemoration for a royal lady long deceased. Such earlier kings of Portugal as Sancho I, Diniz, and Duarte had married into the Aragonese house. 1

2

no

BERMEJO

this last recorded allusion to Bermejo's sojourn in Catalonia. Nevertheless, the presence of the escutcheon of the Empire in the Epiphany at Granada, which with strong conviction I shall ascribe to Bermejo, assists us in extending the span of his life beyond 1495, the date of the window, for it does not seem possible to account for the heraldry except by the Hapsburg marriages of the children of the Reyes Católicos in 1496 and 1497. The "Master Bartholomew, painter" who in a Saragossan document of 1499 is included in a list of debtors to a merchant, Juan Martinez, is not necessarily our artist. One Aragonese painter called Bartolomé Valles died in i486, and, if we take into consideration the way in which the same Christian name occurs in dynasties of artists, he may have had a successor of like appellation living in 1499. A consultation of Abizanda's volumes on the sixteenth century in Aragon 1 will reveal other artistic Bartholomews who must have been active by the end of the fifteenth century. We thus lack proper grounds for stating that Bermejo returned to Aragon and had not yet died by 1499. No sure further knowledge of his travels and career may be gleaned from the wide dispersion of his works, for it is always possible that he did not betake himself to the various places to execute his pictures but merely sent them there to patrons who had ordered them from him while he was residing in Cordova, Aragon, or Barcelona. Such, for instance, may have been the history of the signed St. Michael in the possession of Lady Ludlow (Lady Wernher) in London. Sanpere discovered that it came from the east coast, Valencia or the region, and Tramoyeres and Tormo nosed out the virtual certainty that it had once been in the church of Tous, west of Alcira and south of Valencia, which is dedicated to the archangel. Following up his supposition that the Catalan Pedro de Tous resident at Seville was perhaps instrumental in obtaining employment for Master Alfonso in Catalonia, 2 Sanpere boldly guesses that the Catalan Tous family may have been connected with an aristo1

Documentos para la historia artística y literaria de Aragón, Saragossa, 1915 and

1917. 2 See above, p. 91.

BERMEJO

m

cratic family which belonged to the Valencian town of Tous and was entitled after this town and that the Tous family of Catalonia, living in Andalusia, may have obtained the Valencian commission for the Andalusian painter, Bermejo. But the Catalan family took their name from the Catalan town and castle of Tous near Igualada, and there is no justification in assuming a relationship because both in Catalonia and Valencia there happened to be a settlement called Tous and a family that received its title from each place. The stylistic analogy of the St. Michael to the St. Engracia at Fenway Court, Boston, which was probably done while Bermejo was in Aragon, would imply that the Ludlow picture might have been dispatched by him to Tous from that province; but this argument cannot be pressed, for the variation in style between the St. Dominic of Silos and the St. Engracia shows that his manner might differ somewhat within any given period. There is some reason, however, for believing that he had actually sojourned at Valencia, between his Aragonese and Catalan periods. In the gold backgrounds of the St. Engracia and the St. Michael, the borders are featured in the Valencian fashion, but since the same peculiarity occurs in a work of his undoubtedly done in Aragon, the St. Martin retable at Daroca, there is not much force in the argument unless we suppose that he had been in Valencia also earlier. The two wings of his signed Madonna at Acqui in the Italian province of Piedmont are by another artist whose style is certainly that of the eastern Spanish littoral and probably rather of Valencia than of Catalonia. If the whole triptych, as is likely, was executed at the same time and if a Valencian did the wings, it is virtually necessary to postulate that Bermejo had been at Valencia when he decorated the central panel or that he picked up at Valencia a local assistant and carried him to his final residence in Catalonia or even to Italy, if by any remote possibility the Acqui altarpiece was actually painted in that country. The alleged Valencian provenience of the Peralada Pietà lends some support to the assumption of a visit to Valencia; but undocumented traditions of provenience are very insecure evidence. With stronger conviction than in the case of Master Alfonso, Italian elements may be predicated in the Acqui Madonna and

112

BERMEJO

in the works that are to be assigned with certainty to Bermejo's Catalan period. W e shall subsequently embroil ourselves in the question of his possible training at Naples; but whether or not he studied there as a youth, the increased Italianism of his later productions would suggest a visit to the sister peninsula just before he painted them. Inasmuch, however, as the Acqui Madonna is a comparatively recent acquisition of the cathedral of that city, it constitutes no proof of such a visit to Italy. Nor can the St. Catherine at Pisa be any longer taken as evidence for an italienische Reise, since it is most surely a work of the Bruges Master of the St. Lucy Legend and not of Bermejo. De Mély long ago called attention to a series of Ferrarese painters belonging to a single family called Rosso, which in Italian signifies red. T w o had the Christian name of Bartolommeo, the former of whom died in 1473. T h e latter, entitled Bartolommeo Brasoni Rosso, since he lived until 1517, might, so far as dates go, be identical with our master, and his father is actually described in a document as Dominicus Rubeus, according to the mode in which Bermejo translated his surname into Latin; but the evidence that has accumulated since D e Mély wrote proves overwhelmingly that Bermejo was not an Italian but a Spaniard. Nor can the idea be entertained that the Spaniard Bermejo went to Ferrara and there was dubbed in Italian Bartolommeo Rosso, for the Ferrarese Bartolommeo Rosso is one in a family of artists whose line may be consecutively traced from father to son as citizens of the capital of the D'Este, so that no one of them could have been a foreign interloper. If Bermejo could be categorically asserted to have gone to Italy and if he did not make the trip from Valencia across the sea, it might be conjectured that he journeyed thither via southern France. If one is disposed to descry some of his influence in the great Pietà of Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, which Sanpere had the temerity actually to ascribe to him, it might be elucidated on such a hypothesis, provided the historians of French art could eventually agree that the Pietà was executed late enough in the second half of the fifteenth century to have made the relationship a chronological possibility. There is, however, no Barthélémy Roux in French documents with

BERMEJO

113

whom, in his transitory sojourn, he could be identified, although, in the old days before research had extricated and established his personality, Herbert Cook invented this Gallic name as a translation of his Latin signature, laboring under the delusion that he was a Frenchman. Sanpere, holding to this mere supposition of a trip to France, ventured the surmise that he may have been the same as the Castilian painter who is recorded at Avignon in 1476. 1 We disport ourselves in the realm of the filmiest conjecture, but his failure to complete the Daroca altarpiece from 1474 to 1477 might conceivably find an explanation in an absence from Aragon, whether in Provence or elsewhere. Tormo emphasizes the Central American provenience of the four Barcelona panels of the Descent into Hell, Entry into Paradise, Resurrection, and Ascension, which, though unsigned and undocumented, reveal convincing internal evidence of Bermejo's authorship; but he does not mean to imply that the painter wandered so far afield as this! He does, however, insinuate that the arrival of the panels in Guatemala was "coetaneous" with Bermejo's life, although, since this country was not settled by the Spaniards until 1522 to 1524, he would probably consent to a liberal interpretation of the adjective "coetaneous" which would include the years immediately succeeding the master's death. The only reason for believing that the pictures reached Central America at an early date is that when, in the Renaissance and seventeenth or eighteenth century, the primitives were little esteemed, no one would have taken the trouble to lug them off across the sea; and yet, in the absence of any history of the pictures up to the time of their appearance at Paris at the end of the nineteenth or beginning of the twentieth century, a number of strange accidents might have resulted in their transportation to Guatemala at any date after the beginning of the sixteenth century. Moreover, despite the letters that Tormo received from the Baron de Quinto, who sold the panels in Barcelona, stating that he had obtained them from a Central American, Sáenz de Tejada, who had brought them from Guatemala, sad experience has taught how successive owners so easily forget the provenience of their works of art 1 See above, p. 102.

114

BERMEJO

that the Guatemalan origin of the four paintings cannot be regarded as immutably established. I t is difficult, though not impossible, to believe that Sáenz de Tejada had found or owned in Guatemala a collection of Spanish primitives (for the Baron de Quinto says that he had carried with him to Paris other early Spanish pictures). The contemporary copies of the Resurrection and Ascension in the Parcent Collection at Madrid demonstrate that the series remained in Spain at least long enough at the end of the fifteenth or very beginning of the sixteenth century to inspire imitations.

CHAPTER LXII T H E WORKS OF Ι.

