A History of Spanish Painting. Volume XIV A History of Spanish Painting, Volume XIV: The Later Renaissance in Castile [Reprint 2014 ed.] 9780674422179, 9780674422155

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HARVARD-RADCLIFFE FINE ARTS SERIES

A HISTORY OF SPANISH P A I N T I N G VOLUME XIV

A HISTORY OF SPANISH PAINTING BY

CHANDLER RATHFON POST HARVARD UNIVERSITY

VOLUME XIV THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN CASTILE

EDITED BY

HAROLD E. WETHEY

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1966

©

COPYRIGHT

I966

BY T H E PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE A L L RIGHTS RESERVED

Distributed in Great Britain by OXFORD U N I V E R S I T Y PRESS LONDON

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD N U M B E R 3 0 — 7 7 7 6 P R I N T E D IN T H E U N I T E D STATES OF AMERICA

PREFACE Volumes X I I I and X I V bring to a close Professor Post's invaluable work, A History of Spanish Painting., which begins with the earliest traces of medieval frescoes (Volume I ) , and now ends with the Spanish Renaissance in the middle of the sixteenth century. At the time of his death on November 2, 1959, the material included in Volume X I I I and Appendix had been typed in readiness to go to the publisher. A considerable quantity of manuscript in pen and ink involving various masters of the Renaissance in Castile remained among his papers. To the editor, to whom Professor Post left his unpublished manuscripts, fell the task of deciding which among the numerous studies of individual masters had been completed or had been carried far enough to permit publication. By good fortune Mrs. Doris H . Carlin, Professor Post's typist for many years, was available to undertake the difficult problem of deciphering the handwriting. The last two volumes represent Professor Post's own research, as it remained at the time of his death in 1959. The editor has retained completely intact the author's own attributions, opinions, and style of writing. Even the choice of illustrations had already been indicated, only slight adjustments having been made because of nonavailability of photographs. In the preparation of the manuscript the contribution of Mrs. Carlin, mentioned above, was invaluable. Equally so was the share of my wife, Dr. Alice Sunderland Wethey, who assisted extensively in compiling Post's bibliography and in reading the proofs. At the Fogg Museum, Miss E. Louise Lucas and Miss Mary Ward did much to facilitate the preparation of the photographs, all of which were lent by the Fogg Museum of Art of Harvard University. Professor Sydney J . Freedberg and Professor John Coolidge, director of the Fogg Museum, gave their full cooperation and moral support. HAROLD E . W E T H E Y

Ann Arbor, Michigan January 1, 1965

CONTENTS CHANDLER

RATHFON

POST

XI

W R I T I N G S OF C H A N D L E R R . POST

xv

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION BIBLIOGRAPHY

OF V O L U M E

xxi XIV

xxiii

CHAPTER ALONSO

1

BERRUGUETE

3

CHAPTER THE

II

S C H O O L OF V A L L A D O L I D

1.

Cristóbal de Herrera

32

2.

T h e T o r o Master

43

3.

T h e Abezames Master

55

4.

Gaspar de Palencia

60

5.

Antonio Vázquez

70

6.

Jerónimo Vázquez

89

7.

T h e Cisneros Master

8.

Luis Vêlez

102

T h e Olivares Master

107

Antón Pérez

122

9. 10.

94

CHAPTER

III

T H E S C H O O L OF BURGOS

1. 2.

T h e Ventosilla Master T h e Lences Master

130 I37

3.

T h e Master of San Andrés de Arroyo

140

CHAPTER GASPAR

BECERRA

148

CHAPTER THE

IV

V

SCHOOL OF T O L E D O

1.

Luis de Carvajal

181

2.

Miguel Barroso

195

3. 4.

Blas del Prado Hernando de Avila

203 220

CONTENTS

Vili

APPENDIX ADDITIONS TO E A R L I E R

VOLUMES

T h e Franco-Gothic Style T h e International Movement in Northwestern Castile and Especially its Ultimate Phase Fernando Gallego and His School Painters of the Low Countries Active for Spain during the Early Renaissance T h e Early Renaissance at Fuenteovejuna (Cordoba) I N D E X OF N A M E S

INDEX

OF P L A C E S

OF ARTISTS

229 241 244 255 262 269

272

CHANDLER RATHFON POST

CHANDLER RATHFON

POST

With this last volume on which Professor Post was at work when death came, it has seemed proper to include a short biography and a list of his publications, since no other printed memorial to his memory has been projected. His generation with its broad humanistic aspirations has largely become a matter of history in the face of contemporary, self-imposed specialization. T o Professor Post and some others who grew to maturity at the turn of the century the quest for knowledge knew no limits. Post began as a linguist, taking his bachelor's degree in Spanish literature at Harvard in 1904, a classmate of Franklin Roosevelt and of the Hispanic scholar, Hayward Keniston. The following year he spent studying in the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, imbibing the Greek language and literature, subjects to which he remained permanently attached: he gave courses in Greek literature until the year of his retirement in 1 9 5 1 . Returning to Harvard in 1905, he completed his doctorate in 1909 with a thesis on Mediaeval Spanish Allegory under J . D. M . Ford. At Harvard, Professor Post remained forever after, appointed to various positions as instructor in English, in French, in Italian, and in Greek ( 1 9 1 0 ) until his promotion to assistant professor of Greek and Fine Arts in 1 9 1 2 , associate professor in 1920, and professor in 1923. The title of William Dorr Boardman Professor of Fine Arts followed in 1934. Professor Post's courses were famous to generations of Harvard and Radcliffe students. But in the training of scholars and the direction of doctoral dissertations lies his great contribution as a teacher. From 1923 to 1950 most of the doctoral candidates in Fine Arts worked under his guidance in all fields of Italian, Spanish, and American art from the medieval to the Renaissance and Baroque and modern. H e demanded perfection in every detail, slighting nothing and tolerating no fantasies. All, who had the privilege of his confidence, held in the greatest respect his encyclopedic knowledge and his unremitting quest for accuracy and for the truth. H e knew no such thing as compromise. T h e statistics of Professor Post's life begin with his birth in Detroit on December 14, 1 8 8 1 , the son of William R . Post and Anne M .

xii

C H A N D L E R R A T H F O N POST

Rathfon Post. His education at Harvard has already been recounted. During World War I he held the rank of captain of Infantry, but his most important service was that of assistant to the United States Military Attaché at Rome in 1 9 1 7 - 1 9 1 8 , where his extraordinary linguistic capacity served him to good purpose. The honors which accrued to him as a scholar included membership in many learned societies and nomination for a number of special awards. They are the following: Phi Beta Kappa5 Chevalier, Order of St. Maurice and St. Lazarus, Italy ( 1 9 1 8 ) 5 Chevalier, Order of the Crown of Italy ; American Academy of Arts and Sciences 5 the Hispanic Society of America; the American Philosophical Society ( 1 9 4 6 ) ; Sorolla Medal of the Hispanic Society of America ( 1 9 4 9 ) ; degree of Doctor of Humane Letters, University of Michigan ( 1 9 5 2 ) ; Institut d'Estudis Catalans, Barcelona; Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Luis, Saragossa; Academia de Bellas Artes de Santa Isabel de Hungría, Seville; Real Academia de Buenas Letras, Barcelona; Instituto de Estudios Oscenses, Huesca; Real Academia de San Carlos, Valencia; Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Jorge, Barcelona ( 1 9 5 7 ) ; Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid ( 1 9 5 8 ) ; Order of Isabella the Catholic (posthumous award, 1959). Phenomenal is the only word to describe Professor Post's publication record. After the appearance of his doctoral dissertation, Mediaeval Sfanish Allegory, in 1 9 1 4 and certain articles on Greek literature, he turned definitively to Fine Arts. First came the two-volume work, A History of European and American Sculpture, in 1924, which served generations of college teachers and students as the best survey of the subject. H e collaborated shortly thereafter (1924) in A History of Sculpture with Professor George H . Chase, who wrote the sections on Greece and Rome. Post's great reputation as an original scholar rests upon his vast History of Spanish Painting., the first three volumes of which appeared in 1930. His early intention of writing a general history of the subject in one or two volumes was abandoned in favor of an exhaustive catalogue of Spanish pictures from the earliest murals down to the mid-sixteenth century, the point which he had reached at his death. Up to that time there had appeared eighteen separately bound volumes, although numbered as twelve, since six are in two parts. The present volumes therefore bring the total to twenty. Professor Post thus became the definitive historian of Spanish

CHANDLER RATHFON

POST

xiii

medieval and Renaissance painting, compiling a comprehensive catalogue of pictures, just as Adolfo Venturi and Raimond van Marie had done for Italian painting of the same periods. Post's predominant interests lay in iconography, for which his books are a storehouse of recondite information, and in the recreation of individual masters out of the morass of anonymous works, vast numbers of which were previously unphotographed and unstudied. Like Bernard Berenson, Raimond van Marie, and others of his generation his method of attribution was primarily Morellian. For many years to come Post's History of Sfanish Painting will remain a standard work of reference. His fame is world-wide, but in Spain above all he is recognized and revered, even though a foreigner, as the greatest authority on Spanish painting. T h e photograph, used as frontispiece to this volume, shows Professor Post receiving the hood as Doctor of Humane Letters during the Commencement Exercises at the University of Michigan in 1952. H . E. W .

WRITINGS OF CHANDLER R. POST BOOKS 1915 Mediaeval Spanish Allegory, Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, 4, Cambridge, Mass. Pp. xii + 331. 1921 A History of European and American Sculpture, Cambridge, Mass., vol. I, pp. xvi + 265, 115 illus., vol. II, pp. 1 1 6 , 110 illus. 1924 A History of Sculpture (with George Henry Chase), New York. Pp. 528, 306 illus. 1930 A History of Spanish Painting, Cambridge, Mass., vol. I, pp. xxxv + 298, 84 illus., vol. I I , pp. xiv + 466, 249 illus., vol. I l l , pp. xi + 356, 368 illus. 1933

A History of Spanish Painting, vol. I V , parts I and I I : The HispanoFlemish Style in Northwestern Spain. Cambridge, Mass. Pp. xxviii + 692, 272 illus. 1934 A History of Spanish Painting, vol. V : The Hispano-Flemish Andalusia. Cambridge, Mass. Pp. xv + 357, 1 1 3 illus.

Style in

1935 A History of Spanish Painting, vol. V I , parts I and I I : The Valendan School in the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance. Cambridge, Mass. Pp. xxiv + 676, 294 illus. 1938 A History of Spanish Painting, vol. V I I , parts I and I I : The Catalan School in the Late Middle Ages. Cambridge, Mass. Pp. xxx + 936, 379 i l l u s ·

XVI

WRITINGS OF CHANDLER R. POST 1941

A History of Spanish Painting, vol. V I I I , parts I and I I : The Aragonese School in the Late Middle Ages. Cambridge, Mass. Pp. xxvi + 774, 358 illus. J947

A History of Spanish Painting, vol. I X , parts I and I I : The Beginning of the Renaissance in Castile and Leon. Cambridge, Mass. Pp. xix + 93!» 39° illus · 1950 A History of Spanish Painting, vol. X : The Early Renaissance in Andalusia. Cambridge, Mass. Pp. xi + 482, 200 illus. 1953 A History of Spanish Painting, vol. X I : The Valendan School in the Early Renaissance. Cambridge, Mass. Pp. xi + 484, 203 illus. 1958 A History of Spanish Painting, vol. X I I , parts I and I I : The Catalan School in the Early Renaissance. Cambridge, Mass. Pp. xv + 792, 347 illus. 1966 A History of Spanish Painting, vol. X I I I : The Schools of Aragon and Navarre in the Early Renaissance. Cambridge, Mass. Pp. xv + 455, 188 illus. 1966 A History of Spanish Painting, vol. X I V : The Later Renaissance in Castile. Cambridge, Mass. Pp. xxviii + 280, 105 illus.

ARTICLES 1909 " T h e Development of Motion in Greek Archaic Sculpture," Studies in Classical Philology, 20 ( 1 9 0 9 ) , 95—164.

Harvard

W R I T I N G S OF C H A N D L E R R. POST

xvii

1912 " T h e Dramatic Art of Sophocles," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 2

3 C^12),

7I_I27· ï9Ï3

" T h e Dramatic Art of Menander," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 2

4 (i9I3)»

111-145· 1922

" T h e Dramatic Art of Sophocles as Revealed by the Fragments of Lost Plays," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 33 ( 1 9 2 2 ) , 1—63. " A Painting of Saint Jerome by Ribera," Fogg Museum Notes, 1 ( 1 9 2 2 ) , 1 4 - 2 1 , ι illus. 1927 " A Spanish Painting of the International Movement," Fogg Notes, 2, no. 3 ( 1 9 2 7 ) , 9 8 - 1 0 5 , 1 illus.

Museum

1942 " A Second Retable by Jan Joest in Spain," Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 6, vol. 22 ( 1 9 4 2 ) , 1 2 7 - 1 3 4 , 8 illus. 1

ser.

943

" T h e Pacully Master," Gazette des Beaux-Arts, ser. 6, vol. 23 ( 1 9 4 3 ) , pp. 3 2 1 - 3 2 8 , 6 illus. " T h e Master of the Encarnación (Louis Alimbrot ? ) , " Gazette des Beaux-Arts, ser. 6 vol. 23 ( 1 9 4 3 ) , 153—160, 5 illus. "Additional Works by the Osonas," Gazette des Beaux-Arts, ser. 6, vol. 14 ( 1 9 4 3 ) , 2 7 2 - 2 8 2 , 12 illus. 1947 " A Flight into Egypt by the Schretlen Master," Boston Museum 45 (1947)» 4 9 - 5 5 , ι illus.

Bulletin,

1951 "Contributions to the Understanding of Catalan Painting of the Fifteenth Century," Art Quarterly, 14 ( 1 9 5 1 ) , 107—119, 17 illus. " T h e Paintings of Damián Forment," Miscellània Puig i Cadafalch, Barcelona, I ( 1 9 5 1 ) , 2 1 3 - 2 2 3 .

χνιπ

WRITINGS OF CHANDLER R. POST 1952

"Flemish and Hispano-Flemish Paintings of the Crucifixion," Gaxette des Beaux-Arts, ser. 6, vol. 39 ( 1 9 5 2 ) , 2 2 9 - 2 4 2 , 12 illus. "Unpublished Early Spanish Paintings in American and English Collections," Art Bulletin, 34 ( 1 9 5 2 ) , 2 7 9 - 2 8 3 , 13 illus. " U n a posible obra de Santa C r u z , " Boletín del Seminario, Valladolid, 18 ( 1 9 5 2 ) , 5 3 - 5 4 , 4 illus" E l maestro de G e r i a , " Boletín

del Seminano,

Valladolid, 19

(1952—

" T h e Flemish Master of Santa Inés," Gazette des Beaux-Arts, vol. 42 ( 1 9 5 3 ) , 2 1 7 - 2 3 4 , 18 illus. " T h e Adoration of the M a g i by Blas de Prado," Norfolk Papers, Norfolk, Va., no. 1 ( 1 9 5 3 ) , 9, 5 illus.

ser. 6,

!953)> " - 1 3 · 1

953

Museum

1954 "Unpublished Early Spanish Paintings of Unique or Very Rare T h e m e s , " Gazette des Beaux-Arts, ser. 6, vol. 44 ( 1 9 5 4 ) , 317—338, 15 illus. " E l Maestro de R o d a , " Publicaciones, Institución T e l l o T é l l e z de Meneses, Falencia, 11 ( 1 9 5 4 ) , 1 3 7 - 1 3 9 , 3 illus. 1955 "Pinturas primitivas altoaragonesas poco conocidas, de temas únicos o muy poco frecuentes," Argensola, Huesca, 6 ( 1 9 5 5 ) , núm. 23, 201— 21 o, 3 illus. 1956 "Juan de Borgoña in Italy and in Spain," Gazette des Beaux-Arts, ser. 6, vol. 48 ( 1 9 5 6 ) , 1 2 9 - 1 4 2 , 18 illus. "Attribution of Several Paintings in Valladolid and its Region," Boletín del Seminario, Valladolid, 21 ( 1 9 5 6 ) , 7—13. 1957 " N o t e on the Article on Juan de Borgoña in Italy and in Spain," des Beaux-Arts, ser. 6, vol. 49 ( 1 9 5 7 ) , 208.

Gazette

X958 " A n A g o n y in the Garden by Rodrigo de Osona the Y o u n g e r , " Rhode Island School of Design, 1958, pp. I—3.

Bulletin}

WRITINGS OF CHANDLER R. POST J

959

" D i e g o de la C r u z , " Gazette des Beaux-Arts, ser. 6, vol. 53 ( 1 9 5 9 ) , 21-26. " A Spanish Altarpiece of A l l Saints," Cowley, A Quarterly Magazine of Subjects Missionary and Religious, Cambridge, Mass., 30 ( 1 9 5 9 ) , no. 4, 1 2 0 - 1 3 0 , 7 illus.

EDITOR'S

INTRODUCTION

The material in Volume X I V , devoted to the Later Renaissance in Castile, includes Spanish masters who had studied in Italy and their local Spanish followers. The principal centers of activity are Valladolid, Toledo, Madrid, and the Escorial. The essays on individual painters of these schools were complete at the time of Professor Post's death, and the bibliographical references indicate that he had been engaged upon them not long before. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that, had he lived longer, he would have added material to supply the missing links to form a more complete history of the painting of each region. T h e leading figure of Valladolid, Alonso Berruguete, had undergone the influence of Michelangelo and Leonardo as well as that of the early Florentine Mannerist, Rosso Fiorentino. T h e recent hypothetic attribution to him of works formerly associated with the circle of the latter master demonstrates clearly his knowledge of that environment. Although Alonso Berruguete is a far greater artist as a sculptor, whose style is highly individual even if shot through with the Michelangelesque, his sphere of influence among the painters of the region of Valladolid is considerable. The publications of articles on this master, which appeared in 1961 on the occasion of the fourhundredth anniversary of his death, lie obviously beyond the period of Professor Post's activity. T o the study of Gaspar Becerra, the Italian-trained Spaniard who had assisted Giorgio Vasari in the frescoes of the Cancelleria Palace in Rome, Professor Post devotes a long essay. Particularly significant here is the discussion of the frescoes in the palace of E l Pardo near Madrid and the attribution to Becerra of the illustrations of Valverde's treatise on anatomy. The section on the School of Toledo is limited to the prominent figures of Luis de Carvajal, Miguel Barroso, and Blas del Prado, who worked both in Toledo and at the Escorial. Professor Post makes an important contribution in straightening out the confused identification of Bias del Prado with another master, the recently popular still-life painter, Blas de Ledesma. Undoubtedly Professor Post would have expanded his studies to include the large number of Spanish masters

xxii

EDITOR'S

INTRODUCTION

involved in Philip II's great projects for the monastery of San Lorenzo del Escorial. Among the most important missing in Volume X I V are Fernández de Navarrete, called el Mudo, Juan Gómez, Panto ja de la Cruz, and Sánchez Coello. It was never Post's intention to include El Greco in these volumes because of the editor's monograph on that subject, already in preparation in 1959. Just at the point where the Escorial masters were being studied Professor Post's life came to an abrupt end. HAROLD E . W E T H E Y

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF VOLUME XIV Abizanda y Broto, Manuel, Documentos fara la historia artística y literaria de Aragón, siglo XVI, Saragossa, I I , 1 9 1 7 . Agapito y Revilla, Juan, La fintura en Valladolid, series of articles in the Boletín del Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes de Valladolid, beginning in No. i , January, 1 9 2 5 . Alcázar de San Juan, Enciclopedia universal ilustrada, Espasa-Calpe, Barcelona, I V ( 1 9 0 7 ) , 262. Allende-Salazar, Juan, Alonso Berruguete en Italia, Archivo español de arte y arqueología, X ( 1 9 3 4 ) , 185—187. Amador de los Ríos, José, Toledo pintoresca, Madrid, 1845. Angulo Iñguez, Diego, Dibujos españoles en el Museo de los Uffizi, Archivo español de arte y arqueología, I I I ( 1 9 2 7 ) , 341—347. Pintores cordobeses del Renacimiento, Archivo español de arte, X V I I ( 1 9 4 4 ) , 240. El maestro de Santa Cruz, Archivo español de arte, X V I I I ( 1 9 4 5 ) , 94-96. —• La mitología y el arte español del Renacimiento, Madrid, 1952. Algunos cuadros españoles en museos franceses, Archivo español de arte, X X V I I ( 1 9 5 4 ) , 3 2 1 . Pintura del Renacimiento, Madrid, 1954· Arco, Ricardo del: See Catálogo monumental de España. Arribas, Filemón, Ilustraciones a las biografías de Alonso González Berruguete y de su hijo, Boletín del Seminario de Estudios de Arte y Arqueología, Universidad de Valladolid, tomo X V fascículos X L I X - L ( 1 9 4 8 - 1 9 4 9 ) , 243-249. Baquero Almansa, Α., Catálogo de los profesores de las bellas artes murcianos, Murcia, 1 9 1 3 . Barcia, Angel M . de, Catálogo de la colección de dibujos originales de la Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, 1906—1911. Bartsch, Adam, Le peintre graveur, X I V , Leipzig, 1867. Beer, Rudolf, Archivo general zu Simancas, Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses, X I I , 1 8 9 1 . Bologna, Ferdinando, Roviale Spagnuolo e la pittura napolitana del Cinquecento, Naples, 1959. Bosarte, Isidoro, Viaje artístico a varios pueblos de España, Madrid, 1804. Cabello y Dodero, F . J . , La parroquia de San Millán de Segovia, Estudios segovianos, I ( 1 9 4 9 ) , 413—436. Callahan, Gale Guthrie, Revaluation of the Refectory Retable from the Cathedral of Pamplona, Art Bulletin, X X X V ( 1 9 5 3 ) , 181—193. Candeira y Pérez, Constantino, Los retablos de Gaspar de Tordesillas, Boletín del Seminario de Estudios de Arte y Arqueología, Univer-

xxiv

BIBLIOGRAPHY sidad de Valladolid, tomo V I I I , fascículos X X V I I I - X X X 1942), 1 1 1 - 1 3 7 · Guía del Museo Nacional

de Escultura

de Valladolid,

(1941-

Valladolid,

1945· Catálogo monumental de España, published by the Ministerio de Instrucción Pública y Bellas Artes: Provincia de "Zamora, by M . G ó m e z - M o r e n o , 1 9 2 7 ; Provincia de Huesca, by Ricardo del A r c o , 1942. Cavestany, Julio, Catálogo de la exposición de floreros y bodigones, Madrid, 1940, p. 67. Blas de Ledesma, Arte español, X I V ( 1 9 4 3 ) , tercer trimestre, 16-18. C e á n Bermúdez, J. Α . , Diccionario histórico de los más ilustres profesores de las bellas artes en Esfaña, Madrid, 1800. Historia de la pintura en España, Academia, I ( 1 9 5 0 — 1 9 5 1 ) , 209, 229, 2 3 0 - 2 3 1 . Cedillo, Conde de, Santa Marta la Real de Nieva, Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones, X X X V I I I ( 1 9 3 0 ) , 153—188. Chérancé, Leopold de, Saint Antoine de Padue, Paris, 1895. Cook, W . W . S. and J. Gudiol Ricart, Pintura e imaginería románicas, vol. V I in the series Ars Hispaniae, Madrid, 1 9 5 0 . Colorado y L a c a , E . , Un antecedente al Entierro del Conde de Orgaz, Estudios segovianos, I ( 1 9 4 9 ) , 476—478. C r u z a d a Villaamil, Gregorio, Una recomendación de Miguel Angel a favor de Berruguete, El arte en España, V ( 1 8 6 6 ) , 103—105. Datos documentales inéditos para la historia del arte español, published by the Centro de Estudios Históricos, M a d r i d : I. Notas del archivo de la catedral de Toledo, redactadas sistemáticamente, en el siglo XVIII, por el canónigo-obrero Don Francisco Pérez Sedano, 1 9 1 4 . I I . Documentos de la catedral de Toledo, coleccionados por Don Manuel R. Ζ arco del Valle, 1 9 1 6 . Documentos para la historia del arte en Andalucía, Seville, V I I I ( 1 9 3 5 ) , 51· Durliat, Marcel, La peinture rous sillonnais e à l'époque des rois de Majorque, Etudes roussillonnaises, I I ( 1 9 5 2 ) , 1 9 1 — 2 1 1 . Arts anciens du Roussillon, Perpignan, 1954. Flórez, Enrique, España Sagrada, 1 7 4 7 . Fiorii, José M . , Inventario de los cuadros y objetos de arte, Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones, X I V ( 1 9 0 6 ) , 153—160. Fontainebleau e la maniera italiana, Naples, 1 9 5 2 , pp. 6—7. Freedberg, Sydney, Painting of the High Renaissance in Rome and Florence, Cambridge, Mass., 1 9 6 1 . Friedländer, M a x . J., Die altniederländische Malerei, I V , Leyden, 1924. García C a r r a f f a , Alberto y Arturo, Enciclopedia heráldica y genealógica hispano-americana, X L V , Madrid, 1 9 3 2 .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

XXV

García Chico, Esteban, Documentos para el estudio del arte en Castilla, Escultores, Valladolid, 1 9 4 1 . El templo de San Miguel de Medina, Boletín del Seminario de Estudios de Arte y Arqueología, Universidad de Valladolid, tomo X , fascículos X X X I V - X X X V I ( 1 9 4 3 - 1 9 4 4 ) , 1 0 3 - 1 2 2 . Documentos fara el estudio del arte en Castilla, Pintores, Valladolid, I and I I I , 1946. Artistas que trabajaron en la iglesia de Villamuriel de Cerrato, Boletín del Seminario de Estudios de Arte y Arqueología, Universidad de Valladolid, tomo X V I I I , fascículos L V I I I - L X ( 1 9 5 2 ) , 132-135· La Colegiata de Medina del Campo, Boletín del Seminario de Estudios de Arte y Arqueología, Universidad de Valladolid, XXI— X X I I (1956), 53-79. Retablo mayor de la Mejorada, Boletín del Seminario de Estudios de Arte y Arqueología, Universidad de Valladolid, X X I V ( 1 9 5 8 ) , 77-79· Catálogo monumental de la -provincia de Valladolid, Valladolid, I I , 1959. Gaya Ñuño, Juan Antonio, Sobre el retablo de Ciudad Rodrigo, Archivo español de arte, X X X I ( 1 9 5 8 ) , 299—312. Fernando Gallego, Madrid, 1958. Giglioli, Odoardo H., Affreschi inediti di Pier Francesco Toschi, Bollettino d'arte, X X X I I ( 1 9 3 8 ) , 2 5 - 3 1 . Gómez Brava, Juan, Catálogo de los obispos de Cordova, Cordova, I ( 1 7 7 8 ) , 390. Gómez-Moreno, M., Retablo atribuido a Berruguete, Boletín de la Sociedad Castellana de Excursiones, VII ( 1 9 1 5 — 1 9 1 6 ) , 169. En la Capilla Real de Granada, Archivo español de arte y arqueología,! ( 1 9 2 5 ) , 2 6 2 - 2 6 7 ; I I ( I 9 2 ^ ) > 1 1 0 - 1 1 4 . Las águilas del Renacimiento español, part IV, Madrid, 1 9 4 1 . See also Catálogo monumental de España. Gudiol Ricart, José, Datos para la historia del arte navarro, Príncipe de Viana, V ( 1 9 4 4 ) , 287. Las pinturas de Fernando Gallego de Salamanca, Goya, no. 1 3 , 1956, 8. Guérin, Paul, Les petits Bollandistes, Paris, 1888. Haupt, Albrecht, Ein spanisches Tjeichenbuch der Renaissance, Jahrbuch der königlich preussischen Kunstsammlungen, Berlin, X X I V , (i903). 3-J3· Haverkamp Begemann, Egbert, De Meester van de Godelieve Legende, Bulletin des Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, IV ( 1955 ) 5 185-198. James, M . R., The Apocryphal New Testament, Oxford, 1924. Jameson, Anna Brownell, Legends of the Madonna, ed. London, 1903.

XXVI

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Janson, Horst W . , Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, London, 1952. Layna Serrano, Francisco, Las tablas de Santa María del Rey, Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones, L V I I ( 1 9 5 3 ) , 273—281. Llaguno y Amírola, Eugenio, Noticias de los arquitectos y arquitectura de España, Madrid, 1829. Llórente, Teodoro, Valencia, vol. I in the series España, sus monumentos y artes, Barcelona, 1887—1889. Loga, V. von, Die Malerei in Spanien, Berlin, 1923. Longhi, Roberto, Officina ferrarese, Rome, 1934. Comfrimari sfagnoli della maniera italiana, Paragone, No. 43, *953> ΡΡ· 3 - Ι 5 · Lozoya, Marqués de, Restauración de monumentos en Segovia, Archivo esfañol de arte, X X I V ( 1 9 5 1 ) , 274. Madrazo, Pedro de, Navarra y Logroño, vol. I I I in the series Esfaña, sus monumentos y artes, Barcelona, 1888. Mâle, E . , L'art religieux de la fin du Moyen-Age en France, Paris, 1925. March, José M . , Tres tablas del Paulau de Barcelona, Boletín de la Sociedad Esfañola de Excursiones, L U ( 1 9 4 8 ) , 289—293. Martín González, Juan José, Una tabla del siglo XVI, Boletín del Seminario de Estudios de Arte y Arqueología, Universidad de Valladolid, tomo X V I I I , fascículos L V I I I - L X ( 1 9 5 2 ) , 1 2 8 - 1 3 1 . El retablo mayor de la iglesia parroquial de Olivares de Duero, Boletín del Seminario de Estudios de Arte y Arqueología, Universidad de Valladolid, X X ( 1 9 5 5 ) , 3 1 - 4 1 . En torno al fintor Antonio Vázquez, Archivo esfañol de arte, X X X (1957), 125-133. Martin-Méry, Gilberte, Les frimiti]s méditerranéens, Bordeaux, p. HO. Martí y Monsó, J . , Estudios histórico-artísticos, Valladolid, 1898—1901. Retablos de Quintanilla de Abajo y de Olivares, Boletín de la Sociedad Castellana de Excursiones, I ( 1 9 0 3 — 1 9 0 4 ) , 314—319. Menudencias bio gráfico-artísticas, Boletín de la Sociedad Castellana de Excursiones, I I ( 1 9 0 5 — 1 9 0 6 ) , 26—28, 198, 5 3 5 . Martínez, Jusepe, Discursos fracticables del nobilísimo arte de la pintura in Sánchez Cantón, Fuentes literarias para la historia del arte español, Madrid, I I I , 1934. Martínez y Sanz, Manuel, Historia del templo catedral de Burgos, Burgos, 1866. Mayer, A. L . , Die Sevillaner Malerschule, Leipzig, 1911. Handzeichnungen spanischer Meister, New York and Leipzig, I9I5· Geschichte der spanischen Malerei, Leipzig, edition of 1922. • Historia de la pintura española, Madrid, 1947 (3rd Spanish edition.) Navarro García, Rafael ( e d . ) , Catálogo monumental de la provincia de Palencia, I I , Palencia, 1932, 2 6 1 .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

xxvii

Nielson, Katharine B., Filippino Lippi, Cambridge, Mass., 1938. Orueta, Ricardo de, Berruguete y su obra, Madrid, 1917Papini, Giovanni, Lettere di Michelangelo Buonarroti, Lanciano, 1910. Pefialosa, Luis F. de, Varia, Estudios segovianos, I ( 1 9 4 9 ) , 113, 119. Varia, Estudios segovianos, II (1950—1951), 147· Pérez Pastor, Cristóbal, Colección de documentos inéditos para la historia de las bellas artes en España, Memorias de la Real Academia Española, Madrid, X I , 1914. Pérez Sedano, Francisco: See Datos documentales. Ponz, Α., Viaje de España, Madrid, I, 1 7 7 2 ; V, 1776; X , 1 7 8 1 ; X I , 1783; X I I , 1783. Post, Chandler Rathfon, A Second Retable by Jan Joest in Spain, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, series 6, X X I I ( 1 9 4 2 ) , 1 2 7 - 1 3 4 . The Flemish Master of Santa Inés, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, series 6, X L I I ( 1 9 5 3 ) , 217-234. Quinn, R. M., The Retable of Ciudad Rodrigo by Fernando Gallego, Tucson, 1961. Ramirez de Arellano, Rafael, Catálogo de artífices que trabajaron en Toledo, Toledo, 1920. Reber, Franz von, Katalog der Gemälde-Sammlung, Munich, 1890, no. 1048, p. 230. Salis, Arnold von, Antike und Renaissance, Erlenbach-Zürich, 1947. Saltillo, Marqués de, Efemérides artísticas, Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones, L I I ( 1 9 4 8 ) , 8. San Román, F. de Borja de, Documentos del Greco referentes a los cuadros de Santo Domingo el Antiguo, Archivo español de arte y arqueología, X ( 1 9 3 4 ) , 12, 13. Sánchez Cantón, F. J., Los pintores de cámara de los reyes de España, Madrid, 1916. Fuentes literarias para la historia del arte español, five volumes, Madrid, 1 9 2 3 - 1 9 4 1 . Dibujos españoles, five volumes, Madrid, 1930—1940. Nacimiento e infancia de Cristo, Madrid, 1948. Santarelli, E., Catálogo della raccolta di disegni autografi, donata dal Prof. E. Santarelli alla R. Galleria di Firenze, Florence, 1870. Sanz-Pastor, Consuelo, Museo Cerralbo, Catàlogo, Madrid, 1956. Scharf, Alfred, Studien zur einigen Spätwerken des Filippino Lippi, Jahrbuch der königlich preussischen Kunstsammlungen, Berlin, L I I ( 1 9 3 1 ) , 218-222. Filippino Lippi, Vienna, 1935. Sentenach y Cabanas, Narciso, Historia y arte, Madrid, II, 1912. Sigiienza, José de, Historia primitiva y exacta del monasterio del Escorial (1600) ed. of Madrid, 1881. Historia de la Orden de San Jerónimo, ed. of Madrid, II, 1909. Sterling, Charles, La nature morte de l'antiquité à nos jours (Catalogue of the 1952 Paris Exhibition), pp. 36—38.

xxviii

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Still Lije Painting, Paris, 1959. Tejada, Alfonso María, La antigua iglesia de Villamuriel, Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones, L I X ( 1 9 5 1 ) , 264—269. Thieme, U., and F . Becker, Künstler-Lexikon, Leipzig, X X V I , 1 9 3 2 ; X X X I V , 1940. Tolnay, Charles de, Michelangelo, I I , The Sistine Ceiling, Princeton, N . J . , 1945· Tormo y Monzó, Elias, Gaspar Becerray Boletín de la Sociedad Esfañola de Excursiones, X X ( 1 9 1 2 ) , 65—97; X X I ( 1 9 1 3 ) ; 1 1 7 - 1 5 7 , 245-265. En las Descalzas Reales, Madrid, 1 9 1 5 — 1 9 1 7 . Valverde Madrid, José, La -pintura sevillana en la -primera mitad del siglo XVI, Seville, 1956. Vasari, Giorgio, Andrea del Sarto, Le vite dei più eccellente pittori, scultori ed architetti, edition Milanesi, Florence, 1880. Villegas Sehago, Alonso, Flos sanctorum, I, Madrid, 1 5 9 3 . Viñaza, Conde de, Adiciones al diccionario histórico . . . de Ceán Bermudes, Madrid, 1894. Weise, Georg, Spanische Plastik aus sieben Jahrhunderten, I I I , Reutlingen, 1 9 3 2 . Zarco Cuevas, J . , Pintores españoles en San Lorenzo el Real de el Escorial, Madrid, 1 9 3 1 . Zarco del Valle, D. Manuel R., Documentos inéditos para la historia de las bellas artes en España in Colección de documentos inéditos para la historia de España, L V ( 1 8 7 0 ) , 6 1 4 - 6 1 7 . See also Datos documentales. Zeri, Federico, Alonso Berruguete, Paragone, No. 43 ( 1 9 5 3 ) , 49—51.

THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN CASTILE

CHAPTER I ALONSO

BERRUGUETE

For various reasons Alonso Berruguete will not be given in our pages an amount of space commensurate with his fame. In the first place, although he partly conceived his sculpture in the terms of painting, he expressed himself more essentially in the former art; as a painter he sinks to lower rank; the number of his extant paintings is restricted; and finally, they have been so comprehensively and incisively analyzed by his two principal monographers, Orueta 1 and Gómez-Moreno, 2 that these scholars leave me little to interpret or to add to, or subtract from, their register of his works. T h e y dispense me also from any extended account of his career and allow me to confine myself largely to the biographical facts by which his paintings may be elucidated. Nor for our purpose does much significance attach to the exact dates of his birth or of his journey to Italy, over both of which so much ink has been spilt. Strangely enough, indeed, we have found in volume I X 3 the problem of these dates in Alonso's life more important for an understanding of the production of his father, the painter Pedro Berruguete. From the perusal of the apposite pages in volume I X the reader can easily deduce that Alonso could not have been born before i486 or after 1490 and that he could not have betaken himself to Italy prior to January 6, 1504, when, still at the family hearth, Paredes de Nava, in the province of Palencia, he is recorded in a legal deed as having petitioned his mother to assume the guardianship of himself and the other five children of her R. de Orueta, Berruguete y su obra, Madrid, 1 9 1 7 . M . Gómez-Moreno, in his book, Las águilas del Renacimiento español, Madrid, 1941, part IV and accompanying documents and plates. Esteban García Chico (Boletín del Seminario de Estudios de Arte y Arqueología, Universidad de Valladolid, X X I V ( 1 9 5 8 ) , 7 7 - 7 9 ) has added to our information about him by publishing an earlier document than we had hitherto known in regard to his authorship of the sculptured retable of the high altar of the Hieronymite monastery of L a Mejorada at Olmedo (now in the National Museum of Sculpture, Valladolid) his contract of November 2, 1523, in partnership with Vasco de la Zarza, who soon died leaving the whole undertaking to Berruguete alone ; and a notice of a lost and undated, painted retable f o r the sepulchral niche of Juan Paulo Oliveiro in the monastery of San Benito el Real at Valladolid. 3 Pp. 25 and 29. 1

2

4

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deceased husband. 4 T h e probability is that the journey occurred soon after this last mention of the youth in Spain,5 for we are credibly informed that he worked a picture left unfinished by Filippino Lippi at his death on April 18, 1504, and it is most unlikely that the commissioners of the picture would have waited long to have it completed any more than in the case of Perugino who commenced in 1505 to terminate a Deposition that Filippino had not lived to carry out for the church of the Annunziata at Florence. Study in Italy had by no means yet become the general vogue for Spanish artists at this very early moment in the sixteenth century, and the venture of the lad must have been inspired by his father who at an even more surprisingly pristine date not only had sought an education in the sister peninsula but had there contributed some of the finest pieces to the treasure of Italian painting of the Renaissance. Ceán Bermúdez's assertion 6 that he was instructed by his parent is probably only a natural guess, since it is indeed likely that the boy learned how to use the mere materials and tools of his profession in the family's house at Paredes; but neither in sculpture nor in painting does Alonso's style show any essential trace of paternal tutelage. His labor upon a picture by Filippino brings me to the consideration of a factor that has not yet been given enough emphasis, the influence of his Italian experience and especially of Filippino upon him. O f the five statements that Vasari makes about him, 7 which can be trusted because he would not have invented out of whole cloth the unexpected phenomenon of the presence of a young Spaniard in the 4 W e need not encumber our pages with the bibliography of the documentary references to these facts since it is copiously given in my vol. IX. E. García Chico (Documentos fara el estuilo del arte en Castilla, Pintores, Valladolid, I, 1946, 6) has published tax records of Paredes de Nava confirming the fact that Pedro Berruguete had died by the beginning of 1504. T h e so often demonstrated untrustworthiness of men's memories in regard to their own ages is betrayed by Alonso's description of himself as only sixty years old in the dossier of a lawsuit of 1559 (J. Martí y Monsó, Estudios histörico-artisticos, Valladolid, 1898—1901, p. 1 0 4 ) . 5 In the legal proceedings of 1525 connected with paintings that he was to have done on doors in the church of S. Lorenzo at Valladolid ( M a r t í y Monsó, of. cit., Ρ· 135)3 one of the witnesses, Pedro de Guadalupe, states that he had known Alonso for about 18 years. T h e likelihood would be that the acquaintance had begun in Spain and been interrupted by Alonso's italienische Reise, in which case our master could not have departed before 1507, if we wish to press the accuracy of Pedro's numerical memory; but the witness himself disavows any such accuracy, and it is also possible that he too had gone to Italy and encountered Berruguete there. 6 Diccionario histórico de los más ilustres profesores de las bellas artes en España, I (Madrid, 1800), 130. 7 T h e excerpts from Vasari are conveniently gathered by Sánchez Cantón in his Fuentes literarias fara la historia del arte esfañol, I ( M a d r i d , 1 9 2 3 ) , 461—462.

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5

vibrating atmosphere of Florence and Rome at the commencement of the Cinquecento, one, at the end of his life of Filippino, is that Berruguete carried further the beginnings of this master upon the painting for the high altar of the church of S. Girolamo sulla Costa at Florence but that it was eventually finished by others after his return to Spain. The altarpiece has been identified with a painting of the Coronation and saints, No. 1 4 1 6 of the Louvre, which comes from the designated spot in this church (also sometimes called S. Girolamo e S. Francisco or even S. Giorgio) (Fig. 1 ) . Pier di Cosimo has often been proposed as the altarpiece's author, and indeed he may have been one of the "others" who eventually completed it, although I confess that I find it hard to discern anything of his style 3 but we can scarcely discard the evidence that points to Filippino as the inaugurator of the enterprise,8 and in any case the significant question for us is whether anywhere Berruguete's hand can be detected. T h e figures in which perhaps one would not likely be hypnotizing himself in perceiving a neurotic and religiously intense touch stressed beyond the ordinary Italian standard and characteristic of Alonso would be the Sts. Francis and Jerome at the lower left 5 but Roberto Longhi 9 may well be right in descrying Berruguete's hand rather in the child-angels who surround the group of the Coronation and who, scarcely reconcilable with the art of either Filippino or Pier di Cosimo, do prophesy the sjumatezza of some of the later mannerists and in one or two instances might be taken as suggestive of a Spanish naturalism. For the moment it will not pay to labor the ticklish problem, 10 for the kernel of the whole matter is, for us at this stage in our studies, that the young Alonso was brought into intimate relation with the art of Filippino, who in his last productions developed into the most amazingly and prematurely mannered and even proto-baroque painter of the Quattrocento, thus con8 For a full discussion and bibliography of the altarpiece, see Alfred Scharf, Filippino Lip fi, Vienna, 1 9 3 5 , pp. 73—74, as well as his article in the Jahrbuch der königlich preussischen Kunstsammlungen, Berlin, L I I ( 1 9 3 1 ) , 218 ff., and Katharine Β. Nielson, Filiffino Lipfi, Harvard University Press, 1938, pp. 177—178. Because Vasari calls Filippino Lippi merely Filippo Lippi without the diminutive ending, both Orueta (p. 89) and Gómez-Moreno (p. 1 4 8 ) mistake him for his father whom Vasari properly describes as Fra Filippo Lippo, and so the Spanish scholars refuse to give credence to the statement that Alonso in the early sixteenth century took over a picture by a master believed by them to be the friar who had died so long before in 1469. 9 Paragone, No. 43 ( 1 9 5 3 ) , 6 - 7 . 10 But see below, p. 20.

Fig. I. FILIPPINO LIPP! AND ALONSO BERRUGUETE. LOUVRE, PARIS {Photo. Alinari)

CORONATION.

ALONSO B E R R U G U E T E

7

tributing much more than has been realized to the trends of which Berruguete was to become an outstanding exponent. Allende-Salazar 11 has also discussed Alonso's collaboration on the Coronation now in the Louvre, but his very tentative attribution to the adolescent Spaniard of an Immaculate Conception in the church of Santo Spirito at Florence is conclusively negatived by the fact that this and two other pictures in the same edifice are works of the Italian of the full Cinquecento, Pier Francesco Toschi. 12 Whether or not Pier di Cosimo took hold of the Coronation after Alonso, he, like Filippino, exhibits manneristic traits and had probably adopted them while the Castilian was still in Italy, so that he could hardly have failed to arouse the youth's interest, although we possess no record of the two artists' contact. Despite the fact that Michael Angelo states in one of his letters that a young Spanish painter named Alonso, whom it seems impossible to doubt was Berruguete, 13 enjoyed the acquaintance of Granacci, tangible traces of the influence of this belated exponent of the modes of the Quattrocento are difficult to uncover in the Spaniard's production. The debt of Berruguete to Filippino and Pier di Cosimo should be underlined because he had departed for home before in general the Italian and especially the Florentine mannerists, such as Bacchiacca, and Bronzino, and il Rosso whom he somewhat resembles as a painter, had evolved their characteristic styles. Indeed Roberto Longhi 14 has given to Berruguete an important place in the actual foundation of mannerism in Italy prior to his repatriation. T h e justification for such an exaltation of Alonso would be our acceptance of Longhi's endeavor to ascribe to him a group of early manneristic paintings done in Italy, which, in my opinion, might conceivably, but very far from certainly, embody his craft. The principal obstacle to agreeing with the Italian scholar is the paucity of specific links, as he himself admits,15 with Berruguete's authenticated works in Spain Archivo esfañol de arte y arqueología, Χ (ΐ934·)> 185 — 187See an article by Odoardo Η. Giglioli in Bollettino d'arte, July, 1938, p. 25. So far as I can discover, the attribution of the three pictures to Toschi rests solely upon the authority of Vasari's statement in his life of Andrea del Sarto (cf. the edition by Milanesi, V, 1880, 5 8 ) ; but the Italian biographer, writing in the vicinity of the time when they must have been painted, would surely have known the truth, and the attribution is generally accepted. 13 See below, p. 1 7 . 14 Paragone, No. 43 ( 1 9 5 3 ) , 3 - 1 1 . See also the Catalogue of the Exhibition, Fontainebleau e la maniera italiana, at Naples, 1 9 5 2 , pp. 6—7. 15 P. 1 0 ; Mostra del Pontormo e del primo manierismo fiorentino, Florence, 11

12

8

ALONSO B E R R U G U E T E

and his failure to recognize that in practically all artists there persist from the beginning to the end of their careers at least a few constant characteristics in such matters as human types, chiaroscuro, and Morellian traits. The one of the group that exhibits the most numerous, tangible analogies with the Spanish productions is a tondo of the Virgin, Child, and young St. John, a part of the Loeser bequest to the Palazzo Vecchio at Florence (Fig. 2), hitherto ascribed to il Rosso. The Madonna is not too different from feminine types that we shall find in his achievements in Spain ; the bit of landscape, with its sjumatezza, might fit into the backgrounds that he was to execute at home j but the nearest to concrete proof is afforded by the Baptist's pert and unidealized little visage which could be taken as prophesying the face of the futto holding St. Mark's inkwell (Fig. 8) in the painted sections of Berruguete's retable for S. Benito, Valladolid. Indeed a sort of roguish expression on the countenance of the infant Saviour himself reminds us of the child-angel just to the left of the Virgin in the Coronation in the Louvre, Alonso's contribution to which we have just debated.16 In a panel of the Virgin, Child, St. Elizabeth, and her Son, No. 335 of the Borghese Gallery at Rome, 17 often attributed to Pier di Cosimo, it is the rather marked similarity of the infant Christ to many of the angels in the Louvre Coronation that would argue for an assignment to Alonso, if we could with surety predicate that they constituted his part in the picture, but it must not be overlooked that we do not discover this sort of child in his works in Spain. Somewhat of a resemblance exists between the coy young Baptist and the Christ as a baby in the Loeser picture (which, however, cannot be froved to have come from Berruguete's brush), and St. Elizabeth's open mouth might be looked upon as foreshadowing one of the ways by which he was to express fervid emotion in his sculptures in his native land. The other suggestions of Longhi are less tempting. In one of them, a panel of Salome holding the Baptist's head in the Gallery of the Uffizi, Florence,18 the girl's face has vague counterparts in such 1956, pp. 1 1 9 - 1 2 2 ; Sydney Freedberg, Painting of the High Renaissance in Rome and Florence, Cambridge, Mass., 1 9 6 1 , pp. 5 3 6 - 5 3 9 . 16 Editor's note : Unknown to Professor Post at the time of his death were the Donatellesque compositions of the Virgin and Child in the Uffizi at Florence and the Saibene Collection at Milan, published recently as the work of Berruguete (Freedberg, o f . cit., figs. 329, 660), and similar in style to the Loeser canvas. 17 Freedberg, loc. cit., fig. 328. 18 Freedberg, loc. cit., fig. 659.

Fig. 2. ALONSO BERRUGUETE. VIRGIN AND CHILD W I T H T H E YOUNG ST. JOHN. PALAZZO VECCHIO, FLORENCE

(Photo.

Brogi)

IO

ALONSO

BERRUGUETE

of Alonso's sculptures in Spain as the celebrateci St. Sebastian from S. Benito, Valladolid, now in the Museo Nacional de Escultura in the city J and the decapitated head is marked by a ghastliness that might be interpreted as Spanish and as a harbinger of the naturalism that, in a less morbid aspect, the artist was to exhibit in the rather striking similar countenance of an unidentified patriarch 19 from S. Benito and in further pieces from the same cycle. It is to be noted also that Salome is seated beside a window that opens to a landscape somewhat like the small vista in the Loeser painting. M y dull eyes can see nothing palpable for an assignment to Berruguete in Longhi's final candidate, a male portrait, No. 242 of the Museum at Budapest. Accepting Longhi's attribution of these works to a productive Italian period of Alonso, Federico Zeri 2 0 has wished to increase the number by a panel of the Madonna, Child, and young St. John in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich. 21 Our L a d y embodies a feminine type not common in the artist's works in Spain but nevertheless approximated in certain of his sculptured figures, for instance, in the Virgin of the Epiphany in the retable in the church of Santiago, Valladolid, and in the E v e of the Toledo choir-stalls. T h e picture has a kind of attachment to Longhi's hypothetical group in the rather marked similarity of the St. John to the same child in the Loeser tondo. Zeri has pointed out the pronounced reminiscences of Michael Angelo in the Munich picture, and if it could indeed be proved a creation of Berruguete, the Madonna's countenance would betray a momentary interest in the insinuating woman of Leonardo, an influence that he otherwise bravely and surprisingly, when we consider the time at which he dwelt in Italy, managed to elude. A n enthusiasm for "baroque" qualities was precociously implanted in him also by another episode in his Italian sojourn revealed to us by Vasari, his close, personal contact with one of the most baroque pieces of ancient sculpture, the group of the Laocoön. Toward the beginning of his life of Jacopo Sansovino, Vasari recounts that Bramante instituted one of those competitions so frequent among the Italians of the Renaissance, in which Jacopo, Berruguete, and two others made rival, large wax models of the Laocoön and that at Raphael's judgment Jacopo's was declared the best, from which the bronze casting Photo. Archivo Mas, no. 68143C. Paragone, No. 43 ( 1 9 5 3 ) 1 49~51 · 2 1 Franz von Reber, Katalog der Gemälde-Sammlung, 1048, ascribed to Cesare da Sesto. 19

20

Munich, 1890, p. 230, no.

ALONSO

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II

was therefore executed. T h e event would probably have happened shortly after the tremendous stir aroused by the excavation of the Laocoön in 1506. Michael Angelo, although he did not take part in Bramante's contest, had enjoyed the excitement of being one of the very first to view the classical group as it emerged from the earth, and it is an axiom that his own pre-baroque inclination to agonized contortions of the human body were confirmed by the precedent of the Laocoön, which, in his ignorance of the greatest antiques, he must have thought to incorporate the highest attainments of which the Greeks were capable. W e know that Alonso remained long enough in Italy to be profoundly moved by the expression of this aspect of Buonarroti's genius in the Sistine ceiling, for, among the authentic drawings that the Spaniard has left us, in the sheet belonging to the Academy of St. Ferdinand at Madrid, a study for a Crucifixion containing six sketches for figures nailed to trees, the form on the upper right was directly suggested by the hanging Haman in one of the ceiling's four great spandrels (Fig. 3). Another earlier achievement of Michael Angelo, the cartoon of the Battle of Cascina done for the Palazzo Vecchio at Florence, had helped inculcate in the young Castilian the fondness for those twists of the body by which later he was to give vent to Spanish religious intensity, although the supreme Florentine master himself had not yet in the cartoon employed the contraffosto for ardent, personal, emotional content. Both in discussing the cartoon in his life of Michael Angelo and again early in his life of Baccio Bandinello, Vasari records that Alonso with many others acquired technical ability by making drawings from its agitated and convoluted nudes. It is generally thought that Berruguete was the "young Spaniard" for whom Buonarroti, in a letter from Rome of July 2, 1508, asked one of his brothers in Florence to get permission to see the cartoon, but who was refused the opportunity, as Michael Angelo, in a letter of July 31 of this year to the brother, states that he has learned, rather testily demanding at the same time that the privilege be denied also to others. T h e probability that the Spanish youth who has the signal honor of being called by the great Florentine a buono giovane was indeed Berruguete is increased by a passage in still another letter of Michael Angelo now to his father, dated in 1512 from Rome, in which he asks after the health of a garzone sfagnuolo, a painter named Alonso, who was reported to him as ill

Fig. 3. ALONSO BERRUGUETE. STUDIES FOR A CRUCIFIXION (DRAWING). ACADEMY OF ST. FERDINAND, MADRID {Photo.

Mas)

ALONSO

BERRUGUETE

13

and whose condition, he says, might be learned from Granacci, one of the Spaniard's acquaintances.22 If, then, it is hard to question the identification of Berruguete with the young man of Buonarroti's letters, the reliable assertions of Vasari prove that he was eventually allowed to copy from the Battle of Cascina, which, carried out by Michael Angelo in 1504-1505, did not suffer the irreparable tragedy of destruction until after the restoration of the Medici to Florence in 1512, although certainly before 1520.23 Moreover, in the set of drawings ascribed to Berruguete in the Uffizi at Florence but deriving from Spain there is one generally accepted as his handicraft and representing two perturbed masculine nudes (Fig. 4) both of which seem not too free adaptations from figures in the cartoon. Orueta,24 however, has well pointed out that we lack any factual basis for the allegations of Palomino 25 and Ceán Bermúdez 26 in regard to an actual membership of Berruguete among Michael Angelo's pupils or assistants and that Pacheco 27 in his Arte de la f intura, a much earlier book (1638) than theirs, implies that Alonso had never enjoyed this benefit, when he says that Gaspar Becerra was a better artist because he followed Buonarroti's lessons. Indeed it is probable that Palomino and Ceán merely deduced their affirmations from Vasari's less explicit words. It is indeed symptomatic of strong Italian influence that, contrary to the custom of his Spanish predecessors, and as yet of almost all his indigenous contemporaries (so far as we can judge by the paucity of preserved specimens), he should have made careful drawings and considered them partly as objects of art in themselves, although, as in his paintings, he fails to rise to very high rank in this aspect of his profession. W e can scarcely doubt that the two examples which I have mentioned were done in Italy and proudly brought back by him to his native land, but the only other one unquestioningly assigned to 2 2 F o r the letters, see G i o v a n n i P a p i n i , Lettere di Michelangelo Buonarroti, Lanciano, 1 9 1 0 , pp. 38, 4 2 , and 7 1 . T h e first t w o letters w e r e published ( w i t h a f e w mistranslations) as l o n g a g o in Spain as 1866 b y G r e g o r i o C r u z a d a V i l l a a m i l in El arte en Esfaña, V , 103—105. 2 3 T h e destruction consisted in its b e i n g broken into parts, w h i c h were distributed t h r o u g h o u t I t a l y and have not s u r v i v e d ; but it w a s not, a c c o r d i n g to V a s a r i , a n y o f these parts that B e r r u g u e t e studied but the actual cartoon w h e n it w a s still in the P a l a z z o Vecchio. 24 Berruguete, pp. 9 0 - 9 1 . 2 5 See Sánchez C a n t o n ' s republication of P a l o m i n o in his Fuentes literarias, IV ( 1 9 3 6 ) , 12. 26 Diccionario, I, 130. 2 7 Sánchez C a n t ó n , Fuentes literarias, I I ( 1 9 3 3 ) , 1 5 J .

FIG. 4. ALONSO BERRUGUETE. STUDIES OF MALE NUDES (DRAWING). UFFIZI, FLORENCE {Photo.

Gernsheim)

ALONSO

BERRUGUETE

15

Berruguete by Sánchez Cantón in his authoritative publication of Spanish drawings 28 was executed in Spain, a study for the Christ of his late work, the Transfiguration carved in wood in the church of S. Salvador in Ûbeda, which except for the figure of the Saviour perished in the civil war. T h e finest of his achievements as a pure draughtsman, it curiously possesses, although intended to be sculptured, a more essentially pictorial quality, especially in its gentle sfumatezza, than his formal paintings (Fig. 5). Sánchez Cantón is probably right in the scholarly caution with which he puts a mark of interrogation after the attributions of the two other drawings in the Uffizi set, a torso of a nude youth and a Christ at the Column, and both he and Gómez-Moreno evidently reject, because they omit reference to it, the leaf with two saints in the Academy of St. Ferdinand at Madrid which Orueta claims for Berruguete. Orueta himself wisely refuses to put the master's name to a drawing in the Biblioteca Nacional at Madrid, representing a pair of mythological figures in a lunette, and to a whole Spanish book of 178 leaves of sketches, which Albrecht H a u p t 2 9 in 1903 examined as then in German possession and tended to consider Alonso as in very large part their author. Although the drawings in the book, which, with the exception of nine plates representing horses, are devoted only to motifs of architectural ornament and escutcheons, must have been done in the middle of the sixteenth century, it is hard to detect in them anything suggesting Berruguete's highly individual modes. 30 It goes without saying that, with his keen artistic interests, he could not have failed to watch what other Italian masters besides those whom I have mentioned were executing, and we shall be able actually to discover in his paintings traces of an admiration for the attainments of Raphael and his circle. Mayer, 3 1 however, is right in rejecting Roberto Longhi's 3 2 tentative but, even so, entirely untenable attribution to Alonso, while in Italy, of the Dormition in the 28 Dibujos españoles, five volumes, M a d r i d , 1930—1940. B e r r u g u e t e ' s d r a w i n g s are taken up in v o l u m e I I , pis. 101—105. 29Jahrbuch der königlich freussischen Kunstsammlungen, Berlin, X X I V ( 1 9 0 3 ) , 3—13; n o w in the F u n d a c i ó n L á z a r o G a l d e a n o , M a d r i d . 30 F o r illustrations and a somewhat more extended discussion of the d r a w i n g s by or attributed to B e r r u g u e t e , see : Sánchez C a n t ó n , of. cit. ; R i c a r d o de Orueta, Berruguete y su obra, pp. 1 8 7 - 1 9 2 ; and G ó m e z - M o r e n o , Aguilas del Renacimiento Esfañol, pp. 1 7 7 — 1 7 8 . 3 1 T h i r d Spanish edition of his Historia de la fintura española, M a d r i d , 1 9 4 7 , p. 230. 32 Oficina ferrarese, R o m e , 1 9 3 4 , pp. 1 1 0 — 1 1 1 .

FIG. 5. ALONSO BERRUGUETE. STUDY FOR CHRIST TRANSFIGURED. UFFIZI, FLORENCE {Photo.