AUTHENTIC

BERMEJO WORKS

an intelligent examination of the mystery enveloping the stylistic origins of Bermejo is feasible and before an epitome of his whole great artistic personality may be attempted, it is incumbent on us to analyze in detail, one by one, each of his works that are certified by document, signature, or identity of manner. T h e doubtful or merely related paintings must also fall within our ken for the sake of any possible light that they may cast into the obscurity. BEFORE

T h e first period to which extant works may be assigned with absolute surety is his sojourn in Aragon, and in this period the basic picture to which all other attributions must be referred is the Sto. Domingo de Silos of 1474 in the Prado (Fig. 28), the complete documentation of which has been marshalled in the outline of the master's life. The representation follows closely the detailed specifications of the contract of 1474. It is required that he shall be represented " a s bishop seated on a chair in pontificals of embossed gold and with the seven Virtues round the chair." 1 St. Dominic of Silos was not a bishop but a Benedictine abbot, and the phrase " a s bishop" probably was introduced so that the artist, who could not be expected to know that the vestments of a great abbot are virtually identical with episcopal insignia, might depict him in his proper accoutrement. Over the apparelled alb and beneath the cope, Bermejo has bestowed upon the saint even a dalmatic, 2 which an abbot may imitate a bishop by wearing, in conjunction with the other pontificals, only through special privilege and which, according to the modern Roman rite, is used with the chasuble 1 Bertaux points out the analogy of the Vices depicted as statuettes on the throne of the Aragonese Virgin of Mercy in the episcopal palace at Teruel; see below, p. 313. 3 Or it may be the practically identical vestment, the tunicle; in any case, both the dalmatic and the tunicle, the episcopal and abbatial prerogatives, are not visible.

ιι6

BERMEJO

and not the cope but is here, as not infrequently in the Middle Ages, combined with the latter vestment. 1 St. Dominic's crosier turns outward in the fashion that some writers on ritual would confine to a bishop in his own see, in distinction from an inward turn for an abbot's pastoral staff; but at no time in the church has this practice enjoyed any general observance. The veil on the crosier was usual for bishops and abbots alike in the Middle Ages, and it is doubtful whether the limitation of the veil to an abbot in the presence of a bishop is even a universal modern usage. T h e chair is really a throne of multiplied and exquisite Gothic detail. The contract, however, is violated in one respect, the demand that the gold of the vestments be embossed,2 for the pattern of the brocade is rendered merely by black lines upon the flat gold, the saints of the cope's orphreys are painted upon the gilt background, and the jewels of the mitre are not of raised stucco but are executed only with the Flemish illusion of relief. The four cardinal Virtues are represented as statuettes at the sides of the throne, and the three theological Virtues, with Charity at the summit, on its pointed pinnacle. T h e gold background behind the throne is undiapered. In the case of four of the Virtues the iconography is rather anomalous and does not correspond to either the French or Italian norms. Instead of suckling or protecting children, Charity (Fig. 29) places her hands upon the shoulders of an old and a young man, evidently two representatives of the class of the needy and not, as Tormo would have it, two enemies that she reconciles. T h e y are not proud foes suppressing their animosities, but they cling to Charity's body for shelter with humble supplication upon their faces that Bermejo has succeeded in rendering with convincing and appealing mastery. Hope (Fig. 30) clasps in her left hand a leaving branch, an attribute which is found in some of her Italian effigies and which Mâle interprets as embodying the expectation of the husbandman; 3 but the symbol in her right hand is unique, apparently a golden cloud containing in its midst a masculine profile. Tormo underJ. Braun, Die liturgische Gewandung, 247 ff., 256, 286, and 294. Unless the word embotido (= embutido) be used in the contract in a sense not usual at the time, meaning " c h a s e d " instead of "embossed." 3 L 'art religieux de la fin du moyen âge en France, 344. 1

2

FIG. 28. BERMEJO.

STO. DOMINGO DE SILOS. (Photo. Ruiz Vernacci)

PRADO, MADRID

Fig. 29.

BERMEJO.

CHARITY, DETAIL OF THE PANEL OF

,STO. DOMINGO DE SILOS. (Photo. Ruiz

PRADO, MADRID

Vernacci)

Fig. 30. BERMEJO. HOPE, DETAIL OF THE PANEL OF STO. DOMINGO DE SILOS. PRADO, MADRID (Photo. Ruiz

Vernacci)

I20

BERMEJO

stands this face to be that of the Saviour to whom in the clouds of heaven the Christian looks forward as to his reward, but the clouded face may be only an allegory of mankind, figured by the countenance, aspiring upward, however much his vision be veiled. Fortitude, armed with a sword, seems to be rescuing a nude victim from a dragon-formed devil. T h e nearest approximation is the French attribute of Fortitude, the dragon of sin that she extracts from the tower of the human conscience. 1 Prudence or Wisdom (Fig. 31), without her credentials of the double face, the mirror, or the serpent, simply reads a book by the light of a wax torch. There is at least one French precedent for such an ideation of Prudence, a manuscript of the late fourteenth century, in which she is depicted as reading to her disciples; 2 but the curious thing is that one of the regular French modes of depicting Faith was as a woman holding a candle, the Bible, or the Mosaic Law. 3 Bermejo's Faith, crowned with the tiara, displays her usual tokens, the cross and the chalice. T o vie with the ineffable physical and spiritual loveliness of these allegorical ladies and with the technical supremacy lavished upon them — qualities that, if Bermejo had painted nothing else, would entitle him to a place among the great of the earth — may we suppose that the nobly touching conception of Charity and the profound idea of the mist-veiled image held by Hope emanate from the master's own thought and sage invention, of which the nature of his other works allowed him to reveal to us so few samples? In any case, we shall not be forcing our imaginations to see what is not there if we claim that, like Giotto in the Arena Chapel, he has successfully characterized his symbolical personages in type as well as by attributes. Charity is a woman of a bountiful fullness of form, whose countenance shows her gifts to be inspired by intelligent and impartial kindness. Faith is imbued with simple trust. Hope is a rapt mystic looking into the future. Fortitude is the strongest-bodied of the seven. Justice sadly pursues her task of wielding the sword and of weighing in the balance. Prudence is the most alert and sagacious. Temperance has disciplined herself until her modesty has become almost diffidence. In H>'d; 339 and 343. 3 Ibid., 334 and 343. 1

2

Ibid., 332.

FIG 31.

BERMEJO. PRUDENCE, DETAIL OF THE PANEL OF STO. DOMINGO DE SILOS. PRADO, MADRID (Photo. Ruiz

Vernacci)

122

BERMEJO

beauty of body and mind these Virtues deserve to be set beside the series of the Liberal Arts executed for Frederick of Urbino which until recently have been ascribed to Justus of Ghent perhaps in collaboration with Melozzo da Forlì but in which it now appears that the Spaniard Pedro Berruguete may have had at least some share; and no higher praise could be found to bestow upon Bermejo's creations than such a confrontation. The partial resemblance is no mere chance. The technical basis in both series is skilled Flemish craft; and as the Italian atmosphere or Melozzo's collaboration enabled Frederick's painter to superimpose upon this foundation an Italian sensitiveness to feminine charm, so Bermejo's own nature supplied what was lacking to Spanish in comparison with Italiai appreciation of comeliness and inspired him to discard Flemish asperities and to exalt his allegorical ladies into nobly idealized types. The quality that stands forth first in the panel for mention is the Flemish basis to the style; but Bermejo has grasped all the secrets of Flemish technique in distinction from so many of his less gifted compatriots who were able to reproduce only some of its aspects and to present the accidents rather than the substance of the northern manner. It is not only that he has complete control over the use of oil, but, like Master Alfonso, he attains that full chiaroscuro of nature which was one of the most precocious conquests of the Flemings. The sections in which this pictorial mode are most plainly visible are the face of the saint and the lovely passages of painting in the white amice and alb at the points where their charmingly crumpled lines appear at the neck and at the bottom from beneath the outer vestments. Although the solid gilt of the throne was itself a convention, he has even cast realistic shadows over certain of its parts. The types of the attendant Virtues and the nude figure accompanying Fortitude reveal rather clearly one of the precise Flemish sources to which he is indebted, mediately or immediately, the manner of Roger van der Weyden (whether or not Bermejo was born early enough to have had adult contact with Roger himself). But his obligations to Jan van Eyck are perhaps quite as great. In his Spanish passion for magnificence, he was probably glad to have behind him the authority