Gernsheim)

ALONSO

BERRUGUETE

17

Massari Collection at Ferrara, which has often been claimed for Baldassare Estense ; and there thus collapses also the Italian scholar's idea that the Spanish youth might have included Ferrara in his travels. T h e "Alonso Spagnuolo" listed by Vasari at the end of his life of Masaccio among a host of others who benefited by studying in the Brancacci chapel at Florence can scarcely be anyone else than Berruguete, who thus receives the honor of a fifth mention in the Vita. W e are informed of no other Spanish artist called Alonso in Italy during the fifteenth or early sixteenth century, and Vasari, who manifestly was familiar with Berruguete's actions during his Italian sojourn, would expect to be understood in designating him only by his Christian name when in other passages he specifies him more clearly by adding the cognomen. There is little in common between Masaccio and Berruguete, but the Spaniard, like the many others wise enough to spend long hours among the Brancacci frescoes, strengthened thereby the fundamentals of his craft. Orueta has more or less justly wished to descry that he had his eyes open to the achievements that the Florentine sculptors of the early Renaissance had left behind them, especially Donatello, but such memories did little more than supply him with a few ideas for poses and compositions, not welded into an integral part of his style, and in any case apply principally to his sculpture. T h e Alonso mentioned in Michael Angelo's letter of 1512 as at Florence can scarcely have been anyone else than Berruguete, 33 and indeed he must have remained in Italy late enough to see and, as we have noted, to make a drawing from the large spandrel in the Sistine ceiling that depicts the hanging of Haman and was one of the last parts done by Michael Angelo in 1 5 1 1 - 1 5 1 2 . 3 4 Gómez-Moreno brings him back to Spain at least by 1517 on the supposition that in the reference in the litigation of 1525 about his ill-starred paintings for S. Lorenzo at Valladolid, 35 the witness Gaspar de Valladolid, who asserts an acquaintance of eight years with Alonso, could not have known him before his repatriation ; but there is no absolute proof that Gaspar himself had not been in Italy, and we cannot demand a precise chronological memory on the witness's part any more than in the See above, p. 7. Charles de T o l n a y , Michelangelo, Press, 194.J, p. 1 1 2 . 3 5 Gómez-Moreno, of. cit., p. 148. 33

34

II, The Sistine Ceiling,

Princeton University

ALONSO

ι8

BERRUGUETE

case of the aged Berruguete's faulty allegation 36 about his own years. Nevertheless, Alonso must have returned sometime before 3 7 the earliest date at which by document we can confirm his presence again in Spain, December 20, 1518, for in this document he is already described as court-painter to the young Emperor Charles V and enjoys the distinction of the title magnífico attached to his name. From Flanders the sovereign had set foot in the peninsula for the first time in September of 1517 and established his court on November 18 at Valladolid, where he would have encountered Berruguete and taken him under his protection. W e can only guess at the reasons for the honors conferred upon the artist, who was no more than about thirty years old. Possibly they were due to his father's reputation or the prestige that belonged in the Renaissance to anyone who had been trained in Italy ; but he may have come home at a considerably prior moment in the second decade of the Cinquecento and acquired renown through works now lost. T h e document of December 20, 1518, is his contract at Saragossa, where the court was temporarily residing, to do the non-extant tomb of Charles V's Burgundian chancellor, Jean le Sauvage, in a chapel of the church of Sta. Engracia. 38 T h e Aragonese painter and writer on art in the seventeenth century, Jusepe Martinez, 3 9 informs us, in all likelihood trustworthily, that Berruguete executed in the chapel also the destroyed retable, consisting at least largely of paintings, and, although he praises the achievement almost hyperbolically, he shows critical acumen in discerning in the central compartment, a Baptism, an outstanding characteristic of the master, the use, in his pictorial production, of the cold tones more natural to sculpture. H e extols, however, in the retable the color of the portraits of the donor and his family, the loss of which is particularly to be regretted because no painted examples of this phase of Berruguete's output in other commissions are preserved. T h e interest of his next task, a series of paintings with scenes from See above, n.4. T h e consideration that he seems to have known prints by Agostino Veneziano done in 1518 (see below, p. 26) cannot be taken as proof that he stayed in Italy until this year because the prints would have circulated in Spain. 38 For the document, see M . Abizanda y Broto, Documentos para la historia artística y literaria de Aragón, Saragossa, II ( 1 9 1 7 ) , 254—255, from which source it is republished by Gómez-Moreno, pp. 238—239. T h e contract is not preserved in f u l l but sufficiently to show that it has to do with the tomb of Le Sauvage. 3 9 T h e passage in his book Discursos •practicables del nobilísimo arte de la pintura is most easily accessible in Sánchez Cantón, Fuentes literarias, III ( 1 9 3 4 ) , 69—70. 36

37

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19

the Old and N e w Testaments for no less a place than the Capilla Real at Granada, is that they emphasize his Italianism, since they were to be carried out in fresco, a medium of sacred decoration not common in Spain at this period. T h e definite contract drawn up at Granada is dated September 24, 1521, but the negotiations for the enterprise had commenced before, and continued to drag on for some years by reason of lack of funds. Berruguete definitely states in a letter to the Emperor that he had made beginnings on the undertaking} but evidently he desisted, and at any rate nothing is preserved. 40 A further significance attaches to all this business because in the letter to Charles V he states it to be intended that the backgrounds of the frescoes simulate golden mosaic "in the Italian manner," a procedure that we find exemplified in his actual extant paintings from S. Benito, at Valladolid. Until we arrive at these paintings, we need not linger over the events of his life or his commissions. W e have already referred to the unrealized decoration of the doors in S. Lorenzo, Valladolid, and his sculptures and activity in the polychromy of statuary do not fall within our scope. Continuing in his honorable office as painter to the King, he was appointed on October 1, 1523, to a very curious post for an artist, clerk of the criminal court, but it is evident that this was merely a royal mode of augmenting his income beyond the sums that his sculptures and paintings brought him, for he was constantly allowed to hire a substitute in the exercise of the actual duties. H e held the post until October 31, 1542, when it was taken over by an Alvaro de Prado and eventually, c. 1550, by Berruguete's son of the same Christian name as he himself. 41 From the worldly standpoint, indeed, he became successful financially and in favor with his sovereign, leading, like another Titian, the existence of a prince, constructing a palace for his residence at Valladolid and in 1559, only two years before his death in the second half of September, 1561, 40 For a detailed account of his employment at Granada, see Gómez-Moreno's special article, En la Camilla Real de Granada, Archivo esfañol de arte y arqueología, I ( 1 9 2 5 ) , 262—267, and II ( 1 9 6 2 ) , n o — 1 1 4 . 4 1 T h e primary source for the documents in regard to the clerkship is M a r t í y Monsó, of. cit., pp. 1 1 7 ff., but Filemón Arribas (Boletín del Seminario de Estudios de Arte y Arqueología, Universidad de Valladolid, tomo X V , fascículos X L I X - L (1948—1949), 243-249 has rectified one or two misinterpretations of Marti, proving especially that it was the son and not the father w h o on August 29, 15J3, sold the post to a Sebastián Laso. Esteban García Chico has published a further record of the clerkship dated M a y 27, 1534, in Boletín del Seminario de Estudios de Arte y Arqueología, Universidad de Valladolid, X X I V ( 1 9 5 8 ) , 78.

20

ALONSO

BERRUGUETE

purchasing, near the city, a country estate at Ventosa de la Cuesta from the part of the royal domain that Philip I I was obliged to sell in order to replete the exhausted treasury. H e even owned a house at Madrid. 4 2 T h e paintings for S. Benito el Real, Valladolid, are his first extant, documented works in this major art and comprised only a small part of his retable for the high altar of the church of the Benedictine monastery, which consisted mainly of sculpture. Contracted for on November 8, 1526, and completed and installed by November 27, 1532, 43 the retable was dismantled in the nineteenth century, but its four paintings and practically all its carvings are preserved in the Museo Nacional de Escultura at Valladolid. Originally comprised within the body of the retable, the paintings represent the Nativity, Flight into Egypt (Fig. 6), and the Evangelists Sts. Matthew (Fig. 7) and M a r k (Fig. 8). T h e absence of the other two Evangelists is perhaps explicable on the suppositions that they were included among those statues the subjects of which we can no longer identify or that they were meant to constitute the remaining two painted panels of the six specified in the contract but by an alteration of program were never carried out. Although Berruguete's sculpture lies, strictly speaking, without the province of this book, we must define his style in this art in order to understand how much of it he retained in his less fundamentally characteristic painting. T h e definition, however, we may reduce to its simplest terms. T h e style consists in a curious combination of the elongated and exaggerated posed figures of mannerism with the agitation, contortions, and religious emotionalism of the proclivities that he launched in Spain, although already prophesied in Michael Angelo. T h e stimulus to involutions of the human body he derived partly, as we have seen, from Buonarroti and his personal study of the Laocoön group, but, instead of using for these involutions the powerful and heroic forms of the great Florentine, he found his vehicles of expression ordinarily in attenuated physiques which owed something to the precocious manneristic tendencies of Filippino Lippi and Pier di Cosimo but resemble the modes that the typical Italian mannerists such as Bronzino and Jacopo Sansovino had not evolved before Alonso García Chico, loc. cit., 79. F o r the many documents connected with the retable, see especially M a r t í y Monsó, of. cit., pp. 138 ff. 42 43

FIG. 6. ALONSO BERRUGUETE. FLIGHT INTO EGYPT. MUSEO NACIONAL DE ESCULTURA, VALLADOLID {Photo.

Mas)

FIG. 7. ALONSO BERRUGUETE. ST. M A T T H E W . MUSEO NACIONAL DE ESCULTURA, VALLADOLID {Photo.

Mas)

FIG. 8. ALONSO BERRUGUETE. ST. MARK. MUSEO NACIONAL DE ESCULTURA, VALLADOLID (Photo,

Mas)

24

ALONSO BERRUGUETE

was repatriated and that in considerable degree emanated from his own aesthetic nature. Here and there we espy a head suggested by the examples in Raphael and the other Italian classicists of the early Cinquecento, but the rare classic reminiscences and the manneristic types alike are fused with or transmuted into forms that display little fondness for Italian beauty of person and continue, instead, the vital realism of the late Gothic sculpture of Spain. To phrase it another way, in place of the idealized figures of Italian mannerism, we have frequently haggard and unprepossessing types which bespeak the indigenous admiration for asceticism. The religious feeling, indeed, is raised to a pitch of intensity that, surpassing even the general European standard of the next century, must be regarded as an innate Spanish quality to which the fervid temperament of Berruguete himself gave a more passionate manifestation than almost anyone else in the history of the country's art except his immediate successor in the school of Valladolid, the sculptor Juan de Juni. The struggling agitation and agonized visages of his sculpture, however, had more than a religious cause: as with Michael Angelo, they were, without regard to theme, an inevitable release for his own neurotic individuality and for a susceptibility to the Weltschmerz. Ecstatic, well-nigh phrenetic arms through windings of the body, expression of the countenance, and grouping of the figures were his preponderant concern, and, when he had once achieved these ends, he was often not careful in his sculpture about correctness, especially in anatomy, skimping the execution or turning it over to assistants. Much of all this makes him a precursor of El Greco, and indeed, by a strange paradox, his sculpture is more pictorial than his actual painting, which, as we shall find, possesses more of a truly glyptic approach. The agitation of baroque sculpture in general and its choice of an evanescent moment for representation endowed it with a pictorial tone, but the characteristic is perhaps even more pronounced in Berruguete. I am referring, of course, to the essential nature of his sculpture and not to his retention of polychromy, which, it might be argued, has always since Hellenic days helped to give a more flastic effect by picking out the forms and emphasizing their relief. The fundamental fact about his paintings is that in them he gave less rein to the revolutionary trends incorporated in his sculpture and that he conformed in greater degree both to Italian classicism and to the long established iconography of Spanish art. Since the panels of

ALONSO B E R R U G U E T E

25

the Evangelists from the retable of S. Benito fall without his regular pictorial style, we may postpone for the moment their consideration and illustrate his ordinary modes in painting by the two compartments of sacred narrative. The compositions do not depart widely from the indigenous precedents of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries,44 and the majority of the types witness to an Italianate desire for nobility and physical beauty. In the countenance of the Virgin we perhaps ought to recognize memories of Raphael rather than of Michael Angelo. The physiques are less affected by manneristic elongation, and only the figure of St. Joseph in both compartments is animated by much of the "baroque" excitement that pervades Berruguete's statuary. Even so he waits until he treats the foster-father of Our Lord in the Flight into Egypt to bestow upon him something of the haggard realism and inward distress of so many of the carved forms in the retable. The sculptural character of his paintings is signalized by the powerful existence of the forms in three dimensions, by the restriction of the composition to a few big forms, by the binding of these forms into eminently compact arrangements, notably in the Flight into Egypt, and by the subordination or almost absence of landscape. In addition to his own natural preference for sculpture, he was probably actuated by the considerations that in the majority of instances his paintings were combined in monuments with his sculptures and that a sense of harmony demanded that the former be treated in terms of the latter art. It has often been pointed out that in color he approaches his pictures in the spirit of a sculptor rather than a painter — which is another way of saying that their tonality is cold and that he takes little delight in passages of color as things in themselves or in delicacy of their modelling or of transitions from hue to hue or within the chiaroscuro. His palette therefore is restricted, descending in the draperies to dull, sombre, almost unnameable tints 5 and, when for the flesh and in other spots the gamut is brighter, the contrasts are harsh, as between the carmine and blue in the countenances or between the more vivid passages and the ashen garments. 45 The lights and shadows are likewise violently juxtaposed to one another without gradual transition, 44 The saw and axe lying on the ground in the Flight into Egypt are symbols of the tradition that St. Joseph supported the Holy Family in the foreign country by plying his trade of carpenter, so that he would naturally carry his tools with him : see Mrs. Jameson, Legends of the Madonna, edition London, 1903, p. 3545 under the

heading Repose in 45

Egypt.

Berruguete's color is admirably analyzed by Ricardo del Orueta, Berruguete, 128—129.

pp.

ALONSO

26

BERRUGUETE

prophesying the tenebrosi of the seventeenth century, and this not only in the nocturnal scene into which the Nativity is made but also in the Flight into Egypt. The abruptness of chromatic contrasts not only is provoked by Berruguete's sculptural insensibility to color but also accords with a general proclivity of manneristic painting, whose other exponents, however, usually indulge in more brilliant tonalities. Despite some of these characteristics, which might or not be regarded as defects according to one's aesthetic code, it takes no more than a glance to realize that even in the paintings we are in the presence of an outstanding master who draws and models with vigour and ease, who composes dexterously, and who infuses into his forms and transmits to us his own great and forceful personality. These qualities will become the more evident through comparison with his many imitators, whom we shall subsequently examine, and indeed it is specifically demanded in the contract for the retable of S. Benito that the paintings shall be executed by the artist himself. In judging Berruguete in this aspect of the Fine Arts, also, it must not be forgotten that, although posterity will always think first of his sculpture, he is consistently denominated in the contemporary documents as a painter and therefore must usually have so described himself. The two Evangelists constitute exceptions to his characteristic procedures in painting in that they are not only more dependent upon Italian precedents but also treated to a further extent in the fashion of his sculptures. Mayer 46 describes them as very directly inspired by Agostino Veneziano's engravings of the subjects made in 1 5 1 8 , which were themselves based upon works of Giulio Romano, 47 but, although Berruguete probably caught a few ideas for details of postures and compositions from this source, for instance in the seating of the Evangelists upon clouds, the borrowings are unimportant and without significance for the essential nature of the pictures, since they are wholly translated into his own terms. The ponderous and stocky forms of Agostino's prints have become the attenuated and mannered beings of Alonso's statuary, although differentiated from so many of his figures in the round by countenances impregnated with Italian idealism rather than with the agony of perturbed fervor. St. Matthew's symbol of the angel or man holds the tablet for him to write upon, but beside St. Mark and his lion there is added the innovation 46 47

In his discussion of Alonso Berruguete in Historia de la pintura española, p. 230. A d a m Bartsch, Le peintre graveur-, Leipzig, X I V ( 1 8 6 7 ) , 83, nos. 92—95.

ALONSO

BERRUGUETE

27

of a personage whom Berruguete may have wished to pass off as an angel but who looks entirely like a classical muse. T h e sculptural impression is increased because the figures are executed in grisaille and relieved not against landscapes but flat, conventionalized backgrounds meant to imitate such Italian prototypes as those of Pintoricchio's Sibyls in Sta. Maria del Popolo at Rome and of Raphael's adornment of the ceiling and spandrels in the Stanza della Segnatura. T h e fretting, however, that reproduces the effect of little pieces of auric mosaic was actually carried out only in a patch above St. Matthew, leaving merely expanses of undiapered gold in the rest of the areas. It is to be remembered that Berruguete had promised that in the never executed frescoes at Granada he would employ "Italian" backgrounds of simulated golden mosaic. In Alonso's only other documented and preserved work that includes paintings, the retable over the high altar of the church of the Colegio del Arzobispo or, as now also called, the Colegio de Nobles Irlandeses at Salamanca, the pictorial sections vie in the space that they cover with the sculptures. His prestige is demonstrated by the fact that, when it was ordered on November 3, 1529, by the archbishop of Toledo, Alonso de Fonseca, Berruguete was allowed unusual latitude in the planning of the structure and choice of subjects.48 It is evident that he did not comply with the agreement that it should be completed within a year and a half, for merely the lower section, containing four paintings connected with the H o l y Infancy, seems to have been carried out in the period immediately succeeding the contract, and the rest, comprising sculpture only in part by the master and four additional paintings from the N e w Testament entirely due to another artist, was evidently the result of a long continuation of the enterprise, until the retable was put into its present shape in or after 1549, when the church was enlarged to its existing length. As prescribed in the contract, the four lower paintings, which depict the Nativity, Circumcision, Epiphany, and Flight into Egypt, were obviously executed by Berruguete's own hand. 49 Executed roughly at about the same time as the paintings of S. Benito, they do not depart from their style and teach us little new about Alonso 48 T h e contract is quoted and summarized in part by Ponz. Viaje de Es-paña, Madrid, 1783, tomo X I I , carta V I I , 43—46. 49 Gómez-Moreno ascribes to him also the painting· in the pediment, which represents God the Father amidst futti, but judgment is made difficult by the difficulty of study because of the high position of that detail and by the lack of a good photograph.

ALONSO

28

BERRUGUETE

in this phase of his activity. Indeed, the principal additional light that they do throw upon his attainments is the very fact that, despite the keen invention and alertness exhibited by his sculpture, he did not put forth the effort to vary the compositions of his paintings or to enliven them much with creative imagination. Although his several sculptured treatments of the Epiphany are different from one another, the painting at Salamanca follows the lines of the carved representative from S. Benito, but it is symptomatic that the painted version is more traditional and much less mannered and agitated than the sculptured one, partly abandoning, for instance, the nervous curve of the foremost Wise Man and yet creating in the figure one of his most obvious prophecies of E l Greco. The Circumcision also repeats the composition of the carved rendering from S. Benito, and in the Nativity and Flight into Egypt there are only such insignificant divergences from the painted specimen at Valladolid as the substitution of shepherds for the adoring angels. This completes the short list of Berruguete's extant documented paintings nor does any picture exist authenticated by his signature. Notices are preserved of orders of 1546 for two portraits, a phase of art that we should have scarcely thought congenial with his style ·, and as a matter of fact he never complied with one or perhaps both of these commissions.50 T h e second was a request by the Marquesa del Zenete at Valencia that he copy a portrait of the Comendador Juan de Zúñiga existing at Valladolid. There is documentary evidence that the negotiations may have bogged down for financial reasons, and the picture with a likeness, purporting to represent the gentleman, in the Archivo of the Palacio Real Menor at Barcelona, is manifestly a Flemish creation in a technique alien to our master. 51 It is with humble regret that my conscience compels me to reject all the paintings which are ascribed to him by Gómez-Moreno on internal evidence but which will concern us on subsequent pages as by various assistants, imitators, and other painters — a retable of St. Lucy in the church of Sta. Eulalia at Paredes de Nava, the altarpiece in the church of S. Martin at Medina del Campo, a Crucifixion that has entered the Museum of Valladolid, from the church of the monastery of S. Benito in the city as one of the paintings in a retable con50

Gómez-Moreno, Las águilas-, p. 1 7 7 . José M . March, Tres tablas del Paulan de Barcelona, Boletín de la Sociedad Es-pañola de Excursiones, L U ( 1 9 4 8 ) , 289—293. 51

ALONSO

BERRUGUETE

29

sisting also of carvings for which the sculptor Gaspar de Tordesillas contracted in 1546, the paintings in the principal retable in the chapel of the Visitation at the southeast end of the church as of the convent of Sta. Ursula at Toledo, 5 a and (claimed for him with somewhat less conviction by the Spanish scholar) an altarpiece in the cathedral of Palencia depicting Christ presenting to His mother the redeemer of the old dispensation after the harrowing of hell. W e shall find, for instance, that the Paredes retable of St. Lucy is very obviously a creation of Cristóbal de Herrera, and, besides, even if we could for the sake of argument attribute it to Berruguete, it was absolutely inconceivable that he should have executed this example of highly developed mannerism at the date to which Gómez-Moreno assigns it, before Alonso went to Italy, long before any works of the class had been produced in Spain, and when as a lad, if he were painting at all, he would have followed his father's modes, which, in comparison with the style that he himself evolved, were archaic. In the retable in Sta. Ursula at Toledo, it may readily be admitted that Berruguete did the sculpture, especially the central group of the Visitation, and the somewhat unusual compositions of the paintings may indicate that he made sketches for them ; but I am disposed to agree with Orueta 5 3 in doubting that he applied his own brush to them and to believe that he reserved this task for another. Even Gómez-Moreno acknowledges the carelessness of craft that they betray. 54 In atonement for these eliminations, I am happy confidently to increase our exiguous inheritance from Berruguete the painter by what to me is his greatest achievement in this aspect of his artistic personality, a panel of the Pietà that used to belong to the convent of the Carmelitas Descalzas at Toro but has now been moved to the cathedral of Zamora (Fig. 9). His authorship is so entirely patent that I am surprised that it has not been recognized before. T h e figures have the strong, magnificent, sculptural relief, the inward force, 52 In addition to the discussion of the retable in his book, see his article in the Boletín de la Sociedad Castellana de Excursiones, V I I ( 1 9 1 5 — 1 9 1 6 ) , 169. This retable was transferred after 1961 to the Museo de Santa Cruz, T o l e d o ; illustrated in Consuelo Sanz-Pastor, Alonso Berruguete, Guia de la exposición conmemorativa del IV centenario de su muerte, Madrid, 1961, p. 53. 53 Berruguete, p. 160. His reconstruction of the original arrangement of the retable seems more logical than Gomez-Moreno's. 54 F o r the impossibility of attaching Berruguete's name to the Dormition in the Massari Collection, Ferrara, see above, p. 17.

FIG. 9. ALONSO BERRUGUETE. (Photo.

PIETÀ. CATHEDRAL, ZAMORA Gudiol)

ALONSO B E R R U G U E T E

31

the nobility and superior modelling that baffled his imitators ; for instance, the Master of Toro active in the region of this town and of Zamora; they are overspread with his characteristic chiaroscuro; and one of his admirable and closely knit compositions welds the few, large forms together. He even repeats some of his human types. The St. John provides in features and hair a full-face view of the foremost angel in profile in the Nativity from S. Benito; for the Magdalene and for the Virgin of the Flight into Egypt, one could imagine that a single model had been used; and the head of the sorrowing Mother would look even more similar that it does, were it not partly enveloped by the wimple. The landscape in geology, foliage, lowering clouds, and general bleakness (here suited to the tragedy) resembles what the personages do not hide of the setting to the Nativity from S. Benito, and, as in the case of the excited shepherds in this setting, the right background of the Pietà supplies space for subordinate incidents in diminished scale, in the valley the Via Dolorosa and on the hill of Calvary the bodies of the thieves still hanging on their crosses. The color also does not violate Alonso's addiction to subdued tonalities. Since nothing is known of the picture's history beyond its existence in the Toro convent, we cannot say whether it is a relic of an altarpiece, to which its comparatively small dimensions 55 would have been suited, or constituted a separate effort. Certainly quite worthy of such an effort is the distinguished personal craft 5 6 that he here exerted, especially upon the reverently beautiful delineation of the head and body of Our Lord. Despite the sculptural quality of the forms, it is the most "painterly" of Berruguete's works, to use a neologism, for example in the greater prominence and attention given to the landscape, where at the left a Titianesque burst of sunset light is contrasted with the general murkiness as if in symbolism of the Resurrection. The restraint with which the sincere grief is expressed and the lesser concessions to mannerism may indicate a date prior to the retable of S. Benito, though after, of course, his return from Italy. 55

centimetres in width by 7 1 in height.

W r i t i n g in 1 9 2 7 his volume on the Provincia de Zamora in the series, Catàlogo monumental de España, Madrid, vol. I, ( 2 3 9 ) Gómez-Moreno was so impressed by the fine execution of the panel that he called it Italian, but I am sure that, if he had studied it again for his book, Las águilas, of 1 9 4 1 , he would have discerned Berruguete's hand. 56

CHAPTER II THE

SCHOOL OF Ι.

VALLADOLID

CRISTÓBAL DE HERRERA

Cristóbal de Herrera, 1 one of the most interesting followers of Alonso Berruguete, is established as an artistic personality by his paintings in the high altar ( 1 5 4 4 ) of Santa M a r í a la Sagrada at Tordehumos.

A l t h o u g h awarded the whole contract at 180,000 mara-

vedís, he sublet a third part each to Juan de Villoldo and to Francisco de Amberes. 2

T h e language of the document indicates that

these two men did the gilding, but the top row of paintings, with the possible exception of the Lamentation, is by a different hand from the lower section which may therefore be assumed to be by one of them. Since Francisco de Amberes is an unknown quantity and since Villoldo's style is not well established, the division of the paintings between them remains an unsolved problem. 3 T h e two lower rows of pictures seem certainly to be the work of Cristóbal de Herrera. 4 T h e sculpture in the retable at Tordehumos plays a considerable 1 Ceán Bermúdez (Diccionario, II, 34) records his first appearance as gilder of the reja in the sanctuary of Palencia Cathedral in 1524 in collaboration with Andrés de Espinosa. 2 García Chico, Pintores, Valladolid, III, 1946, part ι , 41—43. 3 T h e dynasty of artists by the name of Villoldo remains to be studied with the exception of Isidro. See García Chico, loc. cit.; Thieme-Becker, Künstler-Lexikon, X X X I V ( 1 9 4 0 ) ; Ceán Bermúdez, Diccionario, V, 260-264; G. Weise, Spanische Plastik aus sieben Jahrhunderten, Reutlingen, III, part 2 ( 1 9 3 2 ) , 3 0 1 - 3 1 0 . Juan de Villoldo's style is shown by canvases in the Capilla del Obispo, M a d r i d : the Baptism over a side altar was declared to be his by Ceán Bermúdez ( A n g u l o , Pintura ¿el Renacimiento, fig. 2 0 7 ) . T h e Christ in the topmost row at Tordehumos resembles Villoldo according to this illustration but not the draperies, so far as I can see, whereas the two lowest rows are not in his style. T h i s Francisco de Amberes is otherwise unknown, but he might have done the top row. Either Francisco de Amberes or Juan de Villoldo did not carry out his full third of paintings. Editor's note: On the contrary Diego A n g u l o (Pintura del Renacimiento, Madrid, 1954, p. 1 9 5 ) gives all of the paintings to Juan de Villoldo. His opinion is accepted by Esteban García Chico (Catálogo monumental de la -provincia de Valladolid, Valladolid, II, 1959, 8O-86, pis. 6 4 - 7 1 ) who republishes the contracts of 1J44 in which the work was divided among three men. 4 Cristóbal de Herrera supplied the gilding and polychromy only for the sculptured high altar of the Colegiata at Husillos ( 1 5 6 8 ) . T h e altar in the chapel of Nuestra Señora del Rosario in S. Pablo at Palencia ( 1 5 7 8 ) was to be gilded and in addition he was to paint a picture of St. John the Baptist in the Desert.

T H E SCHOOL O F VALLADOLID rôle. The whole central vertical section is reserved for this medium, exhibiting in the main body of the structure, just above the tabernacle, the Annunciation, at the next higher level the Nativity, in the middle of the topmost tier the Purification, and as a kind of crown to the altarpiece an elaborately framed and emphasized niche, containing, except for a few -putti, only the solemnly isolated figure of the ascending Virgin, so that, in order to round out the subject of the Assumption, the awestruck Apostles have to be pushed, in a curious composition, outside the niche in two kneeling groups. Sculpture occupies also the predella, comprising the following scenes which aligned at the sides of the modern tabernacle separated by statuettes of saints: (reading from left to right), the Dormition of the Virgin, the Epiphany, and the Lamentation over the Dead Christ. Friezes of carved cherubs' heads divide the tiers in the main body of the retable, and the eight paintings by Cristóbal de Herrera flank in the two lower tiers the sculptures at the centre. The order of the themes of these paintings, which betrays no signs of having been disturbed since the work was completed, seems as jumbled as in the sculptured subjects of the predella, but there appears to have been an intent to arrange them at least in pairs. Above the Epiphany and Lamentation of the predella are depicted the Purification (thus repeating one of the sculptured themes in the middle of the altarpiece) and the Flight into Egypt. In the second tier in this part of the retable Herrera introduced the Harrowing of Hell (Fig. 10) and the Resurrection (Fig. n ) , but in the left part uniformity is violated because the members of the pairs are not disposed horizontally, as at the right, but vertically, the Betrayal above the Agony in the Garden in the outermost section and the Crucifixion above the Via Dolorosa next to the central sculpture. The succession of themes in the highest tier is likewise irregular (reading from right to left) the Visitation, Ecce Homo, Lamentation (again duplicating one of the sculptured scenes), and Flagellation. The style may be partially described as a heightened translation, by an original and forceful artist, of the extravagancies of Alonso Berruguete's sculpture into the terms of painting. Herrera abides by the fundamental manneristic qualities of his time and place, but he fuses with them tendencies then current in this region of Spain, carrying them further than in Alonso's paintings and even to a greater perturbation than the vehemence which in the latter's sculptures fills

Fig. IO. CRISTÓBAL DE HERRERA. HARROWING OF HELL. HIGH ALTAR. STA. MARÍA LA SAGRADA, TORDEHUMOS (Photo. Burgos Photo

Club)

FIG. IT. CRISTÓBAL DE HERRERA. RESURRECTION. HIGH ALTAR. STA. MARÍA LA SAGRADA, TORDEHUMOS (Photo. Burgos Photo Club)

36

T H E SCHOOL OF VALLADOLID

us with amazement. The elongations of mannerism are often present, as in the Christ, Adam, and Eve of the Harrowing of Hell ; and the Saviour in the Agony in the Garden and in the Betrayal illustrates the desire for strained religious expression. The neurotic proclivities of the mannerists declare themselves in the tension incorporated in many of the countenances, frequently resulting in a sacrifice of pulchritude, and the effect of exaggerated sensitivity is increased by a conscious sketchiness in the way in which the faces are delineated. Prime instances are the excited spectators above the priest in the Purification and the figures in the background of the Betrayal. Neither Alonso Berruguete nor almost any other Spanish painter attained to such a degree the chromatic ideals of mannerism in strident contrasts of color, especially of glaring whites and reds. This general accordance with the European fashions of the period, however, is amalgamated with anticipations of the baroque that nearly beggar the analogous prophecies by Alonso. Emotionalism reaches an extreme in violence both of posture and of movement. The Virgin in the Crucifixion has collapsed upon the ground despite St. John's support, and the Magdalene is prostrate at the foot of the cross except for an undulating upward bend of the middle of her body, an attitude that Herrera cultivates also in more erect figures for the sake of infusing his actors with nervous agitation, although he is thereby compelled, as in the case of the distraught visages, to neglect formal beauty and to permit himself harshly disagreeable lines, which, nevertheless, were often a desideratum among the mannerists. Of such postures, made even more peculiar by the projection of the rump at us, the foremost soldiers in the Betrayal and Resurrection constitute palpable examples. The Saviour in the Resurrection was ordinarily represented by the Spanish mannerists in a turmoil of movement, but in the version at Tordehumos the result is almost spasmodic. Further obvious embodiments of violent activity are supplied by the angel in the Agony in the Garden and even by a figure in whom little or no movement was implicit in the theme, the priest in the Purification. Herrera presages likewise the later break with traditional iconography and the craving for new and unusual compositions. H e increases the vibrating nervousness of the Betrayal by quite anomalously giving restive horses to Christ's captors, and, with one of those original and not ineffective touches to which baroque artists

T H E SCHOOL OF

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sometimes resorted, he causes Judas, as he hovers behind Our Lord, to stretch forth vauntingly the bag of thirty pieces of silver, the price of his treachery. In the Harrowing of H e l l , Adam and E v e stand behind Christ as the first fruits of His victory over the powers of darkness, and they are not grouped, according to the ordinary scheme, with the other worthies of the old dispensation whom H e is drawing forth from the infernal pit. Still more strikingly, Satan is not the customary grotesque demon crushed at the entrance to the realms of darkness by the conquering Redeemer, but he soars malevolently in the air as a diabolic transmutation of a fallen angel in the mode of Milton's Lucifer. Not only in this compartment but generally, Herrera portends the practices of the tenebrosi more than Berruguete but less than Gaspar de Palencia. Although doubtless influenced by Berruguete's achievements, he manifests his originality by nowhere actually following closely his inspirer's compositions. For his purposes, he possessed adequate but not paramount technical gifts. Cristóbal de Herrera turns out to be the quite unmistakable author of the retable in the church of Sta. Eulalia at Paredes de Nava, that, as we have seen,5 Gómez-Moreno wrongly ascribes to Alonso Berruguete. Mainly devoted to St. Lucy, it includes eight scenes from her story, seven of which are of common occurrence, her vision of St. Agatha in the midst of angels, her bestowal of clothing upon the indigent (as a symbol of her general distribution of her patrimony), her arraignment before Paschasius, the ineffectual attempt to drag her by ropes to a brothel, the equally unsuccessful use of oxen for the same foul project, her torment by fire, and the final stabbing of her throat (Fig. 12). T h e subject of the eighth compartment I interpret as the subsequent decapitation at Rome of her persecutor Paschasius for peculation, a theme the recognition of which is obscured because strangely the praying St. Lucy, who is said to have miraculously survived for a time the death blow, dominates the picture in the foreground as if she too had been translated, before her last breath, to the eternal city or as if his execution had taken place at her town, Syracuse. T h e retable is extended to five events in the life of the Virgin, the Annunciation, Visitation, Nativity, Epiphany, and (with a somewhat different composition from the rendering at Tordehumos) the Flight into Egypt. 5 P. 28. Diego A n g u l o in Pintura del Renacimiento, ings to Juan de Villoldo.

p. 195, attributes the paint-

Fig. 12. CRISTÓBAL DE HERRERA. MARTYRDOM OF ST. LUCY. STA. EULALIA, PAREDES DE NAVA (Photo. Gudioí)

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39

The community of style with the documented altarpiece is so obvious even to the casual glance that we need not labor the point by detailed comparisons but merely stress a few of the characteristics which we have already tabulated. The scenes of the pyre and of the stabbing are examples of Herrera's tingling, pre-baroque emotionalism, and the foremost beggar whom St. Lucy clothes is an exaggeration of his arbitrary distortion of attitudes. The men behind the oxen which are of no avail to budge her afford instances of his purposed partial omission of facial definition for the sake of nervous expressions, and the costume of St. Lucy in the majority of the panels dedicated to her exhibits conspicuously his manneristic juxtaposition of harsh colors. The tendency to limit the compositions to a few large figures is more tangible than at Tordehumos, occasioned somewhat perhaps by the oblong shape of the panels and causing the master in St. Lucy's arraignment to reduce the members of Paschasius' court to the lowest terms. Stylistic considerations assign to him another commission at Paredes de Nava, two painted panels in a retable in the church of Sta. María consisting chiefly of sculpture executed by Manuel Alvarez in 1558. A handsome and elaborate Plateresque frame, in the ornamented details of which the motif of the -putto plays a large part, enshrines in the central compartment a statue of St. Anthony Abbot, in the pinnacle a bust of God the Father, and in the middle of the predella a half-length of charity between sportive child-angels. The panels by Herrera find places in the lateral divisions beside St. Anthony Abbot and are devoted to themes related to the great anchorite, at the left the recluse whom he visited, St. Paul the Hermit (with the proper emblem of the raven carrying bread), and at the right his namesake, St. Anthony of Padua (Fig. 13). Once more we see the characteristic strong contrasts of light and shade that Herrera casts over his figures and once more types that we have encountered before in his production. The St. Anthony of Padua has a face that is only the masculine version of a female countenance for which the painter shows a preference, as particularly in the St. Elizabeth of the Visitation in the other altarpiece at Paredes de Nava, and the features and long, scraggly beard of St. Paul the Hermit vividly recall such heads as those of the priest and St. Joseph in the Purification or the Adam in the Harrowing of Hell at Tordehumos. The old man, moreover, looks out at us with the intense glance of the

Fie. 13.

CRISTÓBAL D E H E R R E R A . R E T A B L E OF ST. A N T H O N Y ABBOT. STA. M A R Í A , P A R E D E S D E NAVA {Photo. Gudioï)

T H E SCHOOL OF

VALLADOLID

Simon of Cyrene in the Tordehumos Via Dolorosa. T h e fingers of Christ in the Via Dolorosa, Agony in the Garden, and Resurrection, unpleasantly like the claws of a crab, constitute a Morellian detail repeated in St. Paul's right hand. T h e solemn, standing cult-figures of a retable forbad to Cristóbal de Herrera the emotional outbursts that he permitted himself in his narratives. His vogue in the province of Palencia is further evinced by no less than two retables that from the ruined ermita of S. Sebastián at Villamuriel de Cerrato, a town just south of the city, were imported into the parish church and have thence, I am informed, been recently sold, one to a chapel on a private estate in the province of Madrid. I know the retables only in photographs kindly given me by the distinguished Palencian scholar, D o n Ramón Revilla, which, however, are quite enough to reveal without a shadow of a doubt that Cristóbal de Herrera was their author. Esteban García Chico, 6 in the few lines that he devotes to the retables without attributing them to Herrera, states, with what reason I do not know, that their date is possibly 1528. Anyone who has examined the illustrations of his works that I have included or, better still, the originals will need no guidance to perceive the accord with his practices in human types, in costumes, in manneristic contrasts of dissonant hues, in sfumatezza, and in the pre-baroque tendencies to neurotic excitement, unprecedented compositions, and to effects of tenebrosità. One of the retables is dedicated to St. Peter, but a statue of St. Anthony of Padua has been substituted in the central space, whatever it originally contained, and a later canvas of the Flagellation has taken the place of the lost narrative compartment on the upper left side. T h e other three lateral compartments enshrine episodes from the life of St. Peter. A t the lower right he is depicted curing with his shadow, 7 in a composition which would naturally have been tranquil but which the painter's temperament causes to tingle with frantic postures, one of the afflicted actually throwing himself into the air. T h e other two panels have to do with the Apostle's strife with Simon Magus. T h e one at the upper right displays an event that I have never before encountered in 6 Boletín del Seminario de Estudios de Arte y Arqueología, Universidad de Valladolid, tomo X V I I I , fascículos L V I I I - L X ( 1 9 5 2 ) , 1 3 2 - 1 3 5 . T h e retables are briefly noticed also by Alfonso M a r í a T e j a d a , who likewise does not attempt an ascription in La antigua iglesia de Villamuriel, Boletín de la Sociedad Esfañola de Excursiones, L I X ( 1 9 5 1 ) , 269. 7 M y vol. I X , p. 76.

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T H E SCHOOL OF VALLADOLID

sacred art, St. Peter blessing the loaf which is secretly brought to him for use in his guessing contest against the enchanter. The scene at the lower left is his accomplishment of Simon's fall from his experiment in lévitation. A Pietà tops the principal compartment of the altarpiece, and the three sections of the predella exhibit at the centre the blessing Christ flanked by St. Luke and another Evangelist whose emblem the photograph fails to uncover. St. Catherine of Alexandria is honored in the second retable, but here an earlier statue of St. Sebastian has expelled the original occupant of the main compartment. The photographs at my disposal enable me to specify only three of the themes of the virgin martyr's life, her baptism by her early mentor, the hermit, her ordeal of the wheels, and her decapitation. The Crucifixion is in its usual place, above the principal compartment, and the predella appropriately marshals three other canonized women, the Magdalene between Lucy and Margaret. The frames of both retables, as so often at the period, are delightful and lively pieces of Plateresque carving, particularly the grotesques on the base of the one under the invocation of St. Peter. The extensive patronage enjoyed by Cristóbal de Herrera is further instanced by a retable of the Passion on the Gospel side of the parish church of Boadilla del Camino, north of Palencia, a work that illustrates also the lucky chance that has preserved so goodly a number of his achievements. As in some other altarpieces by him, the centre of the structure is consigned to sculpture, here of considerable merit — above the tabernacle a statue of the Saviour at the Column, at the next higher level the Lamentation over the dead Christ, and in the pinnacle the Crucifixion, leaving, however, the two thieves on their crosses to be painted by Herrera in small flanking compartments. The four lateral panels in the body of the retable by the painter represent the Agony in the Garden, the Via Dolorosa, the Entombment, and the Resurrection. In the two divisions of the predella beside the tabernacle the master depicted St. George (overcoming the dragon) and St. Anthony Abbot, a choice of celestial protectors that may reflect the names of the donors. Anyone who has followed me in the preceding discussion of Herrera requires no demonstration of the authorship. As a matter of fact, the neurotic representation of the Resurrection repeats the version at Tordehumos, and the rendering of the Agony in the Garden is not very different from the example in this pivotal production by our master. The

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43

dying malefactors afforded an opportunity for two of his wildest prebaroque contortions.

2.

T H E TORO

MASTER

Gómez-Moreno 8 long ago isolated and christened as the Toro Master, competent but still anonymous, a painter who, whether or not at any period in his life an actual pupil of Alonso Berruguete, certainly fell under his spell but broke less with the indigenous modes of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, rejecting much of the other's mannerism and pre-baroque excitement and evolving a style which, except in its indebtedness to Alonso, resembles, more concretely than does that of Antonio Vázquez, the practices of Juan Correa de Vivar, who indeed might have been his first teacher. His presence at the centre of Berruguete's activity, Valladolid, is proved, as we shall see, by his collaboration in an important retable done in the city during the years 1546-1547. H e is given the name of the Master of Toro by the Spanish scholar because he has left so many works in this town, and as a matter of fact we shall follow Gómez-Moreno's steps in finding that he was at least as extensively employed in the province of Zamora, to which Toro belongs, as his immediate predecessor in the region, Juan Rodriguez de Soli's.9 H i s most ambitious work at Toro is the retable over the high altar of the church of S. Tomás Cantuariense, in which the whole central section, the major part of the predella, the pinnacles, as well as the frames, consist of sculpture, which incorporates a creditable imitation of Alonso's style. T w e l v e paintings, four in each of the three tiers, flank the carvings in the middle: beside the statue of the church's patron, St. Thomas of Canterbury, the Annunciation (Fig. 14), Nativity, Circumcision, and Epiphany ; in the next higher tier, about the sculptured Lamentation over the Dead Christ, the Flight into Egypt, the young Saviour disputing with the Doctors, the Dormition, and the Assumption} and at the summit, as a complement to the carved Crucifixion, the Flagellation, Via Dolorosa, Harrowing of H e l l , and Resurrection. In the predella, the figures of the four Evangelists in the round give way at the centre to a painted Entombment. Berruguete's influence is more tangible in the sculpture but clearly 8 In his Catàlogo monumental of the Provìncia the town of T o r o , et passim. 9 See my vol. I X , pp. 510 and 5 1 4 ff.

de Zamora, Madrid, 1927) under

FIG. 14. T H E T O R O MASTER. ANNUNCIATION. HIGH A L T A R . S. T O M Á S CANTUARIENSE, T O R O (Photo. GuiioV)

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45

perceptible, nevertheless, in the paintings, differentiating them from the fashions even of Correa's late period. Often it infuses into them some degree of Berruguete's higher pitched emotionalism, although without his distressed contortions, as in Gabriel of the Annunciation, in the whole treatment of the Flagellation, and in the agitated flutter of Christ descending into hell, a figure which, in an unsuccessful incorporation of lively movement, betrays that, despite his considerable talents, he remained only a provincial in comparison with Alonso's Italianate expertness. When I studied the retable on the spot, however, I was struck by his greater success with the muscular nude of the Saviour in the Flagellation, whose anatomy he approached quite in the spirit of the High Renaissance. The human types, for instance the Virgin and bearded old men such as the kneeling Magus in the Epiphany, are frequently, to say the least, no less reminiscent of Berruguete than of Correa, and in any case more likely to exhibit a certain amount of mannered elongation. Over them, also, and indeed over a whole scene he is prone to spread an imitation of Alonso's nervous and eerie contrasts of light and shade. The landscapes resemble Correa's in more luxuriance of foliage than interested the sculpturally-minded Berruguete, whose paintings, however, are responsible for the Toro Master's introduction of dark and threatening clouds. T h e compositions do not reflect in any important way Berruguete's slight modifications of traditional iconography and therefore supply one of the factors approximating the Master to Correa. Indeed the arrangement of the Dormition looks as if he had seen the latter's rendering of the theme now in the Prado. 10 A good example of the rooting of his compositions in the past is afforded by the Assumption, in which, according to a mode common at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries, 11 Apostles and sepulchre are excluded, and the Virgin is merely depicted as soaring in the air accompanied by flights of angels, suggesting that the idea of the Immaculate Conception was also present in the iconography. Although, however, the Toro Master did not reproduce Berruguete's significant alterations of the compositions for the subjects, his actual acquaintance with these compositions is implied by the introduction of the cat upon the floor in the Annunciation, a detail occurring regularly in the versions of the theme by Alonso's 10 11

Vol. IX, fig. 95. Ibid., p. 727.

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followers and thus pointing to a lost painting from the hand of the artist himself. In sum, taking all elements into account, we can describe the T o r o Master's style as the reduction of the lessons from Berruguete to a placidity that smacks of Correa's achievements. T h e panels that once constituted a retable in the ruined church of the Salvador at Abezames (just north of T o r o ) and are now kept in the present farroquta afford a clear instance of one of the phenomena often embodied in the documents, the collaboration of two painters in a single monument or an artist's legal transfer of a part of a commission to another or someone else's completion of an enterprise left unfinished by the original contractor's death. Very frequently we are left in a quandary as to what happened in such instances because the paintings, when the monument is extant, turn out to be all in precisely the same style, but at Abezames two separate hands are plainly distinguishable, one that of the Toro Master and the other belonging to a personality to whom in a subsequent section of this book we shall give the name the Abezames Master. Moreover, since the latter seems more advanced stylistically than the former, we are perhaps justified in postulating that the Toro Master began the undertaking and then for some reason desisted, leaving the termination to his successor. Of the fourteen preserved panels, which relate the life of the Saviour by reason of the dedication of the church from which they derive, three, the Nativity, the Y o u n g Christ among the Doctors (Fig. 1 5 ) , and the Nailing to the Cross were so patently executed by the Toro Master as to require no demonstration of the ascription,12 nor can they be relics of an altarpiece in the Salvador separate from that of the Abezames Master since they fill the gaps in the life of Christ made by the latter's compartments. T h e Nativity and the scene of the young Christ in the Temple practically repeat (the former even in the landscape) the versions in the retable of Sto. Tomás Cantuariense, but the peculiarly Spanish subject of the Nailing to the Cross demanded, like a few sections of this retable, more violent action than the Master ordinarily essayed, which, despite the usual quietude of his temper, he has managed surprisingly well. A number of years ago there were to be seen in private possession 1 2 Gómez-Moreno (Catàlogo monumental, Provincia de Zamora, p. 348) keenly discerned that three of the series were not by the artist whom I name the Abezames Master but he ventured to classify them no more definitely than of the T o r o Master's school. Four of the series, when he wrote, had been consigned to an ermita, but all are now in the parish church.

Fie. 15. T H E TORO M A S T E R . YOUNG CHRIST AMONG T H E DOCTORS. E L SALVADOR, ABEZAMES {Photo. Guiiol)

48

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at Madrid three panels depicting the Birth of the Virgin (Fig. 16), the Annunciation, and the Nativity of Christ and so obviously deriving from some retable by the Toro Master that his authorship needs no demonstration. The only information vouchsafed in regard to them was that they came from the province of Zamora, and the probability is that they belonged to one of the many cycles in the region brought into connection with the Master by Gómez-Moreno in his Catálogo monumental of the province and registered by him in this book of 1927 as then still in situ. His description of the paintings in the retable at Castrogonzalo (in the northeastern part of the province) especially his stress upon the contemporary costumes in the Birth of the Virgin and upon the introduction of "little animals" (since the favorite cat appears in the privately owned panels of the Virgin's Birth as well as in the Annunciation) suggests that this town may have been their source, but, inasmuch as he says that the compartments in the retable in the church of S. Martin at Pinilla de Toro are similar 13 and as our Master is generally satisfied to repeat his compositions, we can by no means set down the provenience from Castrogonzalo for a certainty. His habitual retention of established compositions is illustrated by the very exact analogy of the Annunciation to the rendering by Juan de Borgoña in the retable over the high altar of the cathedral of Avila. 14 An Annunciation in the Fundación Lázaro Galdeano at Madrid (Fig. 17), which also must come from one of his retables in the vicinity of Zamora and Toro, alters his customary formula for the subject only by seating the Virgin on the ground and by omitting the cat. W e require the evidence provided by these works in the province of Zamora to ascribe to him the achievements that establish his presence in the ateliers of Valladolid and thus in the circle of Berruguete, two panels of miracles of St. Anthony of Padua which formed his contribution to a retable of St. Anthony Abbot ordered in 1546 for the church of the monastery of S. Benito el Real at Valladolid from the sculptor Gaspar de Tordesillas and carried out by several artists in collaboration.15 Together with the rest of the paint1 3 He treats Castrogonzalo and Pinilla on pp. 339—340 of the Catálogo not actually ascribing· them to the T o r o Master but only discerning affinities to his manner.

Vol. I X , fig. 53. M a r t í y Monsó, of. cit.., pp. 442-443, and C. Candeira y Pérez, Guía del Museo Nacional de Escultura de Valladolid, Valladolid, 1945, p. 64. For the original 14

15

Fig. I 6. T H E TORO MASTER. BIRTH OF THE VIRGIN. PRIVATE COLLECTION, MADRID (Photo.

Moreno)

FIG. χ 7.

THE

FUNDACIÓN

TORO

MASTER.

LÁZARO {Photo.

ANNUNCIATION.

GALDEANO, Gudiol)

MADRID

T H E SCHOOL O F VALLADOLID

51

ings and carvings of the retable, the panels by the Toro Master have been consigned to the Valladolid Museum and depict St. Anthony resurrecting the youth at Vercelli 16 and the more frequently represented marvel of his causing the mule to witness to the Real Presence by genuflecting before the consecrated Host (Fig. 18). Since they open a broader vista upon his modes than the productions that we have hitherto studied, I will need to bore the reader with a tedious list of some of the proofs. Most unescapable is the identity of the man pointing upward at the right in the scene of resurrection and of the similarly placed halberdier in the miracle of the mule with one of the Toro Master's favorite, hatchet-faced types, as exemplified in the priest of the Circumcision in the retable of Sto. Tomás Cantuariense or the doctor at the lower left in the Abezames compartment of Christ in the Temple. The heavy-jowled bystander wearing a curious hat at the upper left in the Circumcision and the like figure talking to the Virgin and St. Joseph in the panel of Christ in the Temple show that such types as the spectator looking to the left just above the Host to which the mule kneels are thoroughly characteristic of our painter. Next to this spectator stands a turbaned personage who looks out at us with exactly the intense glance and much the same visage as a helmeted soldier in the background of the Abezames Nailing to the Cross. Two of the men whose heads alone are seen in the background of both Valladolid compartments have the tousled bangs that the Master affects, as on the Magus holding an open chest in the Epiphany of Sto. Tomás Cantuariense. The prominent youth with a staff watching the Eucharistie wonder possesses the features of the Madonna in the Abezames Nativity; the mother of the raised youth does not differ from the sorrowing Virgin in the Abezames Nailing to the Cross; and indeed the gentle St. Anthony is no more than a slightly masculine version of the kind of countenance regularly employed for Our Lady. Were it necessary, we could multiply corroboratory factors such as the delineation and gesticulation of the hands, but it is more interesting to observe new elements in the Master's style perhaps due to the prescription or even sketches of Gaspar de Tordesillas, the crowding of the foreground with more sculpturally felt and sharper-cut forms arrangement of the sections of retable, see Candeira's article on Gaspar in Boletín del Seminario de Estudios de Arte y Arqueología, Universidad de Valladolid, tomo Vili, fascículos XXVIII—XXX (1941—1942), 121. 16 Leopold de Chérancé, Saint Antoine de Padoue, Paris, 1895, p. 46.

Fie. 18. T H E TORO MASTER. MIRACLE OF T H E HOST. MUSEO NACIONAL DE ESCULTURA, VALLADOLID {Photo. Mas)

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or the filling of the background with architecture more obviously meant to suggest the antique. In the scene of resuscitation he has introduced a pronounced piece of naturalism in the conspicuous figure of the gravedigger at the left carrying the tools with which he has just made the hole from which the youth rises. In 1935 I unexpectedly discovered in the Hundeser Collection at Stuttgart what turns out to be the Toro Master's most interesting work, purchased in Madrid and now again in private possession in Madrid, probably a section from one of his retables in the province of Zamora rather than a separate triptych (Fig. 19). In proficiently carved frames in the style of Alonso Berruguete and perhaps executed by the same sculptor who collaborated in the altarpiece of Sto. Tomás Cantuariense in Toro, there are set three paintings, at the centre the Crucifixion and at the sides the Annunciation and the penitence of St. Jerome. Although it is likely that the Toro Master regarded himself rather as an honest craftsman in the service of the Church than with the dawning consciousness, in the Renaissance, of the high calling of an artist, yet he seems to have here taken aesthetic delight in exerting unusual pains upon the execution, perhaps inspired thereto by the increasing contact with Berruguete evidenced in the greater manneristic elongation of the forms. Nevertheless his right to the honor of the authorship is abundantly manifest. The Annunciation is composed in his habitual way, with the architecture thrown upon the bias, with a vista seen through arches, and again with a crouching cat as spectator. The parturient St. Anne in the privately owned panels at Madrid affords a close analogue for Our Lady, and we may choose the Virgin in the Circumcision of the retable in Sto. Tomás Canturiense as a counterpart of the Gabriel. Even the dove is exactly repeated from the versions of the Annunciation in Sto. Tomás and in the Fundación Lázaro Galdeano. The single factor of the resemblance of St. Jerome's fine head to the kneeling Magus in the Epiphany in Sto. Tomás and to the St. Joseph in the Birth of the Virgin in the Madrid panels would be enough to authenticate the Hundeser pictures. But proof is not lacking in the Crucifixion. The profile of the holy Mother is like that of the woman carrying a plate in the Birth of the Virgin; the child-angels sympathizing with the dying Saviour scarcely differ from those who herald His Nativity in the Madrid set·.,and this Nativity with its darkened clouds should

FIG. 19. THE TORO MASTER. RETABLE OF T H E CRUCIFIXION. PRIVATE COLLECTION, MADRID (Photo.

Moreno)

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be compared, in the Hundeser piece, with the backgrounds not only of the Crucifixion but also of St. Jerome.

3.

T H E ABEZAMES MASTER

We have already 17 thus denominated the painter who collaborated with the Toro Master in a retable the panels of which are still extant in the parish church of E l Salvador at Abezames or who perhaps, instead, since he has proceeded farther along the ways of the High Renaissance, took upon himself the commission after the other for some reason had relinquished it. The eleven compartments from the life of Christ by the Abezames Master represent the Annunciation (Fig. 20), Circumcision, Epiphany (Fig. 2 1 ) , Rest in the Flight into Egypt, Baptism, Agony in the Garden, Last Supper, Flagellation, Crowning with Thorns, Ecce Homo, and Resurrection. His style may be described as a provincial reflection of the cold, statuesque modes which Raphael developed at the end of his life when he had been corrupted by excessive admiration for the antique and by imitation of Michael Angelo, so that the Abezames Master's works look as if he had been a member, less competent than his Italian colleagues, of the Roman school when it was dominated by the great Umbrian's ultimate fashions. Indeed we can scarcely elucidate the style or certain elements in the Master's works without postulating a sojourn in Italy. Berruguete gives so personal an interpretation to the lessons which he had learned in the sister peninsula that the Abezames Master could not have acquired from him this rather servile imitation of the Roman school's tendencies, although contact with Alonso's achievements may have led him to more mannered elongation, postures, and gestures and occasionally to more pre-baroque violence of movement and facial expression than one generally finds in the Italians whom he resembles. The similarity to the late and frozen productions of Raphael and of his Roman followers extends even to an abjuration of much color in the desire to give the effect of ancient sculpture and a consequent reduction of the tonality to virtually a brownish grey monochrome. If there were only one or two reminiscences of Italian works of art, they might be explained by reproductions that had reached Spain, but the accumulation of many instances strongly suggests that 17

P. 46·

FIG. 20. T H E ABEZAMES MASTER. ANNUNCIATION. EL SALVADOR, ABEZAMES (Photo.

Gudiol)

FIG. ZI.

THE

ABEZAMES

EL

SALVADOR, (Photo.

MASTER.

EPIPHANY.

ABEZAMES Gudioi)

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the Master had made the italienische Reise. T h e Last Supper is adapted from Leonardo 5 the soldier at the right in the Resurrection was imported from Michael Angelo's ignudi on the Sistine ceiling; and the walls of the edifices, as in the Annunciation, and the Crowning with Thorns, and the Ecce H o m o are sometimes conceived as embellished with the grotesques that the discovery of the frescoes in Nero's Domus Aurea had popularized as decorative motifs.18 In a frieze in the hall of the Flagellation, futti sport among these ornaments, and the platform upon which Christ stands in the scene of the Ecce H o m o is enriched with an Italianate treatment of the struggle of Hercules and Antaeus as well as with another similar theme which the dilapidation suffered by the panels prevents me from recognizing. T h e influence of Berruguete probably accounts for his exaggerated attempts at high-pitched activity, emotionally strained countenances, and wind-blown hair, as in the priest of the Circumcision who brutally brandishes the knife, the perturbed St. Joseph of the Rest in the Flight into Egypt, who thus resembles the foster-father of Our Lord in Alonso's version of the actual Flight, the St. John of the Baptism who is endowed with a Michelangelesque muscularity, the frantic Apostles of the Last Supper, the rushing tormentors in the Crowning with Thorns, or the actually high-jumping Saviour of the Resurrection, with his wide-billowing cape; but it must be remembered also that the proclivity to an anticipation of the baroque belonged to the general aesthetic atmosphere of Spain at this period. One of the Abezames Master's most mannered forms is the central sleeping soldier in the Resurrection, but his potentialities in giving embodiment to manneristic and baroque tendencies were by no means equal to Berruguete's, and the results strike us as forced and artificial. In the midst of all his Romanism, the tenacity of the indigenous tradition is such that for the Ecce H o m o he reverts to the composition established in the region in the circle of Fernando Gallego, 1 9 and the Spanish feeling for naturalism so ran in his veins that a lolling beggar, in prophecy of Murillo, is given the center of the panel and greater prominence even than the suffering Christ. Some of his works have strayed into private collections. In an Epiphany belonging to the Conde de los Andes at Madrid (Fig. 22), he varied the composition of the subject at Abezames only in such 18 19

Arnold von Salis, Antike und Renaissance, Erlenbach-Zürich, 1947, p. 37. C f . the example of Pedro Bello, my vol. IV, p. 108.

Fig. 22. T H E A B E Z A M E S M A S T E R . E P I P H A N Y . C O L L E C T I O N OF T H E CONDE D E LOS ANDES, M A D R I D {Photo. Pando)

6o

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slight details as the transfer of the uplifted hand from the negroid to a Caucasian Magus. We can scarcely refuse to see his hand in a triptych in the Museo Cerralbo, Madrid, depicting at the centre St. Bartholomew, at the left St. Thomas (with the emblem of the Virgin's girdle), and at the right St. Sebastian. In the midst of the obvious, general correspondence with the Abezames Master's modes, the Sts. Bartholomew and Thomas are recurrent types, in countenance and curly hair, with the artist, as in the spectator at the extreme right in the Circumcision of the retable that gives him his name; the flying beard of the former Apostle accords with his predilection for wind-blown chevelures j and even the ears are drawn in conformity with his practices. The barren landscape, with its rocky knolls, also agrees with the nature of his settings. Although I should not exclude the candidacy of the Olivares Master in the case of a predella in the Museo Cerralbo with figures in half-length, the Mass of St. Gregory at the center and St. Roch and a canonized bishop at the sides (Fig. 23), there is something to be said for an assignment to the Abezames Master and even to the same altarpiece as the triptych. In particular, the angel bringing to St. Roch medicaments for his plague-sores is a comparison to the painter's representations of celestial spirits in other works 5 the episcopal saint betrays the blemish of the Master's claw-like hands; and the landscapes are again characteristic.

4.

G A S P A R DE

PALENCIA

The fortunate circumstance of the preservation of a picture with a signature has disclosed the style of an unexpectedly interesting artist whose personality would otherwise have been hidden from us because the records of his activity, though rather copious, apply to his extensive employment in the mere polychromy of sculpture and as an appraiser of works of art and witness in lawsuits about them or because the notices refer to paintings by him that have perished or cannot with surety be related to the documents. The base of a platform upon which the amputation of St. Agatha's breasts is depicted as taking place in the above-mentioned picture in the Museo de Bellas Artes at Bilbao (Fig. 24) displays the words P A L E N C I A F E (cit.), and, since Gaspar de Palencia is the only recorded painter of

Fig. 23. THE ABEZAMES MASTER (?). PREDELLA WITH T H E MASS OF ST. GREGORY. MUSEO CERRALBO, MADRID

Fig. 24. GASPAR DE PALENCIA. MARTYRDOM OF ST. AGATHA. MUSEO DE BELLAS ARTES, BILBAO {Photo.

Gudiol)

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20

large productions with the surname Palencia at the time to which the style assigns the picture as well as other achievements attributable to the same hand, any doubt that it was Gaspar who signed the picture is so negligible that without more ado we may so call the personality who now concerns us, in no wise anticipating that the future discoveries will nullify our assumption. The date of his birth would seem to be set in 1531 by his testimony on March 1 1 , 1553, in a suit of the sculptor Inocencio Berruguete about payment for a tomb, for he gives his age as twenty-two, adding that he was a resident of Valladolid (although his surname implies him or his parents to have been of Palencian origin) and that he too was a sculptor as well as a painter; 21 but on April 24, 1567, as witness in another legal difficulty, involving the Florentine painter active at Valladolid and called by the Spaniards Benito Rabuyate, he states that he was only thirty-two years old according to the confusing looseness of chronological memory so often encountered in artists' memories, thus suggesting that he was not born until 1535. Overburdened as the mind of the reader is in these volumes with details, however essential, he can be spared the list of Gaspar's performances as a polychromer, appraiser, witness, consultant, and man of family and business, since these facts, not absolutely pertinent to our aims, can be found by turning to the index of artists in Martí y Monsó's Estudios histórico-artísticos, to a note published by him in the Boletín de la Sociedad Castellana de Excursiones,22 and to the apposite pages in Juan Agapito y Revilla's La fintura en Valladolid; 23 and we can confine ourselves to the items about his paintings in order to realize that the archives furnish no certain guide to any extant achievement of his in this aspect of his profession. In 1559 he collaborated with Jerónimo Vázquez in the polychromy of the sculpture and in four paintings in a retable in the church of S. Antonio Abad at Valladolid, but a later study 24 will show the three extant paintings to be productions of Jerónimo, so that Gaspar's task must have been confined to the fourth, lost painting or merely to the polychromy. In the case of the following three commissions, which also included paintings as 20

The illuminator of the period, Fray Martin de Palencia, is, of course, out of the question. 21 Martí y Monsó, of. cit., p. 178. 22

Π ( 1 9 0 5 - 1 9 0 6 ) , 535. Series of articles in the Boletín del Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes de Valladolid, beginning in No. i, January, 1 9 2 5 : the pages here in question are 166—167. 24 See below, p. 93. 23

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well as the polychromy of the sculpture, the monuments have not survived: in 1565, an altarpiece in the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament in the Colegiata at Valladolid 25 ; at the end of 1568, a retable in the church of S. Antón in the town of L a Pedraja de Portillo, besides the polychromy of the sculpture, three paintings depicting the penitent St. Jerome, St. Francis, and St. Martin dividing his cape with the beggar j and, according to a contract of August 25, 1591, further paintings to accompany the sculpture in a retable in a chapel of the no longer existing church, at Valladolid, of the Trinidad Calzada. W e are absolutely sure of no later date in Gaspar's life, but we shall subsequently come upon evidence 26 suggesting that he survived at least until 1613. T h e only place where he is recorded to have worked and where paintings are preserved is Villagarcia de Campos (northwest of Valladolid, though in the diocese of Palencia), but unfortunately the archives do not define explicitly the nature of his task. T h e book of accounts of the stewards of the great lady, Doña Magdalena de Ulloa, the wife and eventually the widow of the nobleman, Luis M é n d e z Quijada, who died in 1570, mention that in 1584 she had ordered payment to Gaspar de Palencia for unspecified work that he did at Villagarcia, one of her favorite domains. In the church that the illustrious couple built in the town and naturally dedicated to San Luis (St. Louis), seven painted Virtues accompany the predominating sculpture of the retable over the high altar, and there are paintings also in the lateral retable of the Virgen del Patrocinio. T h e signed picture of St. Agatha's torment in the Museum of Bilbao, the history of which goes no further back than its bequeathal to the Museum by a gentleman of the city, Don Gregorio de San Pelayo, reveals an artist who belongs to the generation of mannerists that in the school of Valladolid succeeded Alonso Berruguete and his circle but who adds to the inheritance other qualities which prophesy the achievements of the seventeenth century. T h e elongated forms, the over-elegant postures and gestures of mannerism are manipulated by Gaspar de Palencia with better draughtsmanship and modelling and infused with more vitality than lay within the powers of the majority of his immediate predecessors or contemporaries in northern Castile. T h e first new factor that we note is the anticipation of the 25 García Chico, Pintores, III, n o . T h e data about the other commissions that ΪΙ here mention can be found in M a r t í y Monsó. 26 See below, p. 69.