BERMEJO

123

of the great Fleming for the extensive introduction and counterfeiting of jewelled embellishment of costumes, a proclivity that is not so evident in Roger van der Weyden and the school of Tournai. He avoids also Roger's brilliant contrasts of color and cultivates J a n van Eyck's chromatic sobriety. In the face of St. Dominic he reproduces the dead stare of the figures produced by the Van Eyck atelier. It is Flemish example that has inculcated an un-Spanish interest in the nude (since there is no apparent iconographie reason for depicting the rescued victim as naked rather than draped) and has turned Bermejo to a realistic, unidealized, and un-Italian rendering; but he has learned his lessons so intelligently that, instead of merely copying a Flemish prototype, he has superimposed upon the Roger van der Weyden canon a personal knowledge of the human form that bespeaks direct anatomical study. It is significant that in the contract of November 17, I477, for the sections of the retable other than this principal panel, Bermejo's patrons specify that he shall execute the nudes with his own hand. He quite rivals the best of the Belgians in the multiplication and exquisitely faithful definition of accessories. If we consider the amazingly executed Virtues as major elements in the composition, we have still to reckon with such lovingly elaborated details as the ornamental jewels, the saints on the orphrey of the cope, the second aggregation of holy personages simulating statuettes on the knop of the crosier, and the veil that hangs from the staff. He likes to display his Flemish expertness, carefully foreshortening the figures on the cope as they turn with its folds and making a point of the correct perspective of St. Dominic's left thumb. He is always fond of introducing pieces of light and transparent veiling, as on the crosier, and he excels in imitating their delicate texture, here cleverly giving the illusion of the orphrey and the staff dimly seen beneath the gauze. Other bits of similar light stuffs he has used upon the headdresses of Temperance and Prudence and upon the cross held by Faith. The contract of November 17, 1477, singles out for mention a "bridge of glass" already sketched by Bermejo in one of the panels that he is called upon to complete. It must have been another detail that his Flemish training had taught him affectionately to dwell upon, and it was apparently exe-

124

BERMEJO

cuted with such mastery that the mere allusion to it was enough to identify the panel. Cabré 1 believes that in the cope worn by St. Dominic Bermejo was copying a definitely existing vestment similar to such textiles, in the early Hispano-Flemish manner, as the embroidered retable from Burgo de Osma in the Chicago A r t Institute and an ecclesiastical fabric in the parish church of Puebla de Valverde (southeast of Teruel). Some of the saints do indeed resemble those represented in these stuffs, but others are pretty thoroughly modified into Bermejo's own peculiar translation of the Flemish idiom. He has used all the suggestions from the art of the Low Countries only as instruments by which to create something essentially and powerfully Spanish. In no respect does he derive his conceptions more truly from the very marrow of the indigenous religious attitude than in the representation of the saint as a monumental cult-image of the idol-like character dear to the Iberian heart and illustrated, for instance, by the statue of St. James over the high altar of Santiago de Compostela. T h e form of St. Dominic of Silos is exhibited in the baldest frontality, petrified into an august rigidity and literally oppressed by a ponderous opulence of ecclesiastical vestments that is meant to count as one of the factors in awing the worshippers. Nor is the Spanish indulgence in splendor confined to the principal effigy, but the Virtues are clad in sumptuous and heavy costumes, sometimes made more luxurious by Bermejo's fondness for fur trimmings or illumined, as in the tunic of Prudence or the mantle of Justice, by his own peculiarly delicious adaptation of Flemish red. Both the vestments of the Virtues and their gowns are thickly encrusted with jewels. As if all this were not enough, the figures and colors themselves are only like precious and variegated stones set in one great blaze of gold, shining forth from the solid auric expanse of the cope, the throne, and the background and glimmering with innumerable accented details. Bermejo, who gathers together and gives their most pronounced mediaeval expression to so many aspects of the Spanish aesthetic genius, here brings to its culmination, in painting, the native passion for magnificence, 1 El retablo bordado, de Don Pedro de Montoya, Obispo de Osma, Archivo es-pañol de arte y arqueología, V (1929), 12.

BERMEJO

125

capable, with his technical supremacy in oil, of embodying adequately the indigenous enthusiasm for enriched color and saying the last great word in the long tradition of gold backgrounds and accessories. Out of this gorgeousness there stares intensely forth the face of the saint, rendered with a vivid realism towards which, in former volumes, we have seen the characteristic Spanish stress upon the psychological delineation of the countenance gradually leading. Equipped with Flemish methods and guided by his own talent, Bermejo now perfects that perspicacious study of the visage of which Pedro Serra had only dreamed. The union of this extreme realism in detail with formality of general design and pomp of setting is likewise an outstanding trait of mediaeval Spanish art. The Sto. Domingo picture exhibits as yet no evidence of contact with Italy. T h a t Bermejo's pulse should have beat in such complete accord with the national heart may be considered one phase of his own individuality. The panel of Sto. Domingo de Silos, however, incorporates qualities even more personal. In the title to his work upon Bermejo, Tormo attaches to the painter's name the phrase, el más recio de los primitivos españoles, " t h e most vigorous of the Spanish primitives." A review of Spanish primitive painting does not reveal vigor as one of its definitive traits, and it may well be that Bermejo was the lustiest of his compatriots who in the early centuries devoted themselves to painting. But he does not manifest this trait by any means in all his works, although, when he cultivates instead a graceful elegance, he frequently modifies it by some details that emanate from his essential energy. T h e strong, hard features and penetrating eyes perhaps make the Sto. Domingo the most forceful of his creations, and one is therefore possibly justified in the opinion that he took on this robustness, which he does not manifest in the works that we shall eventually ascribe to a prior epoch in his career, from the temper of the province in which he was then laboring, Aragon, whose people are the most virile and rugged of the peninsula. It would in the end have been engrafted into him as a personal trait to which he later gave expression in such pictures as the Barcelona Pietà and particularly the Vich Christ. Certain of the minor devices by which we

126

BERMEJO

shall subsequently be able to recognize some of his undocumented works already declare themselves, for example, as in the Justice, the trick of catching up by some method the lower part of a gown for the sake of breaking the monotony of a continuously regular fall, for increasing the decorative Flemish puckering of the folds, and for making a line or mass to balance some other part of the composition. The character and the perfection of the technique agree in assigning to Bermejo's own hand a predella now in the sacristy of the Colegiata at Daroca; but although it was once in the church of Sto. Domingo de Silos, I am disposed to follow Tormo in rejecting a recognition as the predella of the retable of which the great panel in the Prado was the principal piece. Of its five compartments, the central one is occupied by the Resurrection (Fig. 32), and the others by four figures of saints. A t the extreme left kneels an aged and nude hermit, probably Onuphrius, who was so popular in Spain. The next saint, a bishop or abbot (Fig. 33), Tormo tentatively identifies with the prelate of Santiago de Compostela at the end of the tenth century (986-1000), Pedro de Mosoncio, because in the book that he holds is written the prayer, sometimes ascribed to him, the Salve regina,1 B u t many another saint might be depicted as reading this favorite prayer, like the donor in the Acqui altarpiece; and the evidence for believing that he was ever considered to be canonized is very slight. 2 Tormo carries no conviction in his reasons for abandoning another guess of his, St. Valerius, a patron-bishop of the see to which Daroca is attached, Saragossa. St. Valerius is sometimes represented apart from his more celebrated companion, St. Vincent, and might be conceived, as here, merely in the guise of a bishop without any indication of his prerogatives as a martyr. In the identification of St. Valerius Tormo is troubled also by what he believes to be a white monastic habit beneath the outer episcopal vestments, but the garment is in reality an alb. If the predella did not belong to the retable of the high altar, there is no intrinsic objection to the Spanish scholar's 1 His full name was Pedro Martinez de Mosoncio: see España Sagrada, XIX, 174 ff. The second part of his name he got from his monastery of Sta. Maria de Mosoncio, and the spelling of the last word has several variants, Tormo giving it as Mozonzo. As a monk, he would satisfy Tormo's desire to recognize the monastic habit, instead of the alb, in the white garment that underlies the vestments. 2 See the Bollandists under September 10, and España Sagrada, X I X , 184-185.