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tenebroso style of Caravaggio and his followers, with much of the space plunged in a darkness from which the actors emerge in spotlights and with violent contrasts of brightness and shadow playing over the figures themselves and over the architectural setting. T h e types of persons do not suggest that Gaspar had come into contact with the Venetian school, where Tintoretto and Jacopo Bassano had developed a dramatic chiaroscuro almost as vivid as that which the influence of Caravaggio diffused in Europe during the seventeenth century, but they stem from the standards for the representation of human beings established at Valladolid by a fusion of Italian and Flemish manneristic influences. T h e Venetian effects of tenebrosità were partially naturalized in Spain in the second half of the sixteenth century through a strain in the art of the period spearheaded by Navarrete, and the likelihood is that Gaspar acquired them from this source, namely at second hand, so that his extant paintings would date from rather late in his career. Navarrete is prone to evolve new and naturalistic compositions, but this characteristic of Gaspar, the second way in which he points forward to the next century, may find its cause also in his own alert mentality, in the general pronounced tendency of the school of Valladolid at this time, as in the sculptor Juan de Juni, to presage the traits of the baroque, or even in the innate aesthetics of the Spanish race, to whom naturalism seems to have been a desideratum. T h e perpetrators of St. Agatha's appalling ordeal are relegated to the shadows of the background, and the revolting mutilation itself is projected at us in the very foreground, flooded with the most garish of all the spotlights. In the operation upon the breasts, the most direct and shocking of the many ghastly treatments of the theme that I know, naturalism, which consists in the general conception of a sacred or classical theme as an actual event, passes into realism, 27 the attempt to represent the details literally, and makes Gaspar a forerunner of Ribera's sanguinary horrors. Indeed, as the baroque artists were to do, he imagines the scene in terms of the theatre, even elevating it upon a platform that suggests a stage. Oddly enough, the Museum at Bilbao that has enabled us to rescue Gaspar de Palencia from oblivion proves to contain another work which is demonstrated by internal evidence to embody his craft, an Ecce H o m o confined to three large figures crowding the whole space 21

F o r m y endeavor to diffeerntiate between naturalism and realism, see v o l . I, pp.

16-18.

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at the front of the picture, Our Lord, Pilate, and a guard (Fig. 25) ; and we shall find that there is even a third painting in the Museum which may be claimed for the master with a high degree of probability. The Ecce Homo, coming from the well-known Collection of Don Laureano de Jado, is of unascertained original provenience. In this case, there is nothing particularly new about the composition, but the other general characteristics of the artist's modes are clearly recognizable, the mannered curve of Christ, the picking out of His form by a high light, the sinking of the other figures in partial shadow, and the creation of more forceful types of humanity than almost all the other Spanish mannerists, combined with a more vigorous modelling. He has been kind enough, however, to corroborate the attribution by actually repeating in the guard the countenance of the potentate presiding over St. Agatha's ordeal, Quintianus. In a Resurrection in the Fundación Lázaro Galdeano at Madrid (Fig. 26), the close facial kinship between the bearded soldier at the right and the correspondingly placed tormentor of St. Agatha, as well as between the watchman sleeping with his head upon his arm and the virgin martyr's left mangier, speaks sufficiently for Gaspar de Palencia's authorship, but the other factors also conform, especially the presentation of the mystery according to the tenebroso principles and the actual manipulation of the chiaroscuro. Naturalism here is curiously incorporated in a Hebrew inscription upon the Holy Sepulchre in keeping with the probability that such would have been its language, but the painter (or his clerical prompter) has made the mistake of causing the words to read New Tomb of Nicodemus,28 whereas the New Testament plainly declares it to have belonged to the other participant in the sacred burial, Joseph of Arimathaea. The adjective, New, however, agrees with the scriptural account. It is the second picture in the Bilbao Museum, the Ecce Homo, that puts the seal upon Gaspar's parenthood of a painting of the disputation of St. Stephen in the Puncel Collection, Madrid, for the head of Herod is practically repeated in the Jewish priest at the centre pointing to the protomartyr and almost as exactly duplicated in the learned Hebrew to whom St. Stephen is indicating a passage in Holy Writ. Such detailed evidence, nevertheless, is really not necessary, since the chiaroscuro and all other marks of the artist's usual procedure 28 M y colleague, Professor H a r r y Austryn Wolfson, has kindly deciphered the inscription for me.

Fig. 25. GASPAR DE PALENCIA. ECCE HOMO. MUSEO DE BELLAS ARTES, BILBAO {Photo.

Gudiol)

FIG. 26. GASPAR DE PALENCIA. RESURRECTION. FUNDACIÓN LÁZARO GALDEANO, MADRID (Photo.

GucLioí)

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are once more abundantly present. T h e chief interest of the work is that it constitutes the outstanding example of his pre-baroque originality of composition. The saint does not stand or sit, as ordinarily in the iconography of the theme, but he kneels, fervidly intent upon convincing his interlocutor, and moreover he is placed off centre, being adequately emphasized by the customary spotlight that beats upon him in the first plane. Among the dramatic characterizations of Stephen's disputants, two are perhaps unique and effectively rendered, the perplexed quandary of the seated Jewish sage whom the martyr instructs and, at the extreme right, the thoughtful brooding, as if to end in conversion, of the young man wrapped in a fringed garment. As in the Lázaro Resurrection, the desire for realism results in an error, though of a different sort, the bestowal of Christian crosiers upon the Hebrew prelates. Our process of building up the personality of Gaspar de Palencia has been a nexus in which one attribution has led to another, and so we require the evidence of the picture in the Puncel Collection to claim for him with much complacency a third work in the Bilbao Museum, an Epiphany, whether or not originally a part of the retable or of one of the retables to which the two other pieces belonged. W e observe at once the conformity with the master's methods, particularly in the contrasts of light and shade and in the emphasis on the bones of the metacarpus, so that it is obligatory only to discover analogy in human types; and I do not see how two different artists could have achieved such identity as exists between the standing Magus at the right and the contemplative young man who has interested us as a spectator of St. Stephen's disputation. The features of the Virgin herself in the Epiphany are of the same cast. We need harbor few or no reservations in ascribing to Gaspar the wings of a triptych, from which the centre has been lost, in the Collection of the Conde de Torre Arias at Madrid. The kneeling donors, one on each wing, are Alonso de Idiáquez de Butrón, created first duke of Ciudad Real in 1 6 1 3 , and his wife Juana de Robles y San Quintín. Above them stand their heavenly patrons after whom they were named, for the gentleman St. Ildefonso and for the lady St. John Baptist. Since the nobleman was born in 1565 and looks in the portrait to be nearing middle age, the picture may commemorate his elevation to the dukedom in 1 6 1 3 when he was forty-eight years old, thus supplying us with a later date in the life of Gaspar de Palencia

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than we had hitherto known, if he is indeed, as I believe, the author. In any case, the work must have been executed subsequent to the duke's marriage in 1589 and prior to his death in 1 6 1 8 . T h e branch of the Idiáquez family to which he belonged had its ancestral seat at Anoeta, just north of Tolosa, in the Basque country, 29 a part of Spain where the presence of paintings by Gaspar in the Museum of Bilbao implies that he enjoyed special patronage. T h e general agreement of the triptych's wings with the various aspects of the master's style will be apparent to anyone who has scanned the previous reproductions of his works, but the concrete detail that most supports the attribution is the intense and almost menacing glance with which the Baptist gazes out at us in a mode minutely analogous to the expressions of the seated disputant and of the man at the right holding a crosier in the panel of the Puncel Collection. E v e n the Duke's countenance, whatever he actually looked like, is accommodated somewhat to one of Gaspar's types for the actors in his narrative scenes, as of the guard in the Bilbao Ecce H o m o .

5.

ANTONIO

VÁZQUEZ

T h e lucky chance that has revealed the artistic personality of this exponent of the early stage of the H i g h Renaissance in the school of Valladolid through the preservation of a securely documented retable has had the likewise happy consequence of enabling us, through comparisons, to place under his name a considerable number of works that had hitherto been anonymous. H i s birth can be set c. 1 4 8 5 , for as one of the witnesses in 1 5 2 5 in the litigation in regard to Alonso Berruguete's paintings for the doors in S. Lorenzo, 3 0 Valladolid, he was described as forty years old, and again in the same rôle of a witness in a financial transaction in 1 5 6 3 , the last date at which he is mentioned in the records, he was stated to have reached the age of about eighty. These notices and the other known facts about him can be found by consulting the index of artists in José M a r t í y Monsó's 29

For the facts about Don Alonso and the duchess, I am indebted to Alberto y Arturo García Carraffa, Enciclofedía heráldica y genealógica hispano-americana ^ Madrid, X L V ( 1 9 3 2 ) 4 1 , and to the unflagging· assistance of my friend, the distinguished heraldic scholar, the Barón de San Petrillo. On the prie-dieu, beside each personage there is painted the apposite escutcheon ; but since I have not seen the original picture and the shields are dim in the reproductions, I can say only that the upper left quarter in the blazon of the duke belongs to the Idiáquez family. 30 See above, p. 4, n. 5.

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Estudios histórico-artísticos?1 an article by him in the Boletín de la Sociedad Castellana de Excursiones,32 the lucid account in Juan Agapito y Revilla's La f intura en Valladolid^ Viñaza's Adiciones al Diccionario Histórico de Ceán Bermúdeζ,34 Esteban García Chico's Documentos fara el estudio del arte en Castilla, Pintores,35 and an article by L . F . de Peñalosa in Estudios segovianos; 36 but for our purposes it is necessary to specify only that, besides the extant, documented retable of 1536 at Simancas, he is recorded to have done in 1537 a lost altarpiece of St. L u k e in the church of S. Lorenzo at Valladolid, that the will of his brother-in-law, the painter Gregorio Ribera, with whom he seems often to have collaborated, mentions works that they had executed or were executing conjointly at Peñaflor de Hornija, in the Hospital de S. Miguel at Valladolid, and in the Ermita de Sta. Marina at Cigales, and that Antonio's reputation was such that in 1543 he was given the honor of constructing, together with the sculptor Gaspar de Tordesillas, an arch to be used in the functions which the city of Valladolid organized for the reception of Philip I P s first wife, M a r y of Portugal. T h e documented retable, in a chapel of the Alderete family on the south side of the church of E l Salvador at Simancas, was ordered on October 18, 1536, by Juan Gutiérrez Alderete as a memorial to his mother, Isabel Hernández Alderete, who together with his son is buried beneath the altarpiece. In the contract 37 the commission for the sculptured frames is given to Gaspar de Tordesillas and for their polychromy and for the painted panels to Antonio Vázquez. T h e three subjects in the main body (Fig. 27) of the structure appropriately, in view of the purpose of honoring a lady deceased, have to do with the triumph of Christ over death, in the centre the Resurrection, at the left the Marys at the tomb (with the soldiers represented as still asleep), and at the right the journey to Emmaus. One of the sections of the predella, at the right, adds another episode of Easter, the Incredulity of St. Thomas, and the other two are scenes T o the pages listed in the index should be added 4 4 5 - 4 4 6 . I I ( 1 9 0 5 - 1 9 0 6 ) , 28. 3 3 Pp. 1 5 7 — 1 6 1 . 3 4 M a d r i d , II ( 1 8 9 4 ) , 2 5 1 , and I V , 14. On the f o r m e r page Vinaza misprints 1556 as 1586 f o r a date in Antonio Vazquez's l i f e : cf. M a r t í y Monsó, Estudios histórico-artísticos, p. 6 7 5 . 3 5 I, 8 7 - 8 8 . 31

32

36 37

I (1949), " 3 · M a r t í y Monsó, Estudios

histórico-artísticos,

pp. 194—195.

FIG. 27. ANTONIO VÁZQUEZ. RESURRECTION. (Photo.

Mas)

EL SALVADOR, SIMANCAS

T H E SCHOOL OF V A L L A D O L I D of the Passion, the Last Supper and Deposition. Provision is made in the contract for a seventh panel, evidently with reference to a painted background for a sculptured Crucifixion in the lunette at the summit ; but the background was never carried out, and the statues of Christ on the cross, the Virgin, and St. John now in place are an addition by an artist other than Gaspar de Tordesillas. The decoration of the chapel extends beneath its arch, to the sides at right angles to the retable proper, where, between Gaspar's engaged pilasters, Antonio painted the four themes that, it says in the contract, the donor should choose: at the left a kneeling gentleman and lady, probably Juan Alderete and his mother, under the patronage of a canonized bishop, and in the surmounting compartment St. Gregory the Great; and at the right two further, feminine members of the Alderete family whom Agapito guesses to be daughters of Doña Isabel, and above them a companion to St. Gregory among the Fathers of the Church, St. Jerome. The essence of the style of Antonio Vázquez is the retention of the general ways of his Spanish predecessors of the late Middle Ages and very early sixteenth century, but an interpretation of these conservative modes through forms partially belonging to the classicism of the High Renaissance. H e thus reminds us of such a painter as Juan Correa de Vivar, although his human types are very individual, rendering it easy to descry his hand in other works; but he proceeded less far along the road of mannerism and emotionalism even than Correa, and this despite the fact that his dates and biography reveal him to have come into contact with the neurotic innovations of Alonso Berruguete. The reason was perhaps that he possessed neither the intellect to comprehend nor the craft to incorporate the changing aesthetic mood of the mature Cinquecento, for his creations betray that he lacked both a first-rate technique and lofty artistic ambitions. One of the few indications of any concern with mannerism is a marked fondness for effects of sunset or night in his landscapes. We shall be fairest to him if we look upon him as an honest and competent supplier of the pious trade, and, while we travel amidst the often exhaustingly excited paths cut by his contemporaries and immediate successors, it will be pleasant at times to find repose in contemplating his comparative quietude. Agapito 38 divined what is manifestly the truth, that Antonio executed a somewhat less ambitious retable, dated 1538, in the chapel 38

Of. cit., p. 160.

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of the Bretón family on the opposite side of the same church. The whole principal section consists of a Crucifixion, the figure of Christ a fine carving in wood by an as yet unascertained sculptor against a background painted by Vázquez with only the forms of the Virgin and St. John standing in front of a landscape. The spaces corresponding to the spots where the donors are set in the Alderete altarpiece, Antonio ornamented with effigies of the Magdalene and St. Catherine of Alexandria. The attribution is entirely obvious, as merely a comparison of St. John's head and that of the angel addressing the Marys in the other altarpiece discloses. Analogously to his task for the Bretones, he is documented 39 as having painted in 1541 the landscape and figures of Mary and John as a setting to the carved Christ in the Crucifixion at the apex of the retable, by an unascertained sculptor, in the chapel of the Virnés family in the great church at the town of Santa Maria la Real de Nieva, northwest of Segovia. We learn nothing further of the style or abilities of Antonio from the meagre bits,40 although we are thus supplied with still more confirmation of Segovian patronage of the school of Valladolid. In Valladolid itself Antonio Vázquez has left us a major work, the retable of the Virgin that is now relegated to an aisle of the present church of the convent of Las Huelgas but once stood over the high altar of the older edifice. The middle, vertical section is largely occupied by unascribed sculpture of the period, by no means negligible in its quality, at the base the tabernacle, above this the Assumption fused, as commonly at the time, with ideas of the Immaculate Conception, and in the capping piece the Crucifixion; but between the last two compartments Antonio painted the Annunciation and at the sides the Meeting at the Golden Gate, Visitation, Nativity, Epiphany, and, flanking the tabernacle, the Flight into Egypt and Purification (Fig. 28). Anyone who has familiarized himself with our master's style by examining his productions at Simancas will need no demonstration of his authorship of the retable in the convent of Las Huelgas, since his methods, types, and even his landscapes are almost invariable; but, if it was necessary to offer proof to another approaching the matter for the first time, such a resemblance as exists See an article by Luis F. de Peñalosa in Estudios segovianosx I ( 1 9 4 9 ) , 119. There is an inadequate illustration in an article on the church by the Conde de Cedillo, Santa Maria la Real de Nieva, Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones, XXXVIII ( ι 9 3 ° ) ) opposite p. 160. 39

40

Fig. 28. ANTONIO VÁZQUEZ. PURIFICATION. LAS HUELGAS, VALLADOLID (Photo. Mas)

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again between the angel admonishing the Marys in the Alderete retable and Gabriel of the Valladolid Annunciation would be conclusive. In view of the general similarity in practically all the compositions for the Flight into Egypt, we are not compelled to predicate that Antonio had seen Alonso Berruguete's version in the retable of S. Benito and thus date his activity in Las Huelgas after 1 5 2 6 - 1 5 3 2 when Alonso was engaged upon the commission: at any rate once more we descry no real traces of prematurely baroque tendencies. The most conservative of all Antonio's works, scarcely distinguishable in stage of development from the achievements of such a predecessor of his in the very early Renaissance as the Portillo Master, are built into a later, conglomerate altarpiece in the church of Sta. Clara at Valladolid which includes paintings by other artists of the sixteenth century and at the centre a statue of St. Anthony of Padua that looks as if it were carved in the Seicento. The four panels by Vázquez display figures of saints standing in front of parapets in front of landscapes, in two of them Peter and James and in the other pair the coupled Andrew and Barbara (Fig. 29) and the St. Johns. Although he occasionally retains brocaded garments in his other productions, he here makes the costumes of the saints, beneath their mantles, of stuffs that in brilliance vie with the most conspicuous patterns by which the Spanish painters of the late Middle Ages sought decorative accents. The assignment of the panels to Antonio requires no defence. His great vogue, surprising to us in view of his mediocrity, is exemplified by the number of his works gathered into the Archaeological Museum and National Museum of Sculpture at Valladolid from the religious institutions of the city. Many of these were collected long ago when scholarship did not value the recording of the exact provenience in Valladolid, but information about the origins of one or two panels has come down to us. So in the case of a Pietà (Fig. 30) which derives from no less a place than the monastery of S. Benito and in which, according to his practice of merely repeating types once that he had established them, he duplicates in the Virgin the second of the Marys who, in the Alderete retable, approach the Holy Sepulchre on the morning of the first Easter. The Dominican monastery of S. Pablo has provided the National Museum of Sculpture with one of Antonio's most unmistakable creations, a rather

FIG. 29.

ANTONIO VÁZQUEZ. STS. ANDREW AND BARBARA. STA. CLARA, VALLADOLID {Photo.

Mas)

FIG. 30. ANTONIO VÁZQUEZ. PIETÀ. MUSEO NACIONAL DE ESCULTURA, VALLADOLID {Photo.

Mas)

T H E SCHOOL OF V A L L A D O L I D tall panel 4 ' with an effigy of St. Bernard (Fig. 3 1 ) . Among the pictures whose source has not been recorded, two panels of the Baptism of Christ and the Stigmatization of St. Francis are shown by their size and shape to have been parts of a single assemblage, to which there is some reason for thinking that there belonged also a representation of the penitence of St. Jerome (Fig. 3 2 ) which, although of lesser height, looks, in composition and setting, like a companion-piece to the event in St. Francis's life, and another Pietà that varies only in slight degree the specimen from S. Benito, chiefly by the addition of two more holy women. The compartments depicting the experiences of the two ascetics are conspicuous examples of one of his favorite treatments of landscape, with heavy foliage framing the actors at the front, with a vista in the background over the distant country, and with buildings emerging amidst the trees and hills. I have not been able to discover whether the three following panels by him were originally attached to any of the other pieces in the Museum that I have just registered; a Purification that departs but little from the version in the retable of Las Huelgas except to bring the figures more compactly together; a Crucifixion, with a St. John who is oddly conceived as no more than a boy (Figs. 33 and 34) ; and an Assumption (Fig. 3 5 ) in the National Museum of Sculpture, where the angels reiterate Antonio's constant type for youthful personages and God the Father receiving the Virgin into glory is depicted as an aged sire in precisely the guise of the priest who in the Purification in the retable of Las Huelgas holds the Child. 42 T o this group of paintings by Antonio Vázquez in the Valladolid Museum whose provenience and connection with other productions of his in the institution are unascertained, we must add the panel of St. Ursula and her maidens in the same collection, a work that I assigned in volume IX, 4 3 with grave doubts, to the Becerril Master. Now that I have come to know Antonio better, I can see his craft in every one of the panel's aspects. His unmistakable female types fill the picture, the St. Ursula herself, for example, being comparable to the angels in the Baptism and her hindermost follower scarcely distinguishable in countenance from the angel on the Sepulchre in 41

T h e dimensions are i . i g metres in height by .50 in width. M a r t í n González ascribes to him also another Assumption in the same Museum that includes the figure of a kneeling abbess (whom he calls St. C l a r a ) ( M a s photo. 6 6 6 5 8 C ) , a work that I claim for the Cisneros Master: see below, p. 1 0 0 . 43 P. 4 6 J and fig. 1 6 8 . 42

FIG. 31. ANTONIO VÁZQUEZ. ST. BERNARD. MUSEO NACIONAL DE ESCULTURA, VALLADOLID (Photo.

Mas)

Fig. 32. ANTONIO VÁZQUEZ. ST. JEROME IN PENITENCE. MUSEO NACIONAL DE ESCULTURA, VALLADOLID (Photo.

Mas)

FIG. 33. ANTONIO VÁZQUEZ. CRUCIFIXION. MUSEO NACIONAL DE ESCULTURA, VALLADOLID {Photo.

Mas)

Fig. 34. ANTONIO VÁZQUEZ. CRUCIFIXION ( D E T A I L ) {Photo. Mas)

FIG.

35.

ANTONIO VÁZQUEZ. ASSUMPTION. MUSEO NACIONAL DE ESCULTURA, VALLADOLID {Photo.

Mas)

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the altarpiece of the Resurrection at Simancas. The landscape embodies his affection for nocturnal effects, and the tree in the distance at the right is virtually repeated at the left in the Baptism. The parish church at Tordehumos, west of Valladolid, contains as many as four retables of the sixteenth century, all of them, as we shall find, happily assignable to definitely recognized painters, and in one, in the Meeting at the Golden Gate (Fig. 36) and the Nativity in the two principal, lateral compartments and in the Annunciation in the pinnacle, Antonio Vázquez scarcely modified the compositions for the themes that he used in the altarpiece of Las Huelgas. The central space in the main body of the structure probably enshrined originally a sculptured image of the Madonna but exhibits, at present, a later statue of a canonized young cleric. In the middle of the predella our painter practically duplicated the cartoon of the Pietà that I have grouped with the set of the Baptism in the Valladolid Museum, and the lateral spaces in this part of the structure he reserved for half-lengths of the saints invoked against the plague, Roch and Sebastian. Antonio is so monotonously true to his types and methods that it requires little or no discernment to recognize his hand in a triptych in the Badrinas Collection at Barcelona but reported to come from Palencia or its region, i.e., well within the radius of the master's activity. The centre is devoted to the Annunciation, and the interiors of the wings to the standing Sts. John Evangelist and Mary Magdalene j but, oddly enough, the Annunciation is repeated on the wings' exteriors, although in the grisaille that was orthodox for these spots in an altarpiece. Furthermore, not only has Antonio failed to take the pains to vary the composition of the Annunciation on the inside and outside in any significant way, but he has scarcely departed from his other treatments of the theme. I had written the preceding discussion of Antonio Vazquez before J . J . Martín González published an article 44 on him including, independently of me, almost all the works that I have ascribed to him and adding, with correct perception, six panels, the remains of some retable, in the parish church of Valdenebro de los Valles, northwest of Valladolid. From the body of the retable he logically derives an Assumption which has been cut at the top, bottom, and sides but which originally must have looked very like the version in the 44

Archivo español de arte, X X X ( 1 9 5 7 ) , 125.

FIG. 36. ANTONIO VÁZQUEZ. MEETING A T T H E GOLDEN GATE. PARISH CHURCH, TORDEHUMOS (Photo. Burgos Photo

Club)

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National Museum of Sculpture that I accept as by Vázquez,45 and standing effigies of St. John Baptist, scarcely diversified from the rendering in Sta. Clara, Valladolid, and of St. Roch. To the middle of the predella he assigns an Epiphany, a compressed variant of the composition in the retable of Las Huelgas, and at its sides he places figures of the Magdalene and St. Apollonia, with a kneeling gentleman and lady, probably the donors. A private collection in Spain, probably at Madrid, is or was graced by a panel of the Nativity on which Antonio Vázquez has exerted a little more care in craftsmanship than was ordinarily his wont (Fig. 37). The composition is scarcely varied from the example in the retable of Tordehumos, and even the disintegrated roof of the stable and the landscape are almost the same. The ox and the ass are placed, as at Tordehumos, at the extreme right of the space one in the same relative position to each other. The Virgin is somewhat different in type, but she belongs to a class of femininity, with long curling tresses, often reiterated in Antonio's other productions. The St. Joseph is practically the same individual in both pictures and possesses an aged masculine head that the painter much affected. The version in the retable of the convent of Las Huelgas, Valladolid, alters the composition in not much more than the addition of a few angels, and the posture of the Child is more similar here than in the Tordehumos rendering. Martín González once 46 suggested the Becerril Master as a possibility for the authorship of a large panel of St. John Evangelist on Patmos in the chapel of the Santo Sepulcro in the clausura of the convent of Sta. Catalina at Valladolid, but he based his opinion upon comparisons with a work, the painting of St. Ursula and her maidens in the Valladolid Museum, which I formerly 47 ascribed very tentatively to the Master but which now 48 I claim with conviction for Antonio Vázquez. The Spanish scholar 49 has also transferred the St. Ursula to Vázquez, but he proposes what seems to me incredible, an assignment of the St. John in Patmos to this artist. The panel in the convent of Sta. Catalina, however, does reveal some affiliations 45

See above, p. 79. Boletín del Seminario de Estudios de Arte y Arqueología, ladolid, tomo X V I I I , fascículos L V I I I - L X ( 1 9 5 2 ) , 1 2 8 - 1 3 1 . 47 Vol. IX, p. 465 and fig. 168. 4 8 See above, p. 79. 49 Article in the Archivo esfañol de arte, X X X . 46

Universidad de Val-

FIG. 37. ANTONIO VÁZQUEZ. NATIVITY. MADRID {Photo. Mas)

PRIVATE COLLECTION,

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with the Becerril Master, although far from sufficient to establish the attribution. The accordance with his general style is obvious, but practically the only specific resemblance is found in the analogy of the angel accompanying St. John in mannered, undulating post and in outward glance to the Isaiah in the fragment of a predella in a private collection at Barcelona.50 The landscape is not of his usual bleak, mountainous sort, but there are similar exceptions even in his securely authenticated productions, as behind the St. Catherine in the predella of the retable of St. Pelagius now at Malaga. The particular scene chosen from the Apocalypse 51 is the vision of the woman clothed with the sun and of the seven-headed dragon, which occupies the right of the picture and in which Martin Gonzalez rightly discerns a dependence upon Dürer's woodcut of the same subject. I am not so sure that he correctly sees in the rest of the composition a knowledge of the engraving in which Schongauer treated the theme, particularly when we realize that the subject itself of St. John looking up at the Madonna (who was identified with the woman of Revelation) imposed compositional similarities and that there were contemporary and not very different renderings by the painters of northwest Spain, Juan Rodríguez de Solís 52 and the Belorado Master.53 If the Becerril Master does indeed deserve the credit for the picture, we are provided with our first example of his patronage at Valladolid itself (since the panel of St. Ursula in the Museum of the city turns out to be a work of Antonio Vázquez), although I have ascribed to the Becerril Master a retable at near-lying Bamba.54

6.

JERÓNIMO VÁZQUEZ

Among the painters of the second generation in the school of Valladolid during the High Renaissance, Jerónimo Vázquez is shown by the records to have been one of the most highly esteemed 5 and, if satisfactory, though never brilliant, performance in the artistic vocabulary of his time and place, together with occasional manifestations of invention, be considered all that we should demand, then we may say that he merited his reputation with his contemporaries 50 51

53 54

Vol. X , fig. 183. Chapter X I I . Vol. I X , p. 535-

Ibid,, p. 600. Ibid., p. 457.

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by his attainments, at an appraisal of which we arrive through the preservation of documented works and through others attributable on internal evidence. H e must have been born about 1520, because, when summoned in 15 70 as an expert in the legal proceedings in connection with Benito Rabuyate's frescoes in the church of S. Andrés at Valladolid, he gave his age as fifty. His father was Antonio Vázquez, as is stated by the painter Pedro de las Heras, who in his will of 1556 makes Antonio his executor and, in case of the father's death, the son Jerónimo 5 but the latter proved himself a more alert artist than his parent and entered more into the aesthetic spirit of his century. The first appearance of Jerónimo in our annals is on August 26, 1548, as a witness for the sculptor Francisco Giralte in his suit against Juan de Juni anent the commission for the retable of the Colegiata of Sta. María la Antigua at Valladolid; but no useful purpose would be served in the present volume by itemizing Jerónimo's occupations in such rôles or in his appraisals of others' attainments and even of houses and household goods, in the polychromy of statuary, and in the creation of paintings now lost. References to all these activities and to the data that it is our duty to mention will be found in the established sources,55 and we need to stop only over the documents authenticating extant achievements. Our last allusion to him as still alive is on January 26, 1580, when he empowers the younger painter Gabriel Vázquez de Barreda to divide between Jerónimo and the painter Antón Calvo the task that they had jointly assumed by contracts to undertake the polychromy and paintings in the extant retable over the high altar of the parish church at Santoyo. Among the documented works of Jerónimo Vázquez, the most extensive assemblage is found in the paintings that he contributed to the retable of the high altar in the parish church at Quintanilla de Abajo, east of Valladolid. Our records 56 about the altarpiece describe it as not yet painted in 1568 when remuneration was already beginning to be made to Jerónimo for the commission; and the payments were distributed over the years until 1572. A considerable part of the retable consists in sculpture by an unascertained artist, and it 55 Consult the index in Martí y Monsó, Estudios histórico-artísticos, p. 675, and in Boletín de la Sociedad Castellana de Excursiones, II (1905—1906), 198. Agapito y Revilla, La fintura en Valladolid, pp. 161—164; and García Chico, Documentos fara el estudio del arte en Castilla, Pintores, I I I , 74—87. 56 See an article by Marti y Monsó in the Boletín de la Sociedad Castellana de Excursiones, I (1903—1904), 314—316.

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might be supposed that the entries in the parish book of accounts referred only to Jerónimo's polychromy of the carvings; but the sum that he received, at least 506,746 maravedís, seems too large merely for such a task, and his authorship of the paintings as well can be established by comparison with documented achievements. The central division and lateral extremes of the retable are reserved for sculpture embodying themes connected with the Virgin and to St. Emilianus (San Millán), the patron of the church, and the paintings, between the centre and the extremes, continue the cycle of Mary's life in the subjects of the Expulsion of Sts. Joachim and Anne from the Temple (Fig. 38), the latter's grief for her barrenness at the sight of the nest of sparrows in the laurel tree, the Meeting at the Golden Gate, the Birth of the Virgin, the Nativity of Christ, and the Epiphany (the last two circular in shape). The only sections of the predella in which painting is admitted exhibit the scenes of the Lamentation over the Dead Christ and the Entombment. The style of Jerónimo Vázquez, though easy to recognize because of the individuality of his types, is hard to define in its broader characteristics, which are largely those of the general traits of the manneristic school of Valladolid at the time. Without the superior craft of an absolutely outstanding manipulator of his profession, he elongates the forms and gives them much of the affectation of posture and gesture that contemporary taste demanded; but, conserving something of the restraint of his father, Antonio, he indulges very little in Alonso Berruguete's emotional abandon. His modelling is rather distinctive in its rapid alternations of light and shade, producing in the rendering of the flesh a kind of knobby effect, as in the nude of Christ in the Entombment; but the shadows are by no means so pronounced as, let us say, in Gaspar de Palencia. To the desire of mannerism for winding curves in the draperies he often gives a treatment also, at least to a certain extent, his own, bringing the folds from the neck along the back and then wrapping them about the leg in a Michelangelesque fashion, as in the kneeling woman in the right foreground of the scene of the Expulsion of Sts. Joachim and Anne. He ordinarily abides by traditional compositions, and yet in the Expulsion he reveals that he was occasionally capable of interesting novelties, representing the aged pair as pushed down a staircase by the priest, symbolizing the pathos of their sterility by filling the rest of the space with fruitful parents and their teeming

FIG. 38. JERÓNIMO VÁZQUEZ. EXPULSION OF STS. JOACHIM AND ANNE FROM THE TEMPLE. PARISH CHURCH, QUINTANILLA DE ABAJO (Photo.

Mas)

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offspring as onlookers, and thus satisfying the delight of the High Renaissance in futti, three of whom are actually sheltered under a flight of the Jewish prelate's mantle. If the idea of depicting, not, as regularly, the angelic annunciation to St. Anne, but her yearning at the sight of ornithological motherhood was Jerónimo's rather than the donor's, then he can be credited with another appealing piece of iconographie invention. Ceán Bermúdez 5 7 makes him, for no divulged reason, a pupil of Gaspar Becerra, but it is difficult to discern any traits peculiar to them both. The dim chance that he might have painted a small retable wrongly attributed to Becerra 58 is not enough to support Ceán's allegation. Another comprehensive enterprise in which Jerónimo Vázquez collaborated was the retable of the high altar in the church of S. Antonio Abad at Valladolid. Between 1553 and 1557 the sculpture, which constituted the major part of the structure, was carried out by Leonardo de Carrión and Diego Rodriguez; and in 1559 Jerónimo Vázquez in association with Gaspar de Palencia received the commission to do the polychromy and four panels of painting, whose themes were to be chosen by the donor, Ana de Taxis. 59 Long ago the retable was taken down to give place to a more modern substitute; but the pieces were in part preserved in the church, and after the edifice was demolished in 1940, the carvings were placed in the Museo Nacional de Escultura at Valladolid and three of the paintings in the sacristy of the Santuario Nacional in the same city.60 So far as the documents go, the paintings might be works of Gaspar de Palencia; but that they were turned over to Jerónimo Vázquez and that Gaspar's contribution was limited to the polychromy of the sculpture, is proved by Gaspar's very different manner, which is known to us through other certified achievements, and by the stylistic unity with Jerónimo's productions at Quintanilla, so that the attribution of the panels from S. Antonio and at Quintanilla is mutually confirmed and the slight lacunae in the documents filled by the internal evidence. T h e pieces preserved in the Santuario Nacional show that three of 57

Diccionario, V, 146. See below, p. 1 7 2 . 59 For the documents, see Martí y Monsó, Estudios histórico-artisticos, pp. 2 1 3 - 2 1 6 . 60 See in an article by Constantino Candeira, Boletín del Seminario de Estudios de Arte y Arqueología, Universidad de Valladolid, tomo VIII, fascículos X X V I I I - X X X ( 1 9 4 1 - 1 9 4 2 ) 136. 58

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the subjects chosen by Doña Ana de Taxis were the Agony in the Garden, Deposition, and Ascension. It is very much to be suspected that the fourth painting from the church of S. Antonio at Valladolid is a panel now in the Fundación Lázaro Galdeano, Madrid, in which, by a not infrequent iconographie telescoping, the Assumption and Coronation are united (Fig. 39). The sculpture included the subject of the Assumption} but occasionally in retables where carvings and paintings were combined the same theme was curiously repeated, and indeed the Lázaro panel might have passed rather for a Coronation. In any case, it is a Simon Pure work of Jerónimo Vázquez. T o be convinced, we have only to compare the youthful St. John in the right foreground with the Magdalene in the Entombment of the Quintanilla retable or to observe how the aged Apostles, as well as the Eternal Father in the Coronation, conform to his somewhat rugged conception of old men, illustrated by several of the participants in the Expulsion of Sts. Joachim and Anne in the same altarpiece. The St. John is also a good example of Jerónimo's characteristic manipulation of the drapery, which I have defined on a former page. In general, to be classed among his most carefully executed achievements, it contains one of his best landscapes, according with the kind of vista favored by the Spanish painters of the sixteenth century, augustly mountainous, relieved by settlements or towns nestling in the valleys, and half veiled by romantic mist. At the right in the midst of this setting he has depicted, in diminished scale, with one of the bits of invention to which he sometimes treats us, the subordinate episode of the Apostles bearing the Virgin's body to the sepulchre in the foreground.

7.

T H E CISNEROS

MASTER

In the process of isolating each of the many personalities in the pictorial production of Castile and León during the High Renaissance, we may give to one the name of the Cisneros Master because the sacristy of the church of S. Facundo at Cisneros, northwest of Palencia, contains a work that clearly defines his style. W e shall find at Tordehumos a more elaborate retable by him, but a sobriquet taken from this town would be less distinctive on account of the presence there of achievements by three other painters of the period. The work at Cisneros apparently constituted by itself a whole altar-

Fig. 39. J E R Ó N I M O VÁZQUEZ. CORONATION. FUNDACIÓN L Á Z A R O GALDEANO, M A D R I D (Photo. Gudiol)

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piece (Fig. 40), a representation, before a kneeling youthful donor, of the rare theme 61 of Christ's parting with His mother and other holy women before the Crucifixion (impaired by the use, at some time, of the panel's lower central section for another purpose). T h e particular notes distinguishing the Master from his compeers in the same general style are the application of prevalent manneristic qualities to forms of an extremely delicate unsubstantiality and the prominence that his love of the beauties of nature caused him to give to the settings of landscape. It is almost as if he had used, instead of human beings, gentle and elegant fairies of pleasantly childlike mentality to enact the rôles of sacred personages and donors. Against the mountainous and rocky distances, he places, with charming contrast, thick and opulent foliage growing about highly imaginative agglomerations of buildings. According to the frequent contemporary practice of introducing into the backgrounds related episodes with actors of smaller size, he represents in the vista at the right the Agony in the Garden and, on a ledge behind that prettily descends into Gethsemane, the ominously approaching soldiery in still further and properly diminished scale. T h e richness of the parish church of Tordehumos in manneristic paintings includes not only the retables by Antonio Vázquez, Luis Vêlez, and Cristóbal de Herrera, but also one which internal evidence patently demonstrates to have been done, except for the statue in the principal compartment, by the Cisneros Master and which seems to place him among Antonio Vazquez's disciples. I have already in volume I V 6 2 briefly discussed this retable as perhaps embodying a tardy dependence upon the style that Juan de Flandes had brought to Castile, and in general in the works of our Master we possibly ought to recognize, particularly in the youthful feminine types, a lingering admiration for the Fleming's achievements. T h e photographs made by the Archivo Regional at Burgos enable me to rectify the omissions and the one error of which I was guilty in describing the retable on the basis of the few notes that I scribbled at my hurried visit to the dimly lighted church. Between painted panels of St. Francis's stigmatization and the penitent St. Jerome, the statue, evidently a part of the original enterprise, represents St. Joachim (or St. Joseph?), and in iconographie conformity the Cis61

62

Vol. V, p. P. S3·

64.

FIG. 40. T H E CISNEROS MASTER. ALTARPIECE. S. FACUNDO, CISNEROS {Photo. Burgos Photo Club)

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neros Master depicted in the surmounting compartment the Anna selbdritt (Fig. 4 1 ) flanked by the scenes (reading from right to left rather than, as more usually, vice versa) of the Meeting at the Golden Gate and the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple. The mere landscape in the central pinnacle was obviously meant as the background of a sculptured Crucifix that has now disappeared, and the assemblage includes, above this, a painted tondo of the veronica. The two panels at the sides of the Pietà or Lamentation over the Dead Christ, which occupies the middle of the predella, do not, as I stated in volume IV, display in each instance three figures of saints but a masculine and a feminine donor both accompanied by two heavenly patrons, the gentleman by Sts. Peter and Paul, the lady, probably his wife, by Sts. James Major and John Baptist. The frames look as if the Cisneros Master might here have enjoyed the collaboration of the same woodcarver as in the altarpiece in the town that gives him his name. Once more we encounter in the actors the same amiably simple mentalities that have appealed to us in the scene of Christ's farewell to His mother. The St. Anne, for instance, in the panel where she is grouped with her daughter and Grandson, should be compared with the figure of Our Lady at Cisneros, the maiden facing us, behind St. Joachim, in the Virgin's Presentation with the foremost of Mary's sorrowing companions, and the St. Francis with the departing Saviour himself. The smaller dimensions of the compartments at Tordehumos rendered it generally necessary to make the figures more prominent in order to allow space for the narrative and for the donors and saints of the predella, but what can be seen of the landscapes unfolds the kind of vista that has pleased us in the Cisneros altarpiece, especially in the way that the foliage encroaches upon the architecture in the Meeting at the Golden Gate. When the Master has only single personages to deal with in the panels devoted to St. Francis, to St. Jerome, and to the Crucifix, he exercises his predilections by giving full scope to the natural settings. Among the factors implying that he was trained under Antonio Vázquez are the compositions which almost actually repeat some of those that the latter had evolved in his works at Valladolid, for instance the Meeting at the Golden Gate in the retable in the church of the convent of Las Huelgas and the penitence of St. Jerome, the Stigmatization of St. Francis, and Pietà in the cycle by Antonio in

FIG. 41. T H E CISNEROS M A S T E R . ANNA SELBDRITT. PARISH CHURCH, T O R D E H U M O S {Photo. Burgos Photo Club)

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the Museum. 63 The altarpiece by Vázquez at Tordehumos with two of these themes must have already been in place for the Cisneros Master to see, but he appears to have followed more closely the precedents in the Valladolid religious institutions. The landscapes and some of the actual human types, such as the Virgin in the Anna selbiritt, give the effect of being derived from Antonio, but the Cisneros Master very much refined whatever suggestions he received from the older and coarser artist. Furthermore, it can scarcely be doubted that the Assumption (Fig. 3 5 ) by Antonio Vázquez in the Valladolid Museum was the source of the picture in the same collection, likewise of unrecorded provenience, that the technical procedure and dainty types demonstrate the Cisneros Master to have executed. At the bottom an abbess as donor kneels against one of those landscapes which the Master sketches so invitingly that the spectator would like to wander in them; and as a matter of fact he has there depicted in smaller scale, St. Thomas sauntering in expectation of the Virgin's girdle that is to fall to him. The edges of the foliate masses assume the forms of the projecting tufts that are among the artist's trade-marks. The finest work of his that I know is a triptych now in the Collection of Don Luis A. López Méndez at Caracas, Venezuela (Fig. 42). The centre is occupied by a devotional rather than historical representation of the Crucifixion in which the swooning Virgin, St. John, and the Magdalene at the left of the cross are balanced at the right by personages who were not connected with the event, St. Catherine of Alexandria and a kneeling Dominican donor 64 upon whose shoulder his patron St. Andrew places his hand. The subjects of the wings are the penitent St. Jerome and St. Anthony Abbot beside whom there kneels a gentleman who must have been united in some way with the Dominican in commissioning the picture. If the reader will merely examine what I have written about the Cisneros Master and the foregoing illustrations, he will dispense me from itemizing proof of the attribution. H e will find, as was to be expected, the composition for the St. Jerome somewhat varied from the example in the Tordehumos retable, but the penitent's discarded clothes are slung over a tree in the same way. The Master 63

See a b o v e , p. 74. H e cannot be a D o m i n i c a n saint since he lacks the h a l o w o r n b y the sacred figures in the triptych. 64

FIG. 42. THE CISNEROS MASTER. TRIPTYCH. COLLECTION OF LUIS A. LÓPEZ MÉNDEZ, CARACAS

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so managed the spaces offered him as to provide opportunity for very considerable and lovely landscapes of the sort that I have analyzed. In particular, in the backgrounds of the Crucifixion and of St. Jerome we are treated to masses of his highly inventive conceptions of architecture, overhung by his thickly leaved trees. Underneath one of his impressive rocks at the right in the setting to the Crucifixion there is hollowed out a cave where there is enacted one of those subordinate scenes which he likes to introduce here, the Entombment, with the figures not only in properly lesser size but flooded by an eerie light endowing them with the indistinctness that was often one of the mannerists' desiderata. From the Collection of Don Luis Ruiz, Madrid, there were offered for sale at the American Art Association, N e w York, in January, 1929, two panels which, so far as the extensive restorations permit judgment, derive from some retable by the Cisneros Master. One seems originally to have depicted the scene of the young Saviour among the Doctors, but the restorer has made it over, particularly in the central part, into what he perhaps meant to be the appearance of Christ to the Apostles on the night of Easter, a theme that I do not remember ever having encountered in Spanish art of the Middle Ages or Renaissance. T h e companion-piece, the Resurrection, has been tampered with less wantonly. In both panels the designs in the pavements upon which the events take place virtually repeat the pattern in the flooring of the compartment of the Virgin's Presentation at Tordehumos. T h e compositional relationship of the Resurrection to the version by Antonio Vazquez at Simancas may be taken as for the witness to our Master's tutelage under him.

8. Luis VÉLEZ T h e valuable researches of García Chico in the archives have rescued from oblivion this hitherto unknown painter, who, however, turns out to be only one of the weaker imitators of the fashions established by Alonso Berruguete. Plying his trade at the important town of Medina del Campo, south of Valladolid, he was probably the son or at least a younger relation of a painter, Juan Vêlez of Medina, none of whose productions have been recognized but who is mentioned in a financial transaction of 1 5 1 8 and a portrait of whom is touchingly listed in the inventory of Luis's possessions drawn up

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after the latter's death. The record of Luis's activity stretches from August 5, 1 5 1 8 , to his decease, which must have occurred between September 22, 1575, when he made his will, and November of this year, the time of the inventory of his goods, but, except in the cases of references to preserved works, we need not encumber our pages with a register of his commissions in painting and polychromy or the facts of his life in business and in the family, which are readily accessible in Garcia Chico's writings.65 The style of Luis Vêlez is revealed to us by his documented contributions to the retable of a chapel in the church of S. Miguel at Medina del Campo. On March 2 1 , 1559, he agreed to do for the patron of the chapel, the alderman Alejo de Medina, not only the polychromy of the central, sculptured Descent from the Cross (by an unascertained artist) and of the other carved parts but also the four lateral paintings the subjects of two of which are prescribed in the contract, the Madonna and the Epiphany, with the other pair left to the choice of the donor, who chose the Crucifixion and Resurrection. A bust of Alejo de Medina is applied at the base of the representation of the Madonna, and one of his wife, María López de Mercado, correspondingly in the compartment of the Epiphany, but they are so disproportionately larger than the sacred figures that they may have been afterthoughts, whether by Vélez or, although quite in his mode, by an immediate successor. The commission included also his frescoing of the chapel's walls, thus witnessing to the dissemination of the Italian form of ecclesiastical decoration that Alonso Berruguete helped to popularize, but, if these mural embellishments are preserved, they are now hidden beneath whitewash. The year 1560 is inscribed on the frame beneath the Epiphany, probably referring to the completion of the undertaking. Luis Vêlez incorporates merely the shell of Berruguete's mannerism, without his vigor, without his pre-baroque tendencies, without his originality, without Alonso's infusion of a perfervid personality, and without much of his technical proficiency. The forms are elongated but ordinarily flaccid. In the Resurrection, Christ flutters above the sepulchre in a manneristic pose; but the attitude is poorly artic6s El Tem-plo de San Miguel de Medina, Boletín del Seminario de Estudios de Arte y Arqueología, Universidad de Valladolid, tomo X , fascículos XXXIV— X X X V I ( 1 9 4 3 - 1 9 4 4 ) , 103—122, and in the same periodical, tomos X X I X X I I ( 1 9 5 6 ) , La Colegiata de Medina del Camfo, and his book, Documentos fara el estudio del arte en Castilla, Pintores, Valladolid, III, 1946, 20—39.

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ulated, and the body lacks substantiality. N o w and then we come upon rather pleasantly realized types of humanity, such as the Virgin and kneeling Magus of the Epiphany, and yet there is nothing highly individual about them, since they are the creation of a prosaically minded countryman whose ambitions rose no higher than honest supplying of the pious trade. In the compartment devoted to the honor of Our L a d y holding the Child and crowned by two futti, she is enthroned upon the clouds according to iconography established by Correggio and Raphael; 66 but, inasmuch as Luis could have got the idea through Spanish intermediaries, it is not necessary to postulate a sojourn in Italy or any more intimate contact with Italian art than its reflections in Berruguete as well as other native masters, and, generally speaking, his compositions do not break with the commonplace norms of the indigenous past and his own day. Internal evidence proves him the author of one of the several retables of the period at Tordehumos, northwest of Valladolid. F r o m the Ermita de S. Roque, its parts, so far as they are preserved, have been gathered into the sacristy of the parish church in the town. As the retable ( F i g . 4 3 ) which possesses its fine Plateresque frames, now stands in the sacristy, the principal compartment has lost its original content, whether a painting or a statue, and the place is usurped by an image of Our L a d y . T h e themes of the lateral, painted panels are the Last Supper ( F i g . 4 4 ) , Betrayal, Flagellation, and Ecce H o m o . Directly above M a r y ' s image is the Crucifixion, and over this a compartment displaying the two seated St. Johns. A pair of small panels depicting the Birth and Presentation of the Virgin by another artist have been imported from another retable and set at the top of the structure, but three other episodes of the Passion, manifestly once belonging to the altarpiece by Vêlez, used to be installed separately in the sacristy, the Agony in the Garden, 6 7 Via Dolorosa, and Entombment. T h e attribution is clear in the general style but is driven home by a number of analogies in human types to the retable at Medina. T h e second Wise M a n in the Medina Epiphany, for instance, is practically repeated in face and treatment of the neck by the two foremost Apostles at the right in the Last Supper; the aged model 66

Vol. X , p. 263. Of the three, at least the A g o n y in the Garden has been sold from the church and at my last knowledge was owned by the dealer Costa in Palma de Mallorca. 67

Fig. 43. LUIS VÊLEZ. RETABLE. PARISH CHURCH, TORDEHUMOS {Photo. Burgos Photo

Club)

FIG. 44. LUIS VÉLEZ. LAST SUPPER. PARISH CHURCH, TORDEHUMOS (Photo.

Burgos Photo

Club)

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used for the kneeling Magus served also for the spectator at the extreme right in the scene of the Ecce H o m o ; and the countenance of the Madonna in the clouds scarcely varies from that of St. Veronica in the Via Dolorosa. T h e Crucifixion is a bit more animated than the very similar version at Medina, and the Apostle at the lower left corner in the Last Supper looks as if V ê l e z may have known at second hand Leonardo's rendering, which, however, he is far from following in other respects. In general, the panels at Tordehumos add nothing to our appreciation of the painter's talents or breadth of range. Like strictures may be brought against another set of his paintings, parts of a subordinate retable, dedicated to Our Lady, in the church of the Santos Juanes at Nava del Rey, southwest of Valladolid. T h e carved sections by an unascertained sculptor, on the other hand, are of rather high quality, a statue of the emotionally inspired Virgin in the principal compartment, medallions of the Eternal Father and two Prophets on the surmounting arch, two robust but charming futti on the tops of the enclosing columns, and an exuberant riot of the decorative motif of the Renaissance, mainly child-angels, on the elaborate frames. T h e contributions of Vêlez comprise: immediately adjoining the statue, the scenes of the Annunciation, Nativity (Fig. 45), Epiphany, and Purification; farther at the sides standing effigies of Sts. John Baptist, James M a j o r , and Barbara, and a representation of the Anna selbdritt·, and in the central pinnacle the usual Crucifixion. T h e Epiphany is somewhat varied from the rendering at Medina del Campo, but the Virgin and St. Joseph in this rendering are almost precisely the same types as in the Nativity of the Nava retable, in which also the two bearded shepherds belong to a distinctive, long-necked class of men to whom Vêlez constantly reverts. T h e Crucifixion is more populous than in the versions at Medina and Tordehumos, but the figure of Christ himself on the cross remains the same.

9. T H E

OLIVARES

MASTER

Angulo 68 has extricated the personality of a painter to whom we may give the name of the Olivares Master because his principal extant work is the vast retable over the high altar of the parish church at Olivares de Duero, east of Valladolid in the province of 68

Diego Angulo, Pintura del Renacimiento, pp. n o , 112.

FIG. 45. LUIS V É L E Z .

N A T I V I T Y . SANTOS J U A N E S , N A V A D E L R E Y {Photo. Mas)

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this city and belonging to the diocese of Falencia; but we shall discover that, whereas the orbits of most artists were still at this time confined to single provinces or dioceses and adjacent territory, the Master's vogue extended to a greater distance than Angulo realized, namely as far south as the diocese of Sigüenza. T h e careers, however, of such men as the Luna Master and Juan de Pereda 69 show that it had already become an established practice for artists to circulate between the provinces of Guadalajara, within which Sigüenza lies, and of Soria, which is contiguous to the province of Burgos and includes a large section of the diocese of Burgo de Osma, where also we shall find the Olivares Master employed. Another interest attaches to him, as possessed by more devotion to Michael Angelo than is manifested by the majority of his rivals, and as demonstrated by internal evidence to have enjoyed almost surely an Italian sojourn. If we leave out of account the carving of the elaborate frames with heads of winged putti and other decorative motifs, only the central, vertical section of the structure, the retable at Olivares, amazingly spacious and elaborate for so small a town, is retained for sculpture, contemporary with the paintings, at the bottom an image of the church's patron, the adolescent Cordovan martyr of the tenth century, St. Pelagius (who carries a banderole inscribed with the words, "Veniet desuper plius D e i . " 70 ) who enjoyed a special cult in the diocese of Palencia, above this a group of the Virgin upborne and crowned by angels, and in a lunette at the summit the Crucified between His mother and St. John. 71 T h e face of the original tabernacle is also carved, exhibiting the Resurrection, which, however, has now been moved over to a position in the left side of the predella in order to give place to the present tabernacle substituted in modern times. T h e subjects of the painted compartments of the predella are Prophets, rendered in half-length (reading from left to right), Jeremiah, Isaiah, Solomon, David (Fig. 46), Daniel (Fig. 47) and Balaam, but, quite unusually for such assemblies in Spain, their line V o l . I X , p. 7 0 1 . T h e w o r d s are not f o u n d in Lactantius or any other of the usual sources f o r the prophecies ascribed to the Sibyls: see E . M â l e , L'art religieux de la fin du Moyen Age en France, Paris, 1 9 2 5 , 270 f ï . 7 1 T h e g e n e r a l but not detailed composition of the retable is outlined by M a r t í y M o n s ó in Boletín de la Sociedad Castellana de Excursiones, I (1903—1904), 316. A f t e r w r i t i n g m y discussion of the O l i v a r e s M a s t e r , I have read w i t h profit the article on the retable by Juan José M a r t í n G o n z á l e z in the Boletín del Seminario de Estudios de Arte y Arqueología, Universidad de V a l l a d o l i d , X X ( 1 9 5 5 ) , 3 1 , and have made one or t w o slight changes as a result. 69

70

Fie. 46. THE OLIVARES MASTER. DAVID. HIGH ALTAR. PARISH CHURCH, OLIVARES DE DUERO {Photo.

Mas)

FIG. 47. T H E OLIV ARES MASTER. DANIEL. HIGH ALTAR. PARISH CHURCH, OLIVARES DE DUERO (Photo.

Mas)

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is interrupted, between David and Daniel, by the Phrygian Sibyl. In conformity with the provincial influence of Michael Angelo which overhangs the retable, David and the Sibyl are accompanied by young male genii as in the cases of the Prophets and Sibyls on the Sistine ceiling ; and on the bases of the columns framing David there are simulated in paint two events of his youth, his victories over the lion and Goliath. In the great complication of the retable, the piers that flank the other Prophets are decorated with simulated statuettes of sacred personages. The space at the left now occupied by the original relief on the tabernacle must have contained another Prophet or Sibyl to make four on each side, but the figure is either covered by the relief or has been lost. In the main body of the retable the themes of the paintings, in three tiers of six compartments each, are accorded with the central statuary. In the story of St. Pelagius 72 in the lowest row we first see the minions of the sultan Abdur Rahman remarking his pulchritude during his incarceration; he is then freed from prison; the next scene is the vain endeavor of the Mohammedan potentate to entice him to sin and apostasy at a banquet; there follows his torment with huge, iron pincers (Fig. 4 8 ) ; the subsequent martyrdom by atrocious dismemberment; and finally Christians' recovery of his remains from the river into which the infidels had thrown them. The painter is so saturated with Italianism that he has succumbed to the taste of the Renaissance for the grotesques suggested by antique prototypes, introducing on pieces of architecture in the background of the room of the saint's temptation two nude sprites, one pursuing with a banner the other who carries a plaque inscribed with a transliteration of Abdur Rahman's Arab name. The second tier in the retable is devoted to the Virgin, exhibiting on either side of the statue of her glorification the Dormition and Coronation and in the four outer compartments the Annunciation, Nativity of Christ, Epiphany, and Purification. The top row, just beneath the sculptured Crucifixion, is properly reserved for the Passion in the episodes of the Agony in the Garden, Betrayal, Christ before Pilate, Via Dolorosa, Deposition, Burial, and Resurrection. The elaboration in the retable extends to the decoration of the faces of the great projecting piers enclosing the structure with effigies of saints in all the tiers, and at the sides of the 72 See the Bollandists under the day of his feast, June 2 6 ; Alonso de Villegas Sehago, Flos sanctorum, Madrid, I, 1 5 9 3 , 6 5 9 ; and my vol. I X , p. 449.

FIG. 48. T H E OLIVARES M A S T E R . T O R M E N T OF ST. PELAGIUS. HIGH A L T A R . PARISH CHURCH, OLIVARES D E DUERO {Photo. Mas)

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central capping lunette containing the sculptured Crucifixion the two correspondingly shaped spaces are painted with groups of angels holding the instruments of the Passion. No indubitable evidence is forthcoming that the Olivares Master was trained at Valladolid rather than in another Spanish centre of art. The David and Sibyl with their accompanying genii are not very similar in composition to Alonso Berruguete's painted Evangelists from S. Benito and can be explained by direct borrowing from Michael Angelo. Indeed the types suggest a possible indebtedness to Francisco de Comontes, whose activity 73 extended to Sigüenza where we shall find the Olivares Master also to have been employed. Certain manneristic qualities are present, such as the elongation of the forms, but the Master's Spanish birthright has tempered the Italianate style, endowing his figures with some degree of sobriety that partly rejects the affected poses and gestures of mannerism and balks at adopting very much of the pre-baroque excitement in which Berruguete and his circle revelled. In the scene of the dismemberment of Pelagius the violation of the Master's comparative staidness was provoked by the revolting horror innate in the very theme. The tradition about the saint caused the artist to essay physical beauty in representing the youth ; but in general the ethnic sternness of Castile turned the Master's rude actors into personifications of an unyielding, almost dour severity, emphasized by hardness of outline in the draughtsmanship. The masculinity of his style was further stimulated by so much more potent an admiration for Michael Angelo than is evidenced by most of his Spanish contemporaries that we are bound to postulate direct contact in Italy with Buonarroti's achievements rather than acquaintance through prints or other intermediaries. I have referred to the precedent of the Sistine ceiling as occasioning the introduction of the genii beside David and the Sibyl ·, but the actual form of David's supernatural companion seems to be lifted from the boyish spirit who at the right touches the shoulder of Michael Angelo's Joel, and the fut to with the Sibyl may have had as a source the correspondingly low-placed child at the left of the Sistine Isaiah. There is no Phrygian Sibyl in the Sistine ceiling, but the Olivares Master's oracular lady is almost a copy of the Delphic Sibyl by the great Italian. T h e Balaam seems to owe something to the Sistine Isaiah; the body and 73

Vol. XI, p. 448.

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posture of Pelagius undergoing the torture of the pincers could not have been conceived without the precedent of the ignudi of the ceiling, especially the one at the left just above the Cumaean Sibyl; and the complicated contraffosto of the saint's tormentor at the left is reminiscent of the "slaves" for the tomb of Julius II. Such specific examples could be multiplied, were it necessary, but, more generally, the Olivares Master's whole and somewhat un-Spanish attitude toward his art is powerfully dominated by a veneration for Michael Angelo, for instance the indulgence in nudity where the subject did not really so demand, as in the executioner holding the martyr's severed head, or the frequent stress upon heroically muscular anatomy. A sojourn in Italy appears to be confirmed by the simulated statuette on the pillar to the right of Daniel, which gives the impression of having been inspired directly by Donatello's St. George rather than by Alonso Berruguete's adaptation in his carvings for S. Benito. As in the case of the H o l y Cross Master, the roots of the Olivares Master, despite his Italianism, stretched back sufficiently into the Spanish past to admit now and then handsome brocades as accents in his paintings, but the austerity of his nature eschewed the H o l y Cross Master's occasional Flemish vagaries in architecture and cultivated in the edifices of his settings a severity attuned to the character of the human beings whom he depicted. Although the limited talents of the Olivares Master would have stirred Michael Angelo's impatience, he stands at no lower a provincial level than the H o l y Cross Master in purely technical endowment, and, when he cared to exert himself, he was capable of such rather memorable achievements as the delineation of the David. His popularity well within the province and diocese of Burgos is proven by the other works through which Angulo initiated the process of building personality, panels of the Virgin's Presentation in the Temple and Purification (Figs. 49, 50) from the town of Ameyugo and now in the Barcelona Museum that perhaps embody his collaboration in a retable with the H o l y Cross Master; 74 but, despite the equality of the H o l y Cross Master's compartment of Christ Among the Doctors in dimensions, there is always the possibility that there were two similar retables in the church at Ameyugo, of which each painter did one. An exposition of the unity of style ex74

Angulo, Archivo esfañol de arte, XVIII, 194.J, 94—96.

FIG. 49. T H E OLIVARES MASTER. PURIFICATION. MUSEUM, BARCELONA

FIG, 50. T H E OLIVARES MASTER.