BERMEJO

127

third surmise, Sto. Domingo de Silos himself. T h e balance, however, would be tipped in favor of St. Valerius by the presence of a figure probably representing another episcopal saint of Saragossa, Braulius, as a pendant on the other side of the Resurrection. T o r m o does not believe that the inscription at the bottom of the panel naming St. Braulius is of the time of the painter, but in any case it would probably embody a sound old tradition. T h e Dominican habit and the attributes of the crown of thorns, radiant heart, and the lilies designate the saint in the compartment at the extreme right as Catherine of Siena; and her canonization in 1461 adds its evidence to the other factors to date the picture after this year. T o r m o ' s argument for discarding the theory that the predella was a part of the great altarpiece of Sto. D o m i n g o de Silos is that it is too small for the size of that structure as calculated from the contract and the dimensions of the existing panel in the P r a d o ; but this is a precarious mode of reasoning, for the painted section of a predella (as T o r m o himself acknowledges) might be set under only a section of a large retable. A more efficacious method of a t t a c k would h a v e been to point out that the existing predella does not conform with the prescriptions of the contract of 1474, which calls for a tabernacle of maqoneria or carving in relief at the centre of the predella flanked by two compartments containing ystorias, a word that on the face of it would imply sacred narrative. Since the subjects of these lateral compartments are not stated, we might possibly escape the difficulty of the ystorias b y forcing the term to mean here nothing more than effigies of saints, and the frames of the compartments accord well enough with the specifications for these details in the contract; but I do not see how to elude the fact that at the centre there is a painted Resurrection instead of a carved tabernacle. A forlorn hope would be the supposition that the program for the predella was altered, as sometimes happened in orders for altarpieces, during the course of the years of its construction, but, with the existing evidence, it is wiser to assume that B e r m e j o did a second (and smaller?) retable for the church of Sto. Domingo, of which the predella is the sole relic. I t betrays no traits that are not consonant with a dating in his Aragonese period during the seventies.

Fig. 32.

BERMEJO.

RESURRECTION, SECTION OF PREDELLA. COLEGIATA, DAROCA (Photo.

Mora)

FIG. 33.

BERMEJO.

EPISCOPAL SAINT, SECTION OF PREDELLA. COLEGIATA, DAROCA (Photo.

Mora)

I30

BERMEJO

The justness of the attribution to Bermejo is confirmed by the identity of craft and detail with these elements in his signed or documented works. The only other possible candidates for the honor, his Aragonese followers, Tomás Giner and Martín Bernât, are less skilled, particularly the latter, who is also broader and harsher. We find exactly the same highly individual and clear-headed adaptation of Flemish technique as in the panel of St. Dominic of Silos, and, because of the small proportions of the predella, an emphasis upon fineness and the miniature-like phase of his style. The master did not hand the predella over to an apprentice, nor did he follow his rivals' frequent practice of skimping the execution of this subordinate section of an altarpiece. The folds of St. Braulius's cope and of St. Catherine's habit exhibit his peculiar decorative accentuation of what was already in his Flemish models a stylization of crumpled draperies. The resurrected Christ is particularly a Van der Weyden type. Again he makes a display of his exquisite proficiency in the simulation of veilings — on the crosiers of the two episcopal saints but particularly in the shroud of Christ, wholly a transparent tissue interrupted by the insertions and edgings of lovely lace with which he frequently enlivens his gossamer passages. Of the two bishops, it is especially the anonymous one that is clothed in the jewelled and vested sumptuousness of the St. Dominic. In the less ritualistic predella, frontality is renounced, but all the incisive characterization of St. Dominic's head and more are lavished upon this seated prelate. Each of the saints is forcefully individualized, whether we direct our attention to the lean and ascetic fervor of the aged unidentified bishop, the understanding benignity of St. Braulius, or St. Catherine's tragic meditation upon the Passion. Our Lord and St. Braulius repeat the piercing intensity of gaze that is a characteristic of Bermejo's personages. The tonality of color approximates the sombre but mellow richness of the Barcelona Pietà. The predella affords him an opportunity, not provided by the ceremonious purpose of the Sto. Domingo panel, to display another side of his genius, his un-Spanish interest and ability in landscape. For the two enthroned episcopal saints he retains the gold backgrounds, but in the other three compartments he

BERMEJO

131

banishes even the golden skies and uses landscapes that more than prophesy the astounding attainments of his later works in this aspect of his art. They are like these later landscapes in that the rocks rise higher at the sides as a kind of frame and the broad and undulating intermediate valley stretches through a series of pictorial planes, with a mature mastery over lineal and aërial perspective, to the enchanting depth of Perugino or Raphael. In his realization of aërial perspective, indeed, Bermejo quite outdistances his Flemish prototypes. Nor do his landscapes, despite their spaciousness, resemble in their essential character those of the Umbrian school. They are composed less according to a formal scheme; they are less placid, less bathed in unadulterated light; and, built up of a greater number of interrupting hills and towns, they are less simple. They are so much in advance of their time that in some instances they curiously anticipate the accomplishments of the French and Italian landscapists of the seventeenth century. The landscapes of the Daroca predella are not yet so elaborate as Bermejo's subsequent efforts, but the background of the Resurrection has a certain wild quality that foretells Salvator Rosa. He has Jacomart's affection for the picturesqueness of Gothic towns in his settings, but the toy-like edifices of the Valencian master have grown with Bermejo to the stature of realistic structures. High campaniles are a passion with him, although we can no longer attribute to him the St. Catherine of Pisa and the steeples of Bruges in its background; a splendid specimen appears amidst the foliage just at the left of Christ's head in the Resurrection. The outlines of a towered city may be seen also behind the St. Catherine of the Daroca predella. In the extreme left distance of the Resurrection is a jutting and overhanging rock capped by buildings exactly as in the panel of the Madonna at Acqui — supererogatory proof for the attribution of the predella to Bermejo. Unless we are to suppose that he dispatched paintings to Aragon during his Catalan period or that he returned from Catalonia to Aragon late in life, 1 the subject of the panel at Fenway Court, Boston, would seem to compel an assignment to the present Aragonese group of works, although the picture 1

See above, p. n o .

132

BERMEJO

incorporates a somewhat diverse phase of Bermejo's style (Fig. 34). T h e nail held by the feminine saint who occupies the whole panel identifies her with virtual certainty as the local m a r t y r of Saragossa, Engracia (Latin, Engratia or E n c r a t i a ) , and, since she enjoyed little, if a n y , cult outside of A r a g o n , it follows that the painting must have been executed for a church of the city or, at least, province. Furthermore, the Sale C a t a logue 1 of the Somzée Collection at Brussels, in which the picture was once included, records a tradition that it was bought at Saragossa. St. Helen also sometimes has a nail as attribute; but she would not be entitled to the m a r t y r ' s palm that the figure of the Boston panel carries in her other hand, and she would scarcely be represented without also her most typical attribute, the cross. St. T h e o d u l a is customarily shown with her feet nailed to a cypress. St. F a u s t a of C y z i c u s and St. A u r e a of Paris likewise carry nails; but in face of the fact that there is a prominent Aragonese m a r t y r with the same attribute, Engracia, it is highly improbable that this Spanish picture should have represented, instead, either of these foreign canonized ladies. Another theory, however, in regard to the place where B e r m e j o painted the St. Engracia is possible. Inasmuch as the actual bodily form that she most resembles among his extant productions is the St. Michael, which comes from Valencian territory, they both m a y h a v e been created during a hypothetical sojourn at Valencia, perhaps between his A r a gonese and Catalan periods; and the St. Engracia would then have been sent from Valencia to an Aragonese church. T h e affinity with the St. M i c h a e l is incorporated even in the practically identical treatment of the gold background. In both pictures, according to the Valencian norm, it is tooled only at the edge of the panel, and the pattern consists in a broad band of oak foliage framed in narrower borders of the same motif. In the question of a Valencian origin, however, not too much stress should be laid on the character of the background, which is not absolutely confined to Valencian territory and crops forth in a work of B e r m e j o certainly done in Aragon, the retable of St. M a r t i n at Daroca. A l t h o u g h undocumented 1

II,

104.

and unsigned, the panel

bears,

Fig. 34.

BERMEJO.

ST. ENGRACIA. BOSTON

F E N W A Y COURT,

134

BERMEJO

written all over it, the seal of its authenticity as an outstanding example in the canon of Bermejo's unquestionable paintings; and the ascription is now unanimously conceded. T h e nearest analogues are the Virtues of the Sto. Domingo picture. The St. Engracia was once attributed to the anonymous follower of Bermejo who was created for the Prado picture, the " M a s t e r of Sto. Domingo de Silos," but as soon as the Prado picture was demonstrated by document to be a production of Bermejo himself, it inevitably carried the Boston panel along with it into glory. St. Engracia's attire is of exactly the same fashion and of exactly the same tonality in color as the costumes of the Virtues, except that now for a large cult-image (perhaps a lateral panel of a retable) its magnificence is increased to the point of the fastidious. As in the case of the Charity, the orphreys of her cope are enriched with a border of pearls, and she stretches forth from under her draperies a shoe like that displayed by Hope, except that its wooden sole is embellished with the as yet unelucidated letters I(or T?) R F (or E?) M NOV. Bermejo employs similar enigmatical Roman capitals in several other instances, as, for example, to embellish the hem of Faith's cope in the Sto. Domingo panel. It is possible that he did not hide within such letters any cipher or intend them to be aught but pleasantly decorative; but when we consider the passion of the Middle Ages for cryptograms and the occult and recall the frequent instances in which critics have eventually discovered definite meaning in what they had thought mere ornamentation or genre in mediaeval art and literature, we must pause before admitting categorically that we shall never be able to read sense into Bermejo's various jumbles of Roman capitals. 1 Other painters Spanish and foreign, for example the Master of Flémalle, have the habit of introducing similar, as yet inexplicable groups of letters. It is to be remembered, furthermore, that, when Bermejo employs Hebrew inscriptions, in two cases they are capable of interpretation. St. Engracia's costume is enriched beyond the standard of the Virtues by the addition of a pompous necklace; and the pretentious headdress that was then the feminine mode is elabo1 For a quite impossible interpretation of the letters, see the above-mentioned Catalogue of the Somzée Collection, II, 104.

BERMEJO

135

rated into an object of ostentatious prinking. Her crown, ending in fleurs-de-lis, is of a type peculiarly affected by Bermejo, here more opulent than the specimens adorning some of the Virtues. The piece of transparent tissue that partly constitutes the coiffure concludes in one of his capricious decorative whirls, a second instance of which is found in the lower section of her gown, caught up by her left hand. This hand is lightly veiled by another bit of his favorite gauzes. T h e throne against which it is not certain whether she is standing or sitting is inlaid with gold or ivory like the chairs of the episcopal saints in the Daroca predella. Her halo of embossed rings, the usual type in the second half of the fifteenth century in Aragon and Catalonia, also appears in this predella, whereas Bermejo more frequently constructs his haloes of rays. T h e tonality is a mellow harmony of greens, dark blues, and browns. A recent cleaning has brought out clearly, as lining to the blue cope and as the material of the spreading collar, a lighter fabric of a captivating green brocaded with a foliate motif. Despite the analogies to the Virtues and to certain other works of Bermejo, it is clear that the St. Engracia differs somewhat from the manner of the rest of his Aragonese productions. It embodies another aspect of his style in which his interest is in a kind of languid grace. It has often been pointed out that the closest parallel to this aspect is the London St. Michael. In both of these pieces Bermejo goes further in a dependence upon Roger van der Weyden and adopts even his attenuated canon of the human form. T h e Virtues of the Prado panel have sturdier physiques, except the Faith who is the nearest, among the allegorical figures, to a sister of the St. Engracia. The mannered elegance is offset by, or (it should rather be said) pleasantly combined with, the monumentality which the Spaniards usually sought and which is here obtained by the heavy richness of the gown, the broad spread of the cope, the general sumptuousness, and the formality of the whole design. There is, however, one queer anomaly in the picture: only the background, halo, and perhaps the inlay of the throne are rendered in real gilt, and, possibly because his patron's funds ran out, in the brocade of St. Engracia's gown, in the orphreys of her cope, in her crown, and in other details where the Spanish custom

136

BERMEJO

would demand gold, the burnished metal is merely simulated in paint. Y e t the substitution of yellow or brownish pigment for gold is not an infrequent phenomenon in Hispano-Flemish art, as is witnessed by other productions of Bermejo and by the practice of Fernando Gallego. T h e fact that the St. Michael (Fig. 35) falls exactly within this subdivision of Bermejo's style would virtually date it in the same period; but the divergence between the St. Dominic and the St. Engracia betrays how his manner may vary somewhat at the same moment, and, in the biography of Bermejo that I have attempted above, it has been seen to be impossible to determine whether the panel was sent from Aragon to T o u s in the province of Valencia or whether after his sojourn in Aragon he spent an interval at Valencia before establishing himself at Barcelona. Mayer, for no reason that is apparent to me, wishes to believe that it was painted before the St. Engracia. N o evidence is at hand to indicate whether it was the centre of a retable that has lost the lateral sections or constituted, as a single panel, a whole altarpiece. Tormo points out that its narrowness might suggest that it was one of two panels at the centre of a retable according to the frequent custom of combining a pair of saints for honor; but I cannot see, with him, that this possibility is forestalled by the fact that the design of the gold background is complete in itself, since each panel might have been treated as a separate unit. Bermejo's debt to Flanders and specifically to Roger van der Weyden is more frankly confessed than in any other of his mature works. He employs not only Roger's slim and elongated canon of the body, as in the St. Engracia, but also his oval shape of the countenance framed in symmetrical shocks of curly hair at either side that curiously resemble the modern " b o b . " Roger's angels, when they are large figures and not the diminutive shapes so characteristic of Flemish painting, are very similar, for instance in the picture of the dream of Pope Sergius in the Friedsam Collection of the Metropolitan Museum, New Y o r k . The Gabriel in the Annunciation in the Metropolitan Museum even wears a cross upon his head exactly like that of the St. Michael; but this motif is used by the Van Eycks in the Ghent altarpiece and is, indeed, rather a commonplace of the Middle

Fig. 35.

BERMEJO. ST. MICHAEL. COLLECTION OF LADY LUDLOW, LONDON

138

BERMEJO

Ages. I f we must seek a derivation for Bermejo's cross elsewhere than in the general mediaeval property-room, it would be quite as reasonable to discover it on the angel of Pedro de Cordoba's Annunciation. T h e kneeling donor is finely painted in the manner of Roger's portraits, such as that of Froimont in the Brussels Gallery, and y e t in this instance B e r m e j o almost surely was thinking in terms of Dierick Bouts. T h e high cap creates w h a t might seem a merely superficial resemblance to his figures, but the more one examines the donor and especially his very lean body, the more one feels that B e r m e j o had profitably studied Bouts's achievements. M u c h has been made, by critics, of St. Michael's round shield, with its hemispherical centre, in this case manifestly of crystal rather than of metal polished to the point of constituting a mirror. Some have wished to prove thereby a connection with Juan N ú ñ e z of Seville, but our discussion of this master has demonstrated that the mere evidence of the shield does not j u s t i f y the assumption of the relationship. 1 I t must be remembered that one of the R o m a n soldiers in Bermejo's earlier work, the Resurrection in the M u s e o de la Ciudadela, Barcelona, wields a crystal-centred shield. T h e delightfully rendered buckler of St. Michael is only one of m a n y details painted with all the meticulous b e a u t y of the v e r y greatest Flemings and with the opulence of the Spaniards, for instance the pearls on the orphreys, on the morse of the cope, and even at the ankles and wrists upon the armor. B e r m e j o has taken obvious pleasure in the painstaking and little less than miraculous simulation of the armor itself, representing it as of gold and achieving the success of the D u t c h artists of the seventeenth century in exquisitely depicting one of his Gothic castles as reflected in the piece of the corselet j u s t above the waist. T h e book and its letters, which spell the beginning of the Miserere, not only are rendered w i t h Flemish scrupulousness, but are treated with so affectionate a touch as to suggest that he m a y h a v e once had something to do with illumination. N o less lovely and no less reminiscent of the miniatures are the flowers on the ground at the front of the panel and behind at the edge of the gold, all delightfully differentiated with accurate botanical lore. 1

See above, pp. 29-30.

BERMEJO

139

Bouchot has ferreted out a fairly close compositional analogue to Bermejo's St. Michael in that one of the three renderings of the subject by the German engraver, the Master E. S., which is numbered 153 in Lehrs's Catalogue. 1 The gesture of the right arm with the sword and particularly the broad flight of the cope are the most striking parallelisms; and the archangel's brow is even surmounted by a cross. Much of the rest, nevertheless, is very different •— for instance, the type, the shield, and the striding posture instead of the fine effect of soaring in the Spanish example. Bermejo may conceivably have seen the print of the Master E. S.; but in view of the general similitude between representations of St. Michael in European art of the fifteenth century, the resemblances may be accidental and are certainly not near enough to support Bouchot's surmises that Bermejo underwent any significant Teutonic influence or that he may have been a German residing in Cordova. The assignment of the signature to a detached bit of paper, painted in at the bottom of the picture, in this and the Acqui panel has been taken as evidence that Bermejo was familiar with Italian art. The custom is certainly not Spanish, for the mediaeval painters of the Iberian peninsula, when they signed, simply wrote the inscription across the base of a panel or of the frame. Juan Rexach signs the Cubélls retable with a slip of white spread over the pavement at the bottom of the principal panel, but it is not so obviously intended to simulate a piece of paper; and in any case, a knowledge of Italian art, perhaps through the medium of Jacomart, is not absolutely to be excluded in Rexach's instance. Likewise the patch of white upon which Nicolás Solana 2 sets his signature does not resemble paper. Unless we are willing to suppose that Bermejo could have invented for himself the Italian mode of authenticating a work, we are forced into the belief that he had caught the idea from the precedent of the sister peninsula. The St. Michael, however, reveals no other and no significant elements derived from Italy. 1 M . Lehrs, Geschichte und kritischer Katalog des deutschen, niederländischen und französischen Kupferstichs im XV. Jahrhundert, JI (Vienna, 1910), 221. 1 See below, p. 306