PURIFICATION

(DETAIL)

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isting between the two Ameyugo panels by the Olivares Master and the altarpiece at Olivares itself is rendered unnecessary not only by the fact that a single artist's execution strikes one almost at first glance but also by the stamp of Angulo's authority. T o the customary Castillan rigor of the Master's personages there is added, in the figure (Simeon?) behind the priest of the Purification a Spanish haughtiness; but in general the simple compositions are traditional, and the Master seems to have regarded the commission as merely supplying the religious trade and not to have put forth the effort to which at Olivares he was stimulated. His types and methods are patently present in a retable in the parish church of Roa, in the province of Burgos and diocese of Burgo de Osma but not very far east of Olivares (Fig. 5 1 ) . As in cases by other painters where the subject of the Lamentation over the Dead Christ or a related theme was used,75 it was here enlarged to constitute the whole main body of a retable, which thus was not, according to the commoner practice, divided into compartments; and the only other section permitted in the example at Roa is a lunette of Our Lord in half-length, in the iconographie phase of the Salvator Mundi, adored by two angels. Although retaining his Castilian austerity, the Olivares Master here pays slightly greater homage to prevalent mannerism and to the desire for emotional agitation, for example in the flying locks of the Saviour in the lunette and of the Baptist who, with anomalous iconography, is introduced into the Lamentation as pointing to the dead Christ, now in very truth proven to be, through the sacrifice on the cross, the Lamb of God that St. John ordinarily thus designates at an earlier moment in the Redeemer's life or in the symbolic guise of the actual animal. The extension of the Olivares Master's activity to the province of Guadalajara, further south than the places where we have just followed him, is exemplified by one of his most conscientiously executed works, consisting in four pieces of a predella which until recently were built into the base of a retable of the first half of the seventeenth century over the high altar of the church of Sta. María del Rey at Atienza, northwest of Sigiienza, and which may be the relic of an earlier retable of the sixteenth century for the same spot.76 75 76

Cf., for instance, vols. I l l , p. 90, and V, p. 144. See F. Layna Serrano, Boletín de la Sociedad. Esfañola

( 1 9 S 3 ) , 276 ff·

de Excursiones,

LVII

Fig. JI. THE OLIVARES MASTER. RETABLE. {Photo.

Mas)

PARISH CHURCH, ROA

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Now removed for safer keeping to the sacristy of the church of the Trinidad in the same town, the four pieces marshal a series of seated Prophets and Sibyls against patterned gold backgrounds, arranged in groups of three and not, as at Olivares, each in a separate compartment. The first group at the left comprises Daniel, Micah, and Ezekiel (Fig. 52)5 next, Zechariah, Jeremiah, and David ; then, the Samian, Phrygian, and Cumaean Sibyls; and finally, at the extreme right, Hosea, Isaiah, and Malachi. All these figures are named and accompanied by appropriate inscriptions on banderoles or, in the case of the Cumaean Sibyl, a flag. For the Prophets the following verses from their works are chosen, in some instances partly garbled by restorations or from a Latin translation of the Bible other than the Vulgate: Daniel, I X , 2 5 ; Micah, IV, 1 ; Ezekiel, X V I I , 235 Zechariah, I X , 9; Jeremiah, X X I I I , 5 ; David, Psalms, L X X I I , 6 (Exorietur institia in diebus eius); Hosea, I I I , 5 ; Isaiah, I I , 3 (De Syon exhibit lex) ; and Malachi, IV, 2. Zechariah holds also in his hands a scroll on which is inscribed in Hebrew, "Jesus, King of the Jews." 77 The Phrygian Sibyl in the middle of the group of seeresses bears on her scroll the same sentence as at Olivares; the flag of the Cumaean Sibyl is adorned with the inscription from Lactantius often assigned to her, 78 " A summo sole egressio eius"; but I have been unable to find the source of the words accompanying the Samian Sibyl, "Mann fucta Deo." Compositional unity is effectively attained in the groups by intertwining the figures in manneristic curves through crossing lines and activities. Micah, for instance, leans over to write a Hebrew inscription in a scroll held by Daniel, and the Phrygian Sibyl toys with a locket hanging on her Cumaean sister's neck. The Olivares Master's authorship is established by the resemblance of the Sibyls in heroically powerful forms and countenances to the Phrygian Sibyl in the Olivares retable and by the still more striking analogy of several of the Prophets to some of the older men in this retable, such as the David, in whom the painter transcended his customary craft. The superiority of the Atienza altarpiece to his general average undoubtedly owes much to the forceful memories of Michael Angelo. They do not always result in direct borrowings but rather in the whole character of the style, as in the robust bodies 77 Professor H . A . Wolfson of H a r v a r d has kindly read the Hebrew, above which is another legend in Latin, too f a r hidden for me to decipher. 78 Vol. X I I , p. 3 1 .

Fig. 52. T H E OLIVARES M A S T E R . P R O P H E T S . (Photo. Mas)

L A T R I N I D A D , A T I ENZA

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and powerful contraffosto; and yet some degree of specific dependence can be traced in the Isaiah upon the Sistine Isaiah and in the Malachi upon Buonarroti's Cumaean Sibyl. Like the Olivares retable, the Atienza altarpiece shows that our painter during his Italian experience had his eyes open also to the works of other masters of the sister peninsula, for the involved pose of the Samian Sibyl is derived from Raphael's portrait of Bindo Altoviti (at Washington) or from the similar portraits by Sebastiano del Piombo. T h e Olivares Master's unmistakable, manneristically elongated, and steely types appear in a panel (Fig. 53) in the museum attached to the cathedral of Sigiienza, depicting an assembly of standing saints, two episcopal worthies, destitute of identifying emblems, in the centre, the advocates against the plague, Sebastian and Roch at the left, St. Anthony of Padua paired with an unrecognizable canonized woman at the right, and behind her, in order to break somewhat the rigidity of the system of couples, the emerging head of another, male member of the Church Triumphant, who also lacks any distinctive attribute. T h e painting, in contrast to the Atienza predella, constitutes one of the best examples of one of the ways in which he differed from a number of other mannerists, namely the emotional restraint of the postures and gestures.

10.

A N T Ó N PÉREZ

T h e researches of García Chico in the archives have uncovered not only the name but the style of a late and rather insinuatingly charming exponent of mannerism hitherto unknown in the annals of Spanish art, Antón Pérez, who has the additional interest of having exercised himself more in fresco, under Italian influence, than the majority of his contemporaries in the school that centered in the region of Valladolid. T o be distinguished, of course, from his practically contemporary older homonyms at Seville, the Antón Pérez who now concerns us resided at Medina del Campo, which we have seen to have been then scarcely less important than Valladolid as a city and as a hearth of artistic production. Recorded only in his commissions, which he often carried as a partner, particularly with Pedro de Herrera, and in his transactions of business, he can be traced from December 11, 1571, to July 4, 1614. For our purposes we need to summarize merely the contracts authenticating works that are pre-

Fig. 53. T H E OLIVARES MASTER. MALE SAINTS. CATHEDRAL MUSEUM, SIGÜENZA {Photo.

Mas)

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served, and for the many other orders that he received and frequently were confined to polychromy of sculpture, the reader may consult the apposite pages in García Chico's Documentos fara el estudio del arte en Castilla, Pintores.79 We recover the artistic personality of Antón Pérez through his contract to do an extant retable in the parish church of Sta. María at Pozaldez, between Valladolid and Medina del Campo. In the document, dated May 9, 1585, María Hernández, the widow of a Pedro de Ruela, demands that in the arch under her patronage on the Gospel side of the high altar of Sta. María he paint a retable to consist chiefly of a larger representation of the Lamentation over the Dead Christ (described in the document by the Spanish term for the theme, the "quinta angustia"), including in the lower corners portraits of the "founders" of the shrine, meaning either Señora Hernandez and her husband or forbears who had preceded them in obtaining pious control of the spot in the edifice. The assemblage was to comprise also subordinate pieces, a panel of the Resurrection in the arch above the Lamentation, over the arch a Last Judgment, and, surmounting this, an effigy of the Eternal Father. Antón Pérez is somewhat distinguished from the other mannerists not only by an engaging sensitiveness to feminine beauty, as in the Magdalene bending above Christ's knees, but also by a kind of silky sheen that he spreads over his figures through manipulation of the pigments and chiaroscuro. He creates for himself no complicated problems of delineation by essaying the hectic fervor of Alonso Berruguete, but within the limitations that he set himself he is a competent performer. If, however, we may judge by the two examples in the picture at Pozaldez, portraiture was not his forte, although here his efforts may have been conditioned by the necessity, as we have noted, of resuscitating persons whom he had never seen. The conception of Antón Pérez's manner attained through his documented work at Pozaldez demonstrates that he is the long sought author of the paintings in the retable in the chapel of the Alderete family in the church of S. Antolin at Tordesillas.80 The architecture 79 III, 1 2 6 - 1 4 6 , as well as further pages listed in the Indice de artistas, to which should be added p. 208. 80 For the long and complicated history of the retable, see Martí y Monsó, o f . cit.·, 4 3 2 ff; García Chico, Documentos fara el estudio del arte en Castilla, Escultores, Valladolid, 1 9 4 1 , pp. 35 ff; and Constantino Candeira in Boletín del Seminario de Estudios de Arte y Arqueología, Universidad de Valladolid, tomo VIII, fascículos

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of the retable and the carvings of its Plateresque frames had been made by the sculptor Gaspar de Tordesillas before 1550, when it was sold by the nuns of the convent of Sta. Clara in the town, the institution for which it was originally intended, to Gaspar de Alderete for his chapel. At a somewhat later time the statuary was made by no less an artist than Juan de Juni, to whom there are records of payment from 1567 to 1571, and the polychromy of the retable was not completed until 1583, the date when a Bartolomé Hernández, who had displaced in the undertaking the Italian painter called by the Spaniards Benito Rabuyate, was adjudged to have carried out the task satisfactorily, whether he, who seems in general to have been a mere entrepreneur of altarpieces, did the work himself or turned it over to others. In the legal proceedings that took place in 1581 because Hernández had displaced in the undertaking the Italian Benito Rabuyate, the former definitely states that he had brought with him companions to assist him in the order, which he declares to include the execution of the painted panels of the retable in addition to the polychromy of the sculpture} and one of the companions was very probably Antón Pérez, who in any case is proved by internal evidence to have done the panels at some time in his life. The subjects of the paintings are heterogeneous. Two indeed, representing the Visitation and Epiphany, are related to the principal relief, which depicts the Virgin of Mercy; but the others, since we know nothing of the donor's pious predilections, seem to us as if chosen haphazardly, St. Christopher and the Mass of St. Gregory at the upper level, and the Baptism (Fig. 54) and paired Sts. Benedict and Scholastica in the predella. In the midst of the same peculiar glassiness of surfaces that we have remarked in the Pozaldez picture, the authorship of Antón Pérez is confirmed by such identities in type as exist between the Christ in the Lamentation and the Saviour in the Tordesillas Baptism, between the Magdalene and the Virgin of the Epiphany in the retable, or between the holy woman in the lower left corner of the Lamentation and the angel holding in the Baptism Our Lord's garments. Indeed in the Virgin and Child of the Epiphany he gives the impression of an admiration for the works of Correggio. X X V I I I — X X X ( 1 9 4 1 - 1 9 4 2 ) , 130. There is no general agreement that Juan de Juni did all of the statuary, as is claimed by Georg Weise who wrote before many of the documents were discovered (cf. his Sfanische Plastik aus sieben Jahrhunderten, III, part 2 ( 1 9 3 2 ) , 338.

Fig. 54. ANTÓN PÉREZ. BAPTISM. SAN ANTOLÍN, TORDESILLAS {Photo.

Mas)

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T h e technique and even the types of Antón P é r e z are not hard to recognize in two panels, with painted frames, in the parish church of Valbuena de Duero, constituting the relics of an altarpiece or of some other object of ecclesiastical decoration and depicting, as in the retable by Francisco de Comontes in S. Juan de los Reyes at Toledo, 8 1 figures of the Saviour in phases of the Passion, upheld by Pilate as a simplification of the subject of the Ecce H o m o and languishing in prison beside the column of H i s flagellation 82 ( F i g . 5 5 ) . Although Gaspar de Palencia's anticipation of the effects of here adopted to a certain degree, the conception of is the gentler one of Antón P é r e z , the Redeemer for instance, closely resembling the Christ of the tism.

the tenebrosi is the human form in Pilate's arms, Tordesillas Bap-

It is indeed a surprise to find that a work of so local a painter as Antón P é r e z , however intrinsically gifted he was, has strayed so far as a private collection in the United States, an Epiphany that was offered for sale at the Parke-Bernet Galleries, N e w Y o r k , on January i l , 1956 ( F i g . 56). Curious it is also that so small a panel, 83 probably a part of a predella, should have been recognized as of enough importance to be transported to such a distance from its native hearth. Y e t by Antón P é r e z it certainly is. A l l the marks of his style are revealed by the panel, but the most telling proof is the fact that the kneeling Wise M a n is a replica, in type, posture, and to a certain extent in costume, of the corresponding actor in the version of the theme in the retable at Tordesillas. T h e Virgin herself is little else than a profile view of her figure in this retable, and the profile is absolutely reiterated in the angel in the Baptism which the retable also includes among its subjects. T h e Magdalene in the Pozaldez Lamentation furnishes another counterpart to Anton's lovely realization of feminine beauty in the Virgin of the small, separate Epiphany. In both representations of the Adoration of the Kings we see the same Correggesque Child, and in the example in American possession. H e has a tenderness of gesture that seems reminiscent of the Italian artist. Almost all the other actors in our Epiphany can be verified in the master's other works, the standing Caucasian Magus, for instance, being a duplicate of the Pilate holding Christ in one of the panels at Valbuena de Duero. Vol. I X , p. 341. A modification of the theme of Christ at the Column: ibid., p. 838. 83 T h e dimensions are seventeen inches in height by fourteen in width.

81

82

Fig. 55. ANTÓN PÉREZ. SYMBOLISM OF T H E PASSION. PARISH CHURCH, VALBUENA DE DUERO (Photo.

Mas)

FIG. 5 6. ANTÓN PÉREZ. EPIPHANY. FORMERLY IN T H E PARKE-BERNET GALLERIES, NEW Y O R K (Photo. Taylor and Dull)

CHAPTER III T H E SCHOOL OF

BURGOS

Χ. THE VENTOSILLA MASTER Since the painter whom I so designate belongs in style more to the Early than to the H i g h Renaissance, he should have found a place in my volume I X j but, not having extricated until recently his personality, I have postponed to the present my treatment of him. A t Ventosilla in the extreme southern part of the province of Burgos (but in the diocese of Burgo de Osma), the church contains not only the retable over the high altar by the St. Nicholas Master 1 but also, above lateral altars, two small retables which, though partly of sculpture, contain each a pair of painted panels, all manifestly by a single artist and thus providing for him the pseudonym that I have chosen. In one of these retables, honoring the Virgin, the panels depict the Nativity of Christ and the Assumption (Fig. 5 7 ) ; in the other, devoted to St. John the Precursor, the subjects are his baptism of Christ and decapitation. I cannot interpret the Roman letters S R Τ plainly inscribed on the parapet that constitutes the infant Saviour's bed. T h e Master reveals himself to us as applying his no more than moderate talents to a phase of Spanish art that is just beginning to emerge timidly from the still largely primitive character of painting in the first years of the sixteenth century into the maturer modes of the full Cinquecento. T h e conservative side is uppermost in almost the whole compartment of the Assumption, in the Virgin of the Nativity, and in the carolling angels above her, who have not yet lost the character of the Flemish precedents of the Quattrocento for the representation of celestial spirits. Especially, however, in the scene of the Baptist's decapitation, all the participants are beginning to take on the closer realization of the actual appearance of human beings attained in the H i g h Renaissance, and the St. Joseph in the Nativity, as well as Christ receiving at the top of the panel of the Assumption His soaring mother, may even be said to forebode mannerism. T h e correspondence of the Virgin in the Nativity to a constant type used 1

Vol. IV, p. 260.

Fig. 57. THE VENTOSILLA MASTER. ASSUMPTION. PARISH CHURCH, VENTOSILLA {Photo.

Mas)

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by Juan de Pereda, who certainly was active in the region,2 suggests that the Ventosilla Master might have been a teacher of his 5 and the composition of Juan's Nativity at Soria 3 may owe something to his predecessor's treatment of the theme. Not far from Ventosilla is the town of Rábano situated in the province of Valladolid but in the diocese of Palencia and containing in the parish church fragments of a retable by our Master. T w o of the panels relate incidents in the life of St. Thomas the Apostle, to whom the church is dedicated, his dispensing of the treasure given him by the king of India to the poor (with one of his colloquies with the monarch taking place in smaller scale on an elevated loggia in the background, and at his prayer the supernatural effulgence from heaven curing the diseased (Fig. 58) of the eastern country. A third fragment, perhaps from the predella, depicts St. John Evangelist in half-length. Although one of the old decorative brocades hangs from the loggia where St. Thomas and the sovereign are conversing, the two narrative scenes are somewhat more advanced in style than the panels at Ventosilla, and yet execution by the same artist is very tangible. The type of the Apostle in both episodes, for instance, recalls vividly the St. Joseph of the Ventosilla Nativity; the impressive figure of the indigent cripple at the right to whom St. Thomas ministers has a profile, with wide-opened mouth, exactly like the shepherd at St. Joseph's side; and the angle at which the Virgin's nimbus is pitched in the Nativity and the visible thickness of the halo are repeated on the head of the Apostle kneeling under the flash of light. The emergence of the Ventosilla Master's personality has betrayed that he patently executed the remains of a retable in the parish church of Torregalindo (south of Aranda de Duero), which I was betrayed in volume I X 4 into wrongly assigning to the Durham Master. T o realize the true authorship, one has only to compare, at Torregalindo, the tousled heads of some of the Apostles and of St. Joseph in the Nativity with the representations of St. Thomas at Rábano, or to note that the young St. John Evangelist in one cycle virtually repeats this Apostle in the other. Furthermore, the patterns in the haloes at Torregalindo are duplicated in some instances 2

Vol. IX, pp. 697-705. 3 Vol. IX, p. 701.

4

P· 591·

FIG. 58

T H E VENTOSILLA MASTER. ST. THOMAS CURING THE SICK. PARISH CHURCH, RÁBANO {Photo. Burgos Photo

Club)

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at Ventosilla and in all cases at Rábano. Since, as we have often found, the activities of artists at this time tended to centre in dioceses, it is apposite to remember that both Torregalindo and Ventosilla, though in the province of Burgos, belong to the diocese of Burgo de Osma. T o the same diocese, albeit again in the province of Burgos, there is attached the town of Tubilla del Lago (northeast of Aranda del Duero), in whose parish church a Crucifixion by the Ventosilla Master has been jumbled on the top of a retable painted somewhat later in the Renaissance.5 Sufficient concrete proof for the ascription is forthcoming in the resemblance, in the Baptism at Torregalindo, 6 of Christ to the Saviour on the cross or of the angel holding the garments to St. John Evangelist beside his dying Lord} but the reiteration of the Ventosilla Master's favorite design for haloes is also to be taken into account. There may be safely registered as an embodiment of his handicraft a fragmentary Purification in the church of Valdearcos near Rábano and likewise in the province of Valladolid but in the diocese of Palencia. The Virgin in the Ventosilla Nativity now holds the Child for His Presentation in the Temple; the type at Rábano used for St. Thomas distributing the royal treasure serves for the spectator at the extreme right in the Purification; and the curving forelocks of St. Joseph at Valdearcos illustrate the stylization of this section of the hair that reappears in the angel of the Nativity at Torregalindo. The assemblage of these works by the Ventosilla Master enables us to attach his name to the panel of the Baptism in the church of Sta. Agueda at Burgos (Fig. 59) which I consigned in volume I X 7 to the company of orphans without parentage. I had detected then a clue because I stated that I discerned a compositional similarity to his Baptism at Torregalindo, which, however, I attributed incorrectly to the Durham Master. Even now it has taken me some time to arrive at the conviction that the Ventosilla Master deserves the credit, inasmuch as the craft is a little finer than his average and belongs perhaps to an earlier date than at least the majority of his recognized productions and to a time when possibly we ought to perceive more clearly the influence of Juan de Borgoña. T h e angel 5 6 7

See below, p. 1 3 7 . Vol. I X , fig. 234. P. 662 and fig. 266.

FIG. 59. THE VENTOSILLA MASTER. BAPTISM. SANTA AGUEDA, BURGOS (Photo.

Burgos Photo

Club)

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is the most revealing figure, an oft repeated type in the Master's output and more than approximated in the angels of the Nativity and Assumption at Ventosilla, especially the one at the lower left in the latter scene. The closest counterparts for the Baptist are the St. Thomas at Torregalindo and the half-nude cripple at the left receiving the alms of the same Apostle at Rábano. The Baptism at Ventosilla, as well as the one at Torregalindo, is similar in composition, even, in the delineation of the dove, although in the example in Sta. Agueda is girt by an aura of clouds instead of a halo. Two of the Master's panels in the Museo Cerralbo at Madrid, representing the Purification and Crucifixion, derive from the town of Montuenga, 8 northwest of Medinaceli and in the diocese of Sigiienza, not very near the exact region where we have hitherto found him employed and yet within the province of Soria on the northern edges of which he was active. Indeed we found another painter from the Ventosilla Master's region, the Olivares Master, patronized still further away, in the province of Guadalajara. The Purification is rather different from the fragmentary version at Valdearcos, except in the type of St. Joseph, who indeed accords with a kind of bearded head to which the artist was much addicted, illustrated, for instance, by the St. Bartholomew at Torregalindo. The Virgin in the Purification is not differentiated from her representation in the Torregalindo Nativity. The Crucifixion turns out to be nearly a replica of the rendering at Tubilla del Lago, except in the figure of St. John, who embodies one of the painter's occasional concessions to mannerism. No information has been divulged to show whether the retable of the two pieces discussed in the preceding paragraph provided the Museo Cerralbo with a pair of further panels representing Sts. Bartholomew and James Major standing against textiles in front of parapets above which rise delicate colonnades through whose interstices lightly leaved trees are visible. Not only the technical methods, especially the same moderate degree of sfumatezza, but the types themselves bear witness to the authorship. The Santiago corresponds, among many possible examples, particularly with the representations of St. Thomas at Rábano even in scraggly beard, as well as with the St. James at Torregalindo (though the hat is somewhat different). The languidly mystic glance of the eyes is also the same in both 8

Consuelo Sanz-Pastor, Catalogue

of the Museo Cerralbo,

Madrid, 1956, p. 20.

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figures of the Apostle of Spain, and it is particularly to be noted that the left hand assumes a nearly identical, mannered curve. T h e Crucified at Tubilla del L a g o provides in the head one of the closest counterparts to the St. Bartholomew.

2.

T H E L E N C E S MASTER

T o a secondary but winsome member of the Burgos artistic coterie of the H i g h Renaissance we may give the name of the Lences Master because of the presence of two works by him in the convent of Franciscan nuns at Castil de Lences near the town of Lences northwest of Briviesca. One of these achievements is a triptych exhibiting at the centre the Lamentation over the Dead Christ and in the wings the Via Dolorosa and Entombment (Fig. 60). M y friend, the learned scholar of Burgos, the late Don Luciano Huidobro, to whom I owe my acquaintance with Castil de Lences as well as with so many other treasures in the province, wrote me that, although the escutcheons of the Enriquez and Sandoval families are painted at the tops of the left and right wings respectively, the donor must have been one of the great Rojas gens, among whose appanages Castil de Lences was included and one of whom founded the convent. W e have already come upon works ordered by the Rojas at Monzón (in the province of Palencia) 9 and in their chapel in the cathedral of Burgos, 10 but the donor at Castil de Lences must have had some connection also with the families commemorated in the escutcheons. Not only the use of the form of a triptych but also the general mode of painting and of composition of the scenes are derived from the Antwerp mannerists, and yet the borrowings are translated into indigenous and personal terms. T h e Lamentation is based upon some such rendering of the theme, as the example by the Meister der v. Grooteschen Anbetung in a triptych in the Academy at Vienna, 11 where we perceive, for instance, the same expression of grief in one of the holy women by covering the face with a fold of the mantle j but the types are adapted to Spanish ethnic standards, and Flemish asperity is softened in them to a lovely gentleness that must have emanated from the artist's own individuality. Even when he Vol. I V , p. 192. V o l . I X , p. 649. 1 1 Friedländer, Die altniederländische 9

10

Malerei,

Leyden, X I , 1924, pl. X X .

Fig. 6O. T H E LENCES MASTER. TRIPTYCH OF T H E PASSION. FRANCISCAN NUNS, CASTIL DE LENCES {Photo. Burgos Photo Club)

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has kept the excited postures of his inspirers, as in the above-mentioned woman and the Magdalene bowed to the ground over her Lord's feet, they scarcely convince us of any real violence of emotion. The elements that most recall the Antwerp mannerists are the landscapes with their mist-veiled towns and jagged rocks, but even in these vistas the treatment of the outlines and lighting is less harsh than in the Flemish examples. The Lences Master indeed reveals a very pleasant feeling for the beauties of landscape, and he is likely to punctuate the views with such piquant details as the curving bridge over a chasm between two cliffs at the right in the Lamentation. The compositions in the wings are adroitly accommodated to the narrow, vertical spaces, and in general the Master's talents are nicely balanced with his placid and unpretentious aims. H e seems to have regarded as hack work his second commission in the Franciscan convent at Castil de Lences, a painting for an altar or shrine consisting of a single piece and representing St. Ursula surrounded by a bevy of the maidens who were her companions in martyrdom; but the reason for the dullness may have been partly also that he was cognizant of no Flemish precedent for the theme upon which to base himself. The unity of authorship with the triptych is sufficiently established by the analogy of the delicate types to the feminine participants in the scenes of the Passion, for instance of the prominent maiden on the right side of the picture to the holy woman who raises her hands in grieved amazement in the Lamentation. T h e Master's lack of interest in the work is indicated by the fact that he has made nothing more of the composition than a serried mass of virgins, the multitude of whom, as in a panel by the Girard Master once at Amsterdam, 12 is signified through constructing the background by a dense sea of heads. The iconography is peculiar in more than one respect. The open book held by St. Ursula is one of her regular emblems, but the flower in her under hand, instead of the arrow, is as anomalous and inexplicable as the heart that she carries in a painting by Juan Rodriguez de Solís in S. Isidoro, León. 13 H e r companion in the left foreground is so overemphasized and magnified to so inordinate a stature as to imply that she was intended as one of those maidens of St. Ursula, such as St. Angelina 14 and one 12

Vol. X , p. 384. « Vol. IX, p. 508, n. 7. 14 Vol. XI, p. 91.

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of the St. Bridgets, 15 who enjoyed individual cults. Moreover, in depicting her the artist is obviously affected by the desire of the Renaissance for ideal pulchritude. In 1944 there was offered for sale at the Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York, a triptych 16 of which the centre is a practical replica of the Lamentation at Castil de Lences, varying little except in the introduction of the Crucifixion, the hanging Judas, and the Entombment in the diminished scale suitable to the distance of one of the Master's inviting landscapes (Fig. 6 1 ) . The Agony in the Garden and the Last Judgment in the wings are again agreeably elongated to suit the narrow spaces, and the latter composition is appropriately simplified.

3.

T H E M A S T E R OF S A N A N D R É S DE A R R O Y O

It is indeed a pity that we have not ascertained the real name of the painter to whom I am obliged to denominate by the above sobriquet, for, like Gaspar de Palencia, he surpasses in incisive individuality, mind, and execution the general run of mannerists in northwestern Spain, who were differentiated from one another only in slight degree. I choose the sobriquet from a work of his the provenience of which we know, a triptych once in the abbey of San Andrés de Arroyo (near Santibáñez de Ecla, north of Palencia) and now in a private collection at Barcelona (Figs. 62 and 63). The subject of the Epiphany is expanded over all three sections of the triptych, including in the right wing a richly clad, aristocratic donor presented by the younger of the Caucasian Kings, Melchior. If we adopt first the view of the historian of art in search of derivations, we are struck at once by a much more pronounced dependence upon Flemish painters of the first half of the sixteenth century than we encounter in the Master's rivals in this section of the peninsula, illustrated especially, for instance, by the type and drapery of the Madonna} but the manneristic aspects either of the Flemings or of 15 In a painting by Solibes: see vol. V I I , p. 3 6 6 , n. 2. T h e St. Bridget by Solibes has a branch of flowers f o r an emblem, but I cannot believe that in the picture at Castil de Lences the central and crowned figure, who holds the open book as well as a flower, was meant to represent St. Bridget and that St. Ursula was relegated to the side and given exaggerated size to signify her importance. 16 It had been previously sold in N e w Y o r k in 1 9 2 7 in Part IV of the Achillito Chiesa Collection, Catalogue No. 38. T h e dimensions are 4.8 inches in width by 3 3 / 4 in height.

FIG. 6I. THE LENCES MASTER. TRIPTYCH. FORMERLY IN THE PARKE-BERNET GALLERIES, NEW YORK

FIG. 63. T H E MASTER OF SAN ANDRÉS DE ARROYO. EPIPHANY (DETAIL) (Photo.