ι4ο

BERMEJO

Once more his sources are merely themes that he has reinterpreted and harmonized into a tone-poem that is triumphantly both Spanish and personal. No detail illustrates this quality more clearly than the glorious expanse of St. Michael's cope. Its decorative crumpling is suggested by Flemish practice, but, according to the greater Spanish stress upon formal design, the mannerism is accentuated and the fabric is stretched across the whole panel as a splendid diagonal broadly outspread in a complicated and schematized mesh of broken folds calculated to create in the composition an impressive mass of contrasting lights and shadows and to enable the artist to display his Flemish proficiency in the exquisite gradation of colors. Indeed, I do not know where to go in European painting of the fifteenth century to find a passage in which design, technical supremacy, and free-spirited largeness of feeling are so masterfully united. For the pride and boldness of this dilated drapery is one of the factors that counteract the languor of the style learned from Roger van der Weyden and embody Bermejo's vigor. The grand and powerful gesture of the arm that swings the sword likewise contributes to the effect of strength. Even the dragon, conceived as if by the terrible modern imagination of a creator of relentless robots, has a Spanish fierceness about him. He has the same mouth, teeth, and eyes as the specimen with Fortitude in the Sto. Domingo panel; and the vividness of the Iberian imagination, when applied to the gruesome, here surpasses even the drastic norm of mediaeval grotesquerie, constructing the upper parts of the monster's arms and legs from snakes, making elbows of their mouths, from which issue hideous claws in lieu of the beast's hands and feet, and causing another slimy serpent to crawl forth from a cleft in the infernal armor. With the marked Spanish emphasis upon geometry of composition that distinguishes the whole picture, the sword imposingly repeats the diagonal of the cope, and the line from the hands through the cap of the donor reiterates the same obliquity on the other side, so that the main diagonal is framed in two lesser diagonals. To the pronounced movement towards the left thus created the curve beginning in the demon's body and continuing through the form of the archangel makes a proper balance in the other direction. In a book of the present

BERMEJO

141

dimensions we cannot attempt to exhaust the many subtleties of the composition, for it would be hard to discover another picture of the period in which the conscious artistic purpose of the author is so apparent. The scheme of color is also essentially Spanish: it incorporates a transmutation of the pure brightness of the school of Tournai into a rich but sober vibration of red, green, and grey. In the lining of the archangel's mantle, the red is dulled to an entrancing shade of rose, and the donor's dignity, as in the works of Velázquez, is enhanced by the aristocratic restraint of the solid grey brocade in which he is clad. The only passage in the picture where actual gold is admitted is in combination with the green in the brocade on the exterior of St. Michael's mantle; the purpose was probably to relieve the chastity of the chromatic harmony and to increase the effect of noble opulence. The Pietà that once belonged to Don Eduardo Bartuf of Madrid and is now in the collection of Don Miguel Mateu in the castle at Peralada, northeast of Figueras (Fig. 36), is demonstrated by internal evidence to belong to the canon of Bermejo's authentic works, and, in the absence of any other data, its alleged provenience from Valencia may be taken as a pretext for assigning it to his hypothetical Valencian period. T h e stage of his artistic development incorporated in the panel does not seriously disaccord with an alignment beside the St. Michael, if we may suppose that he resided at Valencia in order to execute the Tous picture. Certainly the Peralada Pietà signalizes a moment in his career prior to the Acqui Madonna and the paintings that he did in Catalonia, and yet the style appears to be more mature than that which he exhibits in the productions out of which we shall subsequently construct for him a presumptive early period anterior to his documented sojourn in Aragon, the Berlin Dormition and the four panels supposed to have come from Guatemala. The style and types resemble those of these four panels so closely that opportunity is provided for a comparison which plainly suggests a later date for the Peralada picture (although Mayer, in the Spanish edition of his Geschichte, for what reason I do not know, asserts the Pietà to have been a part of the same retable with these panels). On the other hand the nature of the forms and physiques is

142

BERMEJO

perhaps less developed than in the Daroca predella; and if such be really the case, one might resort to the theory that Bermejo painted the picture at the very end of his presumptive early period. It must be remembered also that the Peralada panel is united to the works of this assumed early period by the use of Hebrew inscriptions. The subject is not strictly a Pietà, for Christ is represented as alive, although He sits upon His tomb in the virtual nudity of the Crucifixion exhibiting the wounds in His hands, feet, and side and although He is supported by two angels. Tormo guesses that the panel may have once constituted the centre of a predella. Despite the repaint, the evidence for the attribution to Bermejo is manifold. The Christ, with His halo of rays and of fleurs-de-lis set in a cruciform arrangement, is a pristine version of the dead Saviour in the great Barcelona Pietà. The navel and the wrinkled flesh above it are rendered in exactly the same way as at Barcelona; and in the form of Our Lord Bermejo continues that un-Spanish preoccupation with the nude which we have observed in the figure accompanying Fortitude in the Sto. Domingo panel. The angels, perhaps more like those of the Master of Flémalle and Roger van der Weyden than like those of Jan van Eyck, are sorrow-stricken repetitions of the angelic types in the so-called Central American panels. A tragic glumness, indeed, even beyond that occasioned by the theme, overhangs the picture and is itself witness to the presence of Bermejo's temper; but neither here nor elsewhere, until his Catalan period, is he able to surpass his Flemish teachers by making much more of the expression of sorrow than a grimace. The panel is crammed with examples of his Flemish-taught delight in the meticulous and illusory rendering of detail. In addition to the white loin-cloth the angels hold lightly about the Saviour's abdomen a scarf of Bermejo's favorite transparent veiling interwoven with passages of lace. Tears are painted so as to counterfeit actuality. The jewels on the angel's vestments vie with those of the Sto. Domingo panel in fineness of delineation. Above all, the supremely painted chalice in the right foreground, richly encrusted with precious stones, reveals the illuminator's phase of Bermejo's craft at its highest. The red velvet fabric of the dalmatic of the angel at the right is like-

FIG. 36. BERMEJO.

PIETÀ.

COLLECTION OF DON MIGUEL MATEU, PERALADA (From Tormo s

"Bermejo")

144

BERMEJO

wise a triumph of his skill, and the whole panel is suffused with a rich brown tonality highly typical of the master. T h e strip of pavement upon which Christ's feet rest contains a characteristic series of his enigmatical Roman capitals: o(?) ν aq(?) . . . . M(aquam?) e d n b i iq. The Hebrew inscription on the sarcophagus, however, has been read as: " Y e shall

FIG. 3J.

BERMEJO.

PIETÀ.

CATHEDRAL, BARCELONA

f Photo. Arxiu d'Arqueología

Catalana )

(or, thou shalt) hope for life in my death; perfection ye have commended." T h e picture, as a whole, adds little either to our knowledge or to our appreciation of Bermejo. T h e dated Pietà of 1490 (Fig. 37) and the other works that can be securely set in Bermejo's Barcelona period reveal an advance towards the mature style of the Cinquecento that is little less than astounding and recalls the broad interval that

BERMEJO

145

separates Huguet's retable of St. Augustine from his earlier creations. The paintings of Bermejo that we have hitherto considered, despite their mastery, continue to be bound within the limits of the primitive; in the Pietà, he has almost passed, with Leonardo, into the fuller reproduction of nature, with fewer primitive eliminations, that denotes the dawn of modern art. His Flemish origins are still unmistakable in the composition and types of the central group and in his technical methods. The Virgin's blue mantle still spreads forth in one of the triangular expanses so much affected by the Belgians and especially by J a n van Eyck and the Master of Flémalle. For her tunic he uses again his favorite trimming of fur, but upon the border of her mantle he has lavished all his Flemish pictorial science, adorning it with a delicately limned pattern of gold that contrasts with the garish, gilded splurges that were only too common in the Catalan art by which he was surrounded. He has even retained reminiscences of the fondness of the Low Countries for the multiplication and careful definition of small details. He has suggested " t h e place of a skull" by the bones to the Virgin's right, among which crawls a snake. On the ground above the bones another serpent is slinking into the crevice of a rock; a lizard is seen further to the right; but the repulsiveness of the creeping animals is counteracted by the presence of many butterflies. A larger lizard is seeking refuge under a stone in the lower right corner, and the foreground is also occupied by a snail, additional butterflies, and flowers (Fig. 38). To the right of the donor a bird is perched upon another rock, and a flight of feathered creatures sweeps across the clouds behind the cross. With Flemish realism St. Jerome (Fig. 39) is depicted as disfigured by a several days' growth of white beard, and the book that he holds is featured like that of the donor of the St. Michael. As in the case of St. Michael's buckler, it has already been seen 1 that the compositional resemblances of the central group to the panel by Juan Núñez and the constituents of the landscape will not quite bear the burden of a theory of dependence upon the Sevillian master. Yet, whatever his sources, Bermejo has transcended them and employed them as stepping-stones to the broader manner of 1

Cf. above, pp. 29-30.

< Ζ O

ω J

Υ

oí < a HJ

«< Χ y a a ΕO H κ χ g ft—ι 2 •χ

H * W S S < 173. !93> 231-234*. Soler y March Collection, antependium of St. Victoria, 239, 242. retable by Borrassá, 296. Romanesque fragments, 238-239. Barranco de San Juan, retable by Domingo Vails, 293-295*. Bellcaire, Romanesque frescoes, 237-238. Belorado, Hispano-Flemish panels, 332, 334· Berlanga de Duero, retable by Luna Mast e r ^ ) , 334-339*· Berlin, Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Dormition by Bermejo, 141, 168-173*, 179, 180, 181, 187, 190, 193, 195, 201, 214, 220, 224, 226. Kaufmann Collection, Agony in Garden by Coffermans, 70. Bilbao, Museum, Deposition by J u a n Sánchez II(?), 1920*, 25. Valencian Salvator Mundi, 284. Boston, Fenway Court, St. Engracia by Bermejo, m , 131-136*, 160, 165, 179, 196, 201, 215, 221, 224, 225, 234· Bruii, San Martin del, Romanesque frescoes, 237, 238. Budapest, Museum, Entombment by Pedro Sánchez I, 5-7*, 8 , 1 0 , 1 1 , 1 2 , 231. Burgo de Osma, cathedral, sections of Valencian retable, 284, 287*. Cambridge (England), Fitzwilliam Museum, Mass of St. Gregory, 326. Via Dolorosa by Antón and Diego Sánchez, 12-18*, 68.

INDEX OF PLACES

354

Cambridge (Mass.), F o g g M u s e u m ,

Meersmann

Purification from retable of the R e y e s Católicos, 182, 194.

Collection,

panels

from

Villalobos, 321-322*. Provincial M u s e u m , Virgin o f the R o s e ,

section of predella b y Borrassá, 2 6 1 264.

26. P u e r t a de E l v i r a , V i r g i n o f M e r c y , 26.

C a n a p o s t , retable, 101, 102.

S. J u a n de los R e y e s , P i e t à , 25-26, 29.

C a r m o n a , church of Salvator M u n d i , reIglesuela del C i d , fragments o f retable,

table of St. T h o m a s , 54-55. C a s c a n t e , retable b y P e d r o D i a z , 338— C h i c a g o , A r t Institute, Hispano-Flemish M a d o n n a , 230-232*. Chiva

de

295. I n c a , M a d o n n a by D a u r e r , 298.

341*·

Morella,

Transfiguration

by

D o m i n g o Vails, 295.

L e o n , cathedral, retable of high altar by

Cordova, cathedral, Annunciation b y P e d r o de C o r d o b a , 32, 60-64*, 69, 98, 138, 216, 217. church of Santiago, Assumption, 70-72, 230. Provincial M u s e u m , panel of St. Nicholas, 6 9 - 7 1 * .

N i c o l á s Francés, 162. Lille, G a l l e r y , Apostles by P e d r o Serra(?), 252-256*. Lisbon, M u s e u m , L a m e n t a t i o n by Bartolomé R u i z ,

72-

78*, 216. St. A n n e , V i r g i n , and Child, C a t a l a n school of fourteenth century, 252. triptych by M a s t e r of St. George, 276-

D a r o c a , Colegiata, Bermejo,

142, 147, 148,

Solana, 309-310*. L a n g a , retable, 304.

C i u d a d R o d r i g o : see R i c h m o n d .

predella b y

K a n s a s C i t y (Missouri), angel by Nicolás

126-131*,

15 o » 1

5 > 6

ï 6 i

135,

> 179»

180, 187, 193, 197, 201, 224, 226. retable o f S t . M a r t i n , m ,

132,188,193,

195-203*, 212, 221, 224, 248, 250. Dijon, M u s e u m , Aragonese consecration of an

277. London, Collection of Richard H o l m e s , veronica of Flemish school, 1 5 6 - 1 5 8 . T o m a s Harris Collection, Crucifixion b y Cirera (?), 276. P i e t à , school o f Seville, 1 1 - 1 3 * , 29, 52'

episcopal saint, 212. Palais de Justice, E c c e H o m o , 158, 212. D o r t m u n d , C r e m e r Collection, Dormition by Coffermans, 72.

L a d y L u d l o w ' s Collection, St. Michael by B e r m e j o , 29, 30, 49, 106, 110, m ,

! 3 2 , 135. 1 3 6 - 1 4 1 * , 145»

J 47,

160, 161, 168, 179, 180, 201, 204, Edinburgh,

National

Gallery,

St.

Mi-

chael, 290.

205, 215, 221, 223, 225. Victoria and A l b e r t M u s e u m , retable by

Estella, retable b y Juan de L e v i , 304.

M a r z a l de Sas, 282. Madrid,

G a r r a y , Hispano-Flemish paintings, 342. Gerona, private collection, Crucifixion b y G e r a r d o Gener(?), 270-271*.

tion of school of Seville, 46.

cathedral, E p i p h a n y and veronica by i8î,

184-195*, 206, 2 1 3 , 220, 226, 230. Escuelas Pías, P i e t à b y Francisco C h a cón, 25.

and E p i p h a n y , 24. Exposición Histórico-Europea, Assump-

Granada, B e r m e j o , 8, 110, 158, 173,

A l b a Collection, panel of A n n u n c i a t i o n

Garnelo Collection, M a s s of St. Grego r y , 326. Instituto de V a l e n c i a de D o n

Juan,

E p i p h a n y b y N i c o l á s Solana, 306, 307. 308, 310·

INDEX OF PLACES M a d r i d {coni.)

Manresa, Sta. María,

Lázaro Collection,

r e t a b l e b y J a i m e C a b r e r a , 260.

Aragonese panels of episcopal saints, 212, 213.

retable b y P e d r o Serra, 106, 252. M a r e ñ á , R o m a n e s q u e frescoes, 237.

Crucifix and saints b y P e d r o Sánchez I , 1 0 - 1 1 * , 12.

Moguer, Sta. Clara, L a s t S u p p e r , 32.

Parcent Collection,

M a d o n n a o f P o m e g r a n a t e , 58-59*.

A r a g o n e s e p a n e l s o f Sts. L u c y

and

p a i n t e d d o o r s , school of S e v i l l e , 3 1 - 3 5 * ,

A g a t h a , 212, 213. copies o f B e r m e j o ' s w o r k s , 1 1 4 , 178, 1 8 0 - 1 8 4 * , 194, 2 1 2 , 2 1 3 , 2 1 7 , 220,

56, 68. M u n i c h , Galerie Heinemann, Crucifixion b y P e d r o S á n c h e z I , 8 - 1 0 * , 228.

221. panel from Villalobos, 321. p a n e l o f the m e e t i n g o f S t . B e r n a r d a n d the D u k e o f A q u i t a i n e , 2 1 2 . panels by Jaime L a n a ( ? ) , 212, 213. Prado, M a d o n n a b y B e r m e j o (?), 103, 106, 187, 203-205*, 206, 230.

Naples,

Museum,

St.

Adrian

wrongly

a s c r i b e d to B e r m e j o , 223. New York, A n d e r s o n G a l l e r i e s , V i r g e n del P ó p u l o , 228-230*, 231. Borchard Collection, St. Bartholomew from Villalobos, 321-323*.

M a g d a l e n e b y C o f f e r m a n s , 72. retable by Master of Arguis, 280,310,

French

retable of Sts. Sebastian and Nicasius, 248.

Company,

Circumcision

cos, 182, 194. S a t t e r w h i t e C o l l e c t i o n , sections of retable o f the R e y e s C a t ó l i c o s , 182,

S t . M i c h a e l f r o m Z a f r a , 30, 4 6 - 5 0 * , 334·

and

f r o m r e t a b l e o f the R e y e s C a t ó l i -

3T2.

194. Jesse I. S t r a u s C o l l e c t i o n , predella o f

S t o . D o m i n g o de Silos b y B e r m e j o , 97,

355

io3>

107» 108» m ,

u

3>

school o f O ñ a , 3 3 1 * .

"5-

126*, 127, 130, 134, 135, 136, 140,

O ñ a , p a n e l s f r o m E r m i t a de S. V í t o r e s ,

142, 154, 160, 170, 1 7 9 , 182, 184, 187, 196, 197, 200, 202, 204, 2 1 2 , 2 1 5 , 220, 2 2 1 , 222, 224, 226, 234.

332-335* Osormort, San Saturnino de, Romanesque frescoes, 237, 238.

t r i p t y c h b y C o f f e r m a n s , 72. veronica of Flemish school, 156-158. veronica

of S p a n i s h

school o f

six-

teenth century, 157-158.

cathedral,

p a n e l s b y J u a n de F l a n d e s , 324. p o r t r a i t s o f I s a b e l l a , 205-208*, 230. R a i m u n d o R u i z Collection, Virgen del P ó p u l o , 2 1 3 , 228-230, 231. Santillana Collection, retable by Jorge I n g l é s , 46. Schlayer Collection, M a s s of St. Grego r y b y F e r n a n d o G a l l e g o , 326. Weibel Collection, Pietà by Fernando M a j o r c a , Cirera Collection, fragment of school

m a r t y r d o m o f S t . S e b a s t i a n b y the Burgos Master, 328-331*. r e t a b l e o f S t . P a u l , 296. retable of Sts. M a t t h e w and Francis, 296. M u s e o Arqueológico (Luliano), C o r o n a t i o n b y D a u r e r (?), 298. p r e d e l l a o f Sts. W i l l i a m a n d H e l e n , 296-298, 301*.

G a l l e g o , 28.

260*.

326. Palma,

Royal Palace,

predella,

Palencia, cathedral, retable of Visitation,

of

Serras,

257-

S t . J a m e s b y D a u r e r (?), 298. v e r o n i c a , 8. S t a . E u l a l i a , S a v i o u r b y C o m e s (?), 298.

INDEX OF PLACES

356

Palm Beach, Willys Collection, sections of retable of the Reyes Católicos, 182, 194.

Paris, Chalandon Collection, Mass

of

St.

Gregory, 324-327*.

Demotte Collection, Presentation of Virgin, 278-280*, 300. Louvre, panels by Master of St. George, 276. sections of Valencian retable, 284, 286.

Pacully Collection, Christ's farewell to the Virgin, ascribed to Pedro de Cordoba, 64-66.

Párraces, frescoes, 321. Peñafiel, retables, 280. Peralada, Mateu Collection, Pietà by Bermejo, m , 141-144*, 195, 225. Philadelphia, Johnson Collection, panels by Marzal de Sas, 282. Pisa, Gallery, altarpiece of St. Catherine by Master of the St. Lucy Legend and others, i n , 131, 208-212, 214. Port Sunlight, Nativity of the Virgin, 278-280*, 3C0. Puig, El, Entombment, 108. Retascón, retable, 278, 280, 300-302*. Richmond (England), Cook Collection, retable from Ciudad Rodrigo, school of Fernando Gallego, 15. Rodenas, Valencian retable, 284-289*, 291. Salamanca, Old Cathedral, retable by Juan de Flandes, 30, 213, 324. Provincial Museum, St. Andrew by Juan de Flandes, 324-325*. University, predella by Juan de Flandes, 324. San Lorenzo de Morúnys, retable by Cirera (?), 276. retable of Pentecost, 252, 260. Sanlúcar de Barrameda, Collection of Don Alfonso de Orléans, retable of Passion, 22-24*, 25, 29. Iglesia de la Caridad, works by Juan Núñez II, 30.

San Sebastián de Montmajor, retable, 248-250*.

Santiponce, S. Isidoro del Campo, Panteón, Madonna and saints ascribed to Juan Sánchez de Castro, 41-43*. Patio de los Evangelistas, frescoes, 38, 41, 42, 44, 52> 317, 32°· Patio de los Muertos, fresco of Annunciation, 39-41. Saragossa, Archiépiscopal Palace, panels of paired saints, 213. Museum, panels by Jaime Serra, 190. De Pano Collection, Virgen de la Leche, 212.

S. Miguel, retable of St. Quiteña, 312. Santo Sepulcro, retable by Jaime Serra, 252. retable of Sts. Fabian, Sebastian, and Genesius, 312. Segorbe, Iglesia de la Sangre, Spanish adaptation of Colantonio's St. Vincent Ferrer, 223. Seville, cathedral, Crucifixion by Juan Sánchez II, 1820*, 25, 40. Dormi tion by Coffermans, 72-73*. panel of St. Peter, 50. Pietà by Juan Núñez, 12, 25, 27-30*, 219.

Virgen de Gracia by Juan Sánchez de Castro, 36-39*, 41, 42, 44, 46, 5 2 · Collection of the Conde de las Torres de Sánchez-Dalp, Salvator Mundi by Juan Sánchez de Castro, 8, 39. Municipal Archaeological Museum, painting by Pedro Sánchez I I , 5 5 58*.

Pickman Collection, Nativity by Pedro Fernández de Córdoba, 32, 35, 40, 6S-69*, 76, 98> 2 Ι 7 · private collection, Dormi tion of circle of Juan Sánchez II (?), 20-22*. Provincial Museum, retable of the Military Orders, 5054*. St. Matthew from Santiponce, 38. S. Julián, fresco of St. Christopher by Juan Sánchez de Castro, 36,39, 50.

INDEX OF PLACES Sigüenza, cathedral, retable of Sts. Mark and Catherine, 48, 334, 338. Sitges, retable of school of Serras, 260. Soria, S. Juan de Rabanera,

Franco-

Gothic fresco, 247. Sotillo de Rioja, Hispano-Flemish panels, 332-336*. Tarazona, cathedral, retable by Bernat, 181, 182, 184. retable by Pedro Diaz, 340. retable by Juan de Levi, 304. Tardienta, retable by Master of Arguis, 310. Tarragona, cathedral, Franco-Gothic frescoes, 239-242*. Italo-Gothic frescoes, 260-261. retable of St. Bartholomew, 250. Diocesan Museum, retable of St. Bartholomew, school of Jaime Serra, 255-256*. Tarrasa, Franco-Gothic frescoes, 239. panels by Borrassá, 261. retable by Huguet, 86. T e j a d a , retable, 331. Teruel, cathedral, Virgin of Mercy, 313-315*. Episcopal Palace, Valencian Sts. Michael and Catherine, 286-290*, 316. Virgin of Mercy, 115, 313-316*. Toledo, cathedral, retable of Mozarabic Chapel, 77. Torralbilla, retable, 312-313. Tudela, cathedral, retable by Pedro Diaz, 340. retable by Juan de Levi, 304. Turin, Gualino Collection, Romanesque antependium, 238.

357

Valencia, cathedral, Incredulity of St. Thomas by Marzal de Sas, 282. Sts. Martha and Clement by Gerardo Gener and Gonzalo Pérez (?), 266, 267. Provincial Museum, panel of Sts. Francis and Catherine, 286, 290. panels of life of St. Martin, 292. predella in Valencian Germanic manner, 282. retable of Holy Cross, 280-282. retable of Virgen de la Leche, 282. triptych of St. Martin, 292. Vich, Abadal Collection, Crucificion Pedro Serra, 252-253*.

by

Museum, Christ before Pilate by Pedro Serra (?), 257. Crucifixion by Cirera (?), 276-277*. fragment of enthroned St. Andrew by Borrassá, 264. fragments of retable from Gurb by Borrassá, 264. panels by Juan de Levi, 302-304*. panels from Ferrerons by Cirera, 276. predella from Seva by Borrassá, 264. retable by Master of Albatárrech, 256-258*. Salvator Mundi of sixteenth century, 157· veronica by Bermejo, 8, 109, 125, 154-158*, 187, 188, 194, 226. Vienna, Ouroussoff Collection, section of Valencian retable of St. Michael, 291-292*. Villarreal, Spanish adaptation of Colantonio's St. Vincent Ferrer, 223. Vilovi, retable of St. Margaret, 242-244*, 246.