Mas)

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other European artists at the time are perceptible in only a sober degree. Doubtless it was partly contact with the achievements of the Low Countries that inculcated in him finer principles of craftsmanship. Furthermore, in contrast to the largely generalized figures of so many of his contemporaries, he strongly characterizes his personages, not only in the memorable portrait of the donor but also in such stock actors as St. Joseph, the kneeling old Caspar, and above all in the negroid Magus. So far as types of humanity appear at all in his works, they resemble somewhat those of his peer, Gaspar de Palencia, but yet are so much his own as to become expressions of his marked individuality. The charming originality of mind that we shall discover in another work by him is less tangible in the triptych from San Andrés de Arroyo but even here has left its traces. It was not uncommon to suggest the previous adoration of the shepherds in paintings whose main theme was the homage paid by the Wise Men, but in the central compartment of the triptych the motif takes a pleasing original form. In the ruined but handsome edifice of the Renaissance that in the background stands for the stable of Bethlehem, one shepherd kneels gazing intently at some object which he holds, perhaps some rustic offering, while a comrade enters a door farther to the rear, carrying a basket of eggs. The work that better illustrates the keen but gentle imagination of the Master of San Andrés de Arroyo is a panel in the Mateu Collection, Barcelona, actually devoted as a whole to the Adoration of the Shepherds, for whose provenience from the same part of Spain as the triptych, region of Palencia, we shall subsequently adduce proof (Fig. 64). Our first duty, however, is to establish the unity of authorship between the Mateu panel and the triptych. It requires an impossible stretch of credulity to believe that two different artists could have created countenances and hair so nearly identical as those of the shepherd in the panel carrying the lamb and in the triptych the St. Joseph, two heads that are differentiated only by the somewhat greater age of the foster-father of Our Lord. Guided by this convincing parallelism, we at once descry many other corroboratory similarities. The oldest shepherd vividly recalls in the triptych the kneeling Caspar 5 although the Holy Child is analogous, the Madonna in the Mateu panel is somewhat different, but the two outermost angels at the left in the upper section of the panel possess much of the same Flemish character as the Virgin in the Epiphany; and — a

Fig. 64. T H E M A S T E R OF SAN ANDRÉS DE ARROYO. ADORATION OF T H E SHEPHERDS. M A T E U COLLECTION, BARCELONA {Photo. Mas)

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minor but telling point — the ox in both works looks out at us with the same coquettish eye. The distinguishing potent Flemish influence upon the Master of San Andrés de Arroyo is exemplified in the Mateu panel also by the composition, which is expanded from the usual kind for the subject, with a few, large actors, into filling the space with a considerable number of participants, who thus have to be reduced to smaller size. The increase consists principally in the multiplication of the shepherds, whose activities, according to the Master's acute inventiveness, are all varied and exhibit, moreover, a lovely feeling on the artist's part for pastoral life. In front of the above-mentioned rustic carrying a lamb, another presses forward eagerly restraining a splendid dog; behind the intensely devout aged shepherd, to whom also we have had occasion to refer, a younger comrade reverently doffs his hat, while still further to the right the musician of aggregation plays his pipes; and in the foreground there kneels an additional simple countryman presenting his humble offering of eggs, which the painter evidently wishes us to believe is as valued as the richer gifts that the Wise Men are to bring. The lowly stable has been built amidst the ruins of architecture as magnificent as the setting to the Epiphany from San Andrés de Arroyo; and above all this the moti] of the angels' proclamation assumes a most impressive form, in which, delineated with a fine sense for physical beauty of a somewhat Flemish cast, they constitute a kind of aureole about the apparition of the Eternal Father, who outspreads His arms in benediction and in whom the artist has realized a majesty which we should scarcely have expected from his seemingly gentle nature and which few others have been able to attain in such materializations of the First Person of the Trinity. It may have been due to Flemish example that the Master has emphasized the time of the event as night, even slashing across the pavement effective shadows that, however, create less violent contrasts than do those of Gaspar de Palencia. The Mateu panel brings into relief also another outstanding quality of our painter, his amazing superiority in the rôle of an animalier, illustrated not only by the lamb, ox, and ass but particularly in the shapely hound, whose like was scarcely to appear in the canine annals of Spanish art before Velazquez. If the reader will use his magnifying glass, he will discern another instance of the Master's interest in dogs and skill in reproducing their

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forms and movements in the two little beasts that run along below the legs of the white horse in the Magi's cortège in the right background of the central piece of the triptych. The provenience of the Mateu panel from Palencian territory is established by the existence of a hardly varied replica, made by a less gifted painter of the period, the centre of a triptych in the church of Sta. Eulalia at Paredes de Nava. 17 1 7 Illustrated on p. 261 of vol. II of the Catálogo monumental falencia, edited by Rafael Navarro Garcia, Palencia, 1932.

de la Provincia

de

CHAPTER IV GASPAR B E C E R R A As in the case of Antonio Poliamolo and Melozzo da Forlì, fate has been very unkind to Gaspar Becerra in the rôle of a painter, destroying one by one and century after century his achievements in this major art and leaving us really no more than one soundly authenticated work of the kind, a ceiling in the palace of E l Pardo near Madrid j but this single example of his pictorial attainments is quite enough to show that, despite his sojourn in Italy and saturation in the Italian style of the High Renaissance, his aesthetic temper largely remained, as also in his sculpture, essentially Spanish. Indeed it is probable that he came of solid, old Spanish artistic stock, since there is good reason to believe that his father Antonio was none other than the painter of Baeza, Antón Becerra, active during the very early years of the Renaissance.1 The document which gives us the father's name and Baeza as his residence thus confirms the tradition embodied in Spanish literature of art that this Andalusian town was the place of Gaspar's origin, but no record corroborates the date set down by Ceán Bermúdez for his birth, 1520. The thing that has won him a greater acclaim in the history of art than many of his at least quite as worthy compatriots and contemporaries is his unnormally lengthy study and sojourn in Italy, as well as the recognition which he there received. Palomino and the old Spanish writers upon the art of their country guess that it was the example of Alonso Berruguete that stimulated him to seek the opportunities for a solider education in painting and sculpture provided by the sister peninsula, but prior to Becerra's departure Alonso had not done any works in southern Spain that could have inspired the lad, nor did he carve the sculptured Transfiguration at Übeda, near Baeza, until 1 See my vols. X , p. 224, and X I , p. 462. T h a t Gaspar's father was named Antonio or Antón rests not only on the statement of Ceán Bermúdez but on an actual document of 1J62, in which Gaspar, then doing- the sculptured retable of the cathedral of Asterga, sends funds to his parent and to a brother; but it must not be overlooked that, if Ceán knew the father to have been a painter, he strangely does not mention it and that therefore the father might conceivably have been another Antón Becerra living at Baeza. Since Gaspar includes only his mother in his w i l l of January 22, 1568 (see below, pp. 153 and 1 5 6 ) , the father must have already died — if he was the painter, well laden with years.

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about 1554 when Gaspar had long been absent from his own country. The timid steps of his presumptive father, Antonio, in the paths of the Renaissance might have encouraged the son in his Italian adventure, but the fundamental cause must have been the general admiration for the aesthetic achievements of Italy current in the sixteenth century throughout Europe. Our knowledge of his Italian experiences comes to us on the reliable, coetaneous authority of Vasari, whose assistant he actually was. In his own autobiography at the end of his Vite, the Italian states that, when he was frescoing the principal hall of the Palazzo della Cancelleria at Rome between 1544 and 1546 Becerra and another Spaniard, Pedro de Rubiales,2 were among his apprentices who did the preparatory work on the walls after Vasari's designs in this artistic undertaking which at the request of the donor, the Cardinal Ranuccio Farnese, he recklessly, as he himself admits, carried out in a hundred days. Vasari's words not only constitute the first mention of Gaspar in history but also furnish us with the earliest certain moment at which we can bring him to Italy, although he must have arrived some time before in order to have obtained so important a position as enrolment among Vasari's helpers and to have deserved the Italian's approval of him, in this passage of the autobiography, as already very competent as an assistant in mural painting. Tormo, 3 in his admirable account of Becerra, the first scholarly treatment of the artist, deduces from Vasari's praise and from Gaspar's place at the top of the list of assistants in the Cancelleria, that he was even at so youthful an age at the head of the Italian's bottega, but Vasari may have singled both him and Rubiales out merely because of the somewhat piquant fact of the presence of Spaniards, in his predominantly Italian atelier. It is futile to attempt to detect Becerra's hand in this unpleasant cycle of frescoes, since Vasari declares that the assistants were merely working on his cartoons, and the principal significance of this episode in the Spaniard's career is the revelation that he had become a member of the phase of Italian art of the Cinquecento strongly dependent upon Michael Angelo, whose follower Vasari was. 2 Vasari uses only the surname which he Italianizes as "Roviale," who has hitherto been equated with Francisco de Rubiales, but Ferdinando Bologna {Roviale Sfagnuolo e la pittura napolitana del Cinquecento, Naples, 1 9 5 9 ) has shown that it was rather Pedro who assisted Vasari: see my vol. X I I I , p. 4 2 4 S. 3 A series of articles in the Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones, XX— X X I ( 1 9 1 2 - 1 9 1 3 ) . The page referred to above is 1 2 3 of X X I .

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This determinative factor in Gaspar's training was accentuated by a later occupation in which he was engaged at Rome, his assistance of another disciple of Michael Angelo, Daniele da Volterra, for Vasari in his life of the latter tells us that Becerra was one of the aids during the early fifties of the sixteenth century in executing Daniele's cartoons for the decoration of the chapel of Lucrezia della Rovere in the church of the Trinità dei Monti, but, although Vasari was careless in registering the subjects of the paintings in the chapel, it doesn't make much difference what theme Becerra painted since again he was only working under another's direct personal supervision, and the point important for us remains unassailable, namely that Vasari would definitely have known that Becerra, who had been his own valued apprentice, was subsequently in Daniele's employ. Inevitably the tradition gained force in Spain that he had enjoyed the distinction of an actual tutelage under Michael Angelo himself j but Buonarroti was never prone to use assistants, particularly late in life at the time when Becerra was in Italy, and it is enough for our purpose to realize that he became imbued with the great master's modes as interpreted by his imitators. The existence of a drawing, probably by Gaspar, of sections of the Sistine Last Judgment 4 by no means proves that he belonged to Michael Angelo's bottega. In this school he would have devoted himself to one of its consuming interests, anatomy, which indeed is predominant in the sadly restricted number of works that he has left us in Spain; and there are indeed reasons for accepting the allegation of Vincencio Carducho that Gaspar did the drawings for the engraved illustrations to the treatise, Historia de la composición del cuerpo humano, by his contemporary, the Spanish anatomist and physician, Juan Valverde de Amusco, published in 1556 at Rome, where the scientist resided.5 Carducho and Pacheco are good authorities, particularly in view of the fact that they wrote not so long after Becerra had disappeared from the scene, but their assertion has often been discredited because of Valverde's own statement in his book to the effect that he used the woodcuts of his great contemporary in anatomy, Vesalius, which are generally considered to have been made by Jan Stephan von Calcar.6 Valverde, however, goes on to say that he can improve upon the 4

See below, p. 1 7 9 .

s

Sánchez Cantón, Fuentes

334··6

literarias,

II ( 1 9 3 3 ) , 67 and 1 5 6 , and V ( 1 9 4 . 1 ) , 3 3 3 -

There are some advocates for Titian or Campagnola as responsible.

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plates by Vesalius, and in the foreword that he added to the Italian edition of his book in 1559 he says that he used the illustrations in Vesalius only for the most fart. Moreover, at the bottom of the title page in the copy of the Italian edition accessible to me, someone has written in Italian in penmanship that might be contemporary with the engraving, "Gaspare Bezzerra incise" (with a spelling of the surname like that used by Vasari). Since it is highly improbable that any Italian would have known Carducho's and Pacheco's assertions of Becerra's authorship of the plates and would have later appended the words in script that in itself might conceivably be subsequent to the sixteenth century, the likelihood is that we owe the statement to a contemporary of the artist, though not to him himself, who had left Italy by the time of the actual printing, and that, as a contemporary, the inscriber would have known the truth. Neither this title page nor the different one in the Spanish edition of 1556 is found in Vesalius, and we shall subseqently with some conviction ascribe them both to Becerra, thus arriving at the conclusion that the makers of the title page would almost certainly have done also the anatomical illustrations. 7 T h e belief in Becerra's authorship, however, has not been without its dissenters, who have rather proposed for the honor Pedro de Rubiales. As long ago as 1829 the Spanish scholar Llaguno 8 advanced this opinion, chiefly because Valverde in one place in his book lauds Rubiales for his expertness in anatomy. Principally for the same reason, the Italian scholar Ferdinando Bologna, 9 evidently not knowing that one hundred and thirty years earlier he had been anticipated by Llaguno, made the same assumption, guarding himself by acknowledging that he was merely indulging in an hypothesis. It is hard, nevertheless, to think that Carducho and Pacheco, in making their statements, did not possess some accurate information. A comparison of Vesalius's and Valverde's sets of plates, a task that no one before me seems to have given himself the trouble to 7 In the copy of the Italian edition accessible to me someone has interpolated within the actual title on the title page the words, "Incisioni del Vessalio," in a handwriting different from that of the "Gaspare Bezzerra incise"; but, although the inscriber realized that the anatomical engravings in the Valverde book had their ultimate source in the Vesalius illustrations, he did not know that, as we shall immediately see, they underwent, in Valverde's treatise, significant modifications. 8 Eugenio Llaguno y Amírola, Noticias de los arquitectos y arquitectura de España, Madrid, II ( 1 8 2 9 ) , 1 0 7 - 1 0 8 . 9 In his book on Pedro de Rubiales, pp. 45—47, for which see above, n.2.

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undertake very carefully, conclusively reveals that the prototypes of the former are often decidedly altered in the latter's publication. Llaguno approximated the truth when he supposed that some improvements might have been made in the Valverde series, and Ferdinando Bologna has noted some differences in the direction of a kind of mannerism. If we leave out of account many minor changes, the major modifications in the Valverde book usually embody an endeavor to transmute the scientific illustrations in Vesalius's volume into at least approximations to works of art. The torsos in the latter treatise, with the internal organs laid bare of flesh and skin, are sometimes taken in the Valverde book and given heads, so that they may bear a greater resemblance to the ordinary nudes of painting, engraving, and sculpture, as on plates i , 3, and 5 of the third book. Correspondingly, two of Vesalius's bare torsos are clothed in armor on plate 2 of the third book of Valverde. On plate 6 of the third book, a representation of the abdominal female organs is enshrined in a simulation of a whole statue inspired by the Medicean Venus. In another instance (last plate of the third book) two separate woodcuts in Vesalius are brought together in Valverde into a single composition, one erect figure, with his revealed interior, being depicted as fingering the insides of another prostrate form: the intention was for pictorial realism, but the consequence, it must be confessed, is bathos. In two cases where Vesalius actually uses the entire physique and head, there are significant alterations in the Valverde volume: one figure (book I I , plate 5), sinks into the easier kneeling posture, and another (book I I , plate 1 ) , becomes a St. Bartholomew holding his flayed skin ! The way in which Jan von Calcar, in his woodcuts for Vesalius, seems to have sought some kind of an artistic effect is by setting in landscape what complete figures he employed, whereas the draughtsman of the engravings in Valverde emphasizes the plastic qualities by placing the forms simply on bits of earth; but the result in the Spanish book is perhaps more harmonious. It is a question, however, whether either the method in Vesalius or the changes in Valverde can, from a strictly aesthetic point of view, be said to be advantageous, for the uncovered, unpleasant anatomical details are more glaring when incongruously combined with partial characteristics of ordinary works of art than if the illustrations possessed nothing but a frankly biological purpose.

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T h e engravings in Valverde, though the style does not prove them achievements of Becerra, are reconcilable with the qualities that we find in his paintings and sculptures. T h e friar Antonio Ares, writing elaborately in 1640 on the image of the Virgen de la Soledad which had been carved by Becerra for the monastery of Nuestra Señora de la Victoria belonging to the Order of the Minimes at Madrid, declares that the artist had included in his Italian peregrinations a visit to Calabria; 10 but, if Ares was rightly informed, the experience would have meant more to Gaspar's religious than to his artistic personality, for like his Sardinian predecessor, Pedro Cavaro, 11 he became a devotee of the Minimes, who had been founded by St. Francis de Paula in southern Italy. H e obtained the patronage of a chapel in their church at Madrid, where in his will of January 22, 1568, 12 he asked to be buried in the habit of the Order, probably as a tertiary, and he became so imbued with the fervor of the Minimes that he did for them the image of Nuestra Señora de la Soledad in a style more diverse from his usual manner and more in accord with intensity of Spanish piety than we discern in any other of his known achievements. W h e n the monastery of la Victoria was long ago demolished, the image, one of those Spanish examples in which the sculptor did only the face and hands for a mere clothed framework, passed into the cathedral of S. Isidro at Madrid, where, during the conflagrations at the outbreak of the civil war in 1936, it suffered the unhappy distinction of being the last of the sadly numerous works of Becerra that the course of time has not spared. His repatriation must have occurred between July 15, 1556, when still at Rome he married a Paula Velazquez, the daughter of an Hernando de Torneo of Tordesillas, near Valladolid, and our earliest sure record of his presence in Spain, the contract of August 8, 1558, for the sculptured retable of the cathedral of Astorga. Although, oddly enough, he is not mentioned in any documents of Valladolid yet published, the Astorga contract states that he was there residing, the reasons being, as Tormo 13 suggests, not only his wife's derivation from the region but chiefly because the city at the time was the 1 0 F o r the passage in the treatise by Ares, see T o r m o , Boletín de la Española de Excursiones, X X I ( 1 9 1 3 ) , 252. 1 1 See vol. X I I , pp. 493-523. 1 3 For the document, see Llaguno, of. cit., II, 262. 13 Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones, X X ( 1 9 1 2 ) , 91.

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artistic focus of northwestern Spain. By a strange kind of fortuitous apostolic succession, he held the same sort of legal office as Alonso Berruguete: at Astorga he was given a clerkship of court in partial remuneration for his execution of the retable of the cathedral, just as at Valladolid Alonso enjoyed the income from a corresponding post. A t least as early as November 26, 1562, his reputation ran so high that Philip I I took him into his service and on August 23, 1563, formally bestowed upon him the title of royal painter. 14 As we already have had occasion sorrowfully to remark, the vicissitudes of time have been singularly merciless to Becerra's pictorial productions. H i s retable of the high altar of the church of the Descalzas Reales, Madrid, consisting of both paintings and sculpture, was destroyed by a fire of 1862, and his drawing only for its general plan, preserved in the Biblioteca Nacional of the city, leaves the spaces for the paintings blank and so fails to give us any idea of what they looked like. T h e lateral altars that he did for the edifice, comprising each only a single effigy of a saint painted on marble in an architectural frame, in one instance John the Baptist and in the other Sebastian, perished in the recent Spanish civil war, but they survived long enough to be studied by modern students of art and to be photographed. Their authentication is based not only on the unanimous witness of the early Spanish writers upon art, one of them, Juan de Arfe, who makes the attribution of the principal retable as soon after Becerra's death as 1585, 15 but also by document, since in his will of January 22, 1568, he requests that his brother, Juan Becerra, do the polychromy on his retables for the Princess, namely the Infanta Doña Juana, the daughter of Charles V and widow of the Prince of Brazil, the heir to the Portuguese throne, a pious lady who in 1560 moved to the convent of the Descalzas Reales which she was constructing for the Franciscan community of nuns that she had founded. T h e retable of the high altar could not have been commenced before 1563 since in the drawing the left cartouche in the consoles supporting the structure bears this date. T h e paintings in the church of the Minimes, Nuestra Señora de la Victoria, Madrid, that are ascribed to Becerra by Ponz, 1 6 are undocumented; but he would naturally have done works besides the image of the Virgen de la Soledad for this 14 15 16

For the documents, see Llaguno, of. cit., 259. Sánchez Cantón, Fuentes literarias, I, 274. Viaje de Esfaña, Madrid, 1776, tomo V , carta V I I , 9.

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religious institution to which he was so devoted, and in any case it is an academic question, since the paintings disappeared when the church was demolished. No contemporary record has come to light documenting the frescoes that he contributed to the Alcázar, then a royal palace, at Madrid, but his authorship is again sufficiently established by the fact that Carducho, 18 no later than 1633, and the succeeding, early Spanish composers of treatises upon art credit him with their execution. It is particularly to be deplored that they were destroyed in the conflagration of the Alcázar in 1 7 3 4 because, like the preserved frescoes in E l Pardo, they embodied non-religious Italianate themes, rare in Spain at the time, in this instance including representations of the liberal arts and the four elements, as well as stuccoes grotesque in their content.'9 T h e evil fate that overhung his works at Madrid extended to Toledo, where a fresco that he did in the cloister of the cathedral was, like the other early mural paintings in this section of the edifice, obliterated 5 but the malignant spell has in a sense been defied, in that we possess (formerly in the Boix Collection, Madrid) 20 a drawing for the fresco which, in distinction from the one for the retable of the high altar of the Descalzas Reales, gives us a fairly satisfactory idea of what the achievement in the cloister must have looked like. The archives 21 of the church tell us not only that in 1563, on an unspecified day, he was commissioned to do in this spot a theme to be chosen by the cleric then in charge of artistic works in the cathedral, but also that on June 14 of the same year he received partial payment ; and the Boix drawing reveals that the subject selected was the Lamentation over the Dead Christ. 22 Ponz, 23 in discussing the sculptured retable of the high altar of the church of Nuestra Señora de la Merced at Valladolid says merely that the four Evangelists painted on the tabernacle are ascribed to Becerra, but T o r m o 2 4 has demonstrated the impossibility of the attribution, since the retable was not begun by the sculptor Isaac de 17

See above, p. 153. Sánchez Cantón, Fuentes literarias, II, 106. 19 For what we know of the frescoes, see Tormo in the Boletín de la Sociedad Esfañola de Excursiones, X X I ( 1 9 1 3 ) , 131—140. 20 Sánchez Cantón, Dibujos esfañoles, Madrid, II, 1930, pl. CXII. 21 Documentos de la catedral de Toledo, coleccionados for D. Manuel R. Zarco del Valle, published by the Centro de Estudios Históricos, Madrid, II, part 2 ( 1 9 1 6 ) , 138 and 1 4 1 . 22 Sánchez Cantón, Dibujos esfañoles, II, 1930, pl. CXII. 23 Viaje de Esfaña, Madrid, 1783, tomo XI, carta III, 38. 24 Boletín de la Sociedad Esfañola de Excursiones, X X ( 1 9 1 2 ) , 82, n. 1. 18

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Juni, in collaboration with Benito Celma, until 1597, considerably after Becerra's death, and eventually was completed by the sculptor Pedro de la Cuadra. 25 Moreover, although some of the carvings are preserved in the Museo Nacional de Escultura, Valladolid, the tabernacle does not appear to have survived. Indeed, it is strange that, despite his residence at Valladolid, no sure records exist of commissions which he obtained for the city, nor can any extant work there be soundly assigned to him on internal evidence, since we shall be obliged to reject a small, painted retable in the Museo Nacional de Escultura that has been provisionally claimed for him. 26 Juan Agapito y Revilla, who was thoroughly conversant with the art of his beloved Valladolid, appears to have been right in stating 27 that no paintings or even sculptures are to be found in the city to which the name of Beccera can justly be attached. Pérez Pastor 28 lists a receipt of Becerra, dated August 3, 1565, in favor of a Nicolás de la Cruz in a transaction the nature of which is not specified. T h e last documentary record of the master is his will of January 22, 1568, and it is not known whence Ceán Bermúdez derives his statement that Gaspar did not actually die until 1570. In the winter palace or hunting-lodge of E l Pardo, near Madrid, there has miraculously escaped not only a ruinous fire of 1604 but also the havoc of the recent civil war Becerra's most considerable, thoroughly authenticated extant work in painting, a ceiling decorated with the story of Perseus in a room of the southwest tower. Both in a document of August 23, 1563, a royal permission to absent himself for forty days from the King's service, 29 and in the artist's will, 30 his activity in E l Pardo is specified, but this would not be enough to establish his authorship of the preserved ceiling, since it could be argued that he labored in parts of the edifice now destroyed. H e r e a contemporary of Gaspar comes to our aid, the littérateur, bibliophile, and publisher, Gonzalo Argote de Molina, who, writing in 1582, only some dozen years after the artist's death, and thus certainly cognizant of the truth, states categorically in his treatise on the woods and palace of E l Pardo that the frescoes from the myth M a r t í y Monsó, Estudios histórico-artísticos, pp. 369—370. See below, p. 172. 27 La f intura en Valladolid, Valladolid ( 1 9 2 5 ) , 189. 28 Colección de documentos inéditos fara la historia de las bellas artes en Esfaña, Memorias de la Real Academia Esfañola, Madrid, X I ( 1 9 1 4 ) , 8. 29 Llaguno y Amírola, Noticias de los arquitectos, Madrid, IV ( 1 8 2 9 ) , 261. 30 Ibid., 263. 25

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of Perseus in the southwest tower were done by Becerra. Yet even so the matter is not entirely cleared up, for Argote de Molina adds that Becerra had as collaborators in the enterprise two Italians then active in Spain, Giovanni Battista Castello, nicknamed II Bergamasco, and Romulo Cincinnato, so that all the frescoes would not necessarily reveal the Spaniard's personal style. The paintings in the ceiling, however, are all in the manner of a single artist or so dominated by such an artist that the contribution of any assistants must have been of the most subordinate nature ; and the identity of this artist with Becerra is finally achieved by a process of exclusion, since the style is different from the more idealized and less Michelangelesque manner of II Bergamasco and from the suaver manner of Romulo Cincinnato, both of whom have bequeathed to posterity works definitely preserving for us their pictorial modes. Tormo believes that the contribution of II Bergamasco was limited to the grotesques and arabesques in raised stucco that frame the paintings and that Romulo Cincinnato may have had something to do with the now perished frescoes on the walls beneath the ceiling, which depicted further episodes in the story of Perseus. T h e knowledge of Becerra's execution of the cycle in the southwest tower of E l Pardo was so firmly embedded as to be repeated by Argote de Molina's successors in the early writings of the annals of Spanish art, even by the authoritative Vincencio Carducho and by Pacheco. The arrangement of the subjects on the ceiling constitutes a felicitous architectural composition whether or not we owe to Becerra the general design. On four sides of the great tondo at the centre there are oblong compartments whose rounded tops meet the circle and form spandrels about it. T h e squares thus left at the corners of the vault contain paintings in ovals directed obliquely toward the central tondo and framed in rectangles of stucco grotesques and arabesques. Monotony is everywhere avoided by this deftly planned variation of shapes and of straight and curving lines, as well as by minor devices that it does not fall within our purpose to analyze. The story begins, in the oblong compartment on the south side of the room, with the scene of Danae receiving the Jovian shower of gold in the presence of her nurse, who had been immersed with her, 31 See Tormo in Boletín de la Sociedad Esfañola de Excursiones, X X I ( 1 9 1 3 ) , 1 4 1 - 1 4 2 , and Sánchez Cantón, Fuentes literarias, V, 359. The treatise is appended to Argote de Molina's publication of a mediaeval book on hunting·, El libro de la montería.

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and of a sleeping Cupid (Fig. 65). T o the adjoining oval (Fig. 66) on the southwest is consigned the representation of the birth of Danaë's son, Perseus. There follows, in the large compartment (Fig. 66) at the west, a theme that I agree with Angulo 32 in interpreting as the episode of the mother and her child delivered by her father Acrisius to the mercy of the waves, rather than, with Tormo, as their arrival at the island of Seriphus. T h e sorrowful expressions and gesticulations of the female spectators of the event cannot be otherwise explained. As in minor details in the other scenes, so in this rendering of the commitment to the sea there is a major departure from the ordinary accounts of the myth, since Danaë and her child are not set afloat in a coffer but all by themselves in a sizeable sailboat either because the artist was using an as yet undiscovered literary source or because he was boldly using his own invention, and giving expression to a tendency to do away with the fantastically miraculous elements in the myth which is several times evident in the cycle of E l Pardo. In the next oval, Polydectes, the ruler of Seriphus, dispatches, in the presence of Danaë, the now adult Perseus on the quest of the Gorgon Medusa's head who, in the large division on the north, is given by Mercury and Minerva the instruments for his enterprise, the short, curved sword and the shield. In an oval section he then steals from the two daughters of Phorcys, the Graeae, the eye that they are passing one to the other (Fig. 6 7 ) ; but, in the classic mood of the Renaissance, he violates the letter of the tale by refusing to depict them as monstrous hags with a single eye and single tooth between them, and instead he conceives them as lovely, half-nude women in the prime of life. T h e adventures represented in the ceiling culminate in the principal compartment on the east, where Perseus is shown swooping down to decapitate Medusa reclining in her bed (Fig. 67), but here a number of factors in the orthodox accounts of the happening have been abandoned or altered. W h a t is in a way the keynote of the story, the hero's contemplation of the reflection of her head in his shield in order to avoid the petrifying consequence of a direct glance, is omitted altogether ; instead of the dormant condition in which he is said to have found the three Gorgons, only Medusa lies upon her couch, and the two sisters merely stand at the left, none of them exhibiting the bizarre charac32

D . A n g u l o I ñ i g u e z , La mitología

19S 2 . Ρ· Ι 35·

y el arte es-pañol del Renacimiento,

Madrid,

Fig. 65. GASPAR BECERRA. BIRTH OF PEGASUS. DANAE AND THE SHOWER OF GOLD. EL PARDO PALACE, MADRID {Photo.

Mas)

Fig. 66. GASPAR BECERRA. BIRTH OF PERSEUS. DEPARTURE OF PERSEUS. EL PARDO PALACE, MADRID {Photo. Mas)

FIG. 67. GASPAR BECERRA. PERSEUS STEALS T H E EYE FROM T H E GRAEAE. PERSEUS SLAYS T H E MEDUSA. EL PARDO PALACE, MADRID (Photo.

Mas)

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teristics of scales for skins or tusks for teeth but, like the Graeae, appearing, except for their serpentine locks, as handsome specimens of normal femininity} and in the fashion of telescoping episodes of saints' lives in a single panel in mediaeval retables, the Gorgons' power of turning mortals into stone takes shape in the crumpled form of a man at Medusa's feet, while above him stand soldiers who have been saved from a similar fate by the victory of Perseus and who constitute a compositional balance to her sisters on the other side. The last oval shows Pegasus born from the blood dripping off Medusa's head (Fig. 65) which is carried by the hero as he flies away. The central tondo is devoted to the single figure of the soaring Perseus the conqueror holding in his forcefully extended arms the sword of curving blade and the shield now containing the head of his victim as a kind of heraldic charge. The four spandrels round about the circle are appropriately embellished with pretty forms of Victories in raised stucco, arranged in pairs in which one figure repeats the other at the opposite corner. It is not incredible that they were modelled by Becerra, however much they curiously resemble the renderings of the subject called Renommée in the French sculpture of the period. In view of the rarity of mythological themes in Spanish art at the time, Diego Angulo seeks an explanation for the decoration of a room in a palace of Philip II with the story of Perseus in the consideration that the Greek hero may just possibly have been taken as a symbol not only of the sovereign's desire to conquer what he judged the monstrosity of the Reform in England but also of his outstanding characteristic of prudence which he wished to combine with force in the enterprises of his reign.33 The suggestion occurs in a section of the Spanish scholar's pioneering, erudite, and perceptive book, La mitología y el arte esfañol del Renacimiento,34 in which he joins the large number of modern Kunsthistoriker, especially in the Warburg and Courtauld Institute, London, who are endeavoring to find the full and exact content of works of art and to elucidate this content on historical, literary, moral, and other cultural grounds. In the treatment of the ceiling, Becerra does not follow the illusionism of Mantegna and Correggio in depicting a lofty space as continuation of the space of the apartment where the paintings are; but the spaces are conceived as those of the actual events just as if the scenes were taking place on a level with the spectator's vision, and Becerra does 33 34

See, however, below, p. i 6 j . Pp. 1 3 4 - 1 3 7 ·

GASPAR B E C E R R A not even make the concession to the high position of the the Venetians and so many other Italian artists of the incorporated, namely, the foreshortening of the figures cept to a slight extent in the central flying Perseus and of the episodes of the Graeae and of Pegasus.

163 frescoes that Cinquecento upward, exin the ovals

The stylistic dependence of Becerra upon Michael Angelo and upon the great Florentine's imitators in Italy is so obvious and so generally emphasized by critics as to require no comment, but the things which, I believe, have not been sufficiently realized are that this indebtedness is decidedly modified by indigenous Spanish traits and that he was by no means a thorough Italianate. In the first place, in comparison with contemporary Italian production, the themes are pervaded by a relative quietude in accord with the sobriety 35 that is seldom lacking in the whole evolution of Spanish art and was transgressed in the sixteenth century chiefly by Alonso Berruguete and some other members of the school of Valladolid. Becerra is less agitated and less manneristic than Vasari, less violent and less blatantly muscular than the other Italian with whom he collaborated at Rome, Daniele da Volterra. Indeed, the elongations and affected postures and gestures of mannerism are admitted by the Spaniard in only a restrained aspect. T h e sobriety is not the same thing as the lack of expression in the countenances that is stressed by Tormo, 36 especially in the Astorga sculptures, and came to Becerra through his contact with Italian classicism, which cultivated the impersonality of ancient art. It was not to be expected that Becerra should imbue an Hellenic theme with characteristic Spanish fervor, and, when we take up his religious paintings, we will weigh the pro and con of the question in a sphere more congenial to the indigenous temperament. W e perhaps ought to attribute to the innate Spanish fondness for naturalism the approximation to more ordinary events attained in the eliminations of supernatural details that we have noted in our analysis of the themes, whether Becerra himself dared the alterations or found them in an as yet undiscovered literary source more in accord with his and the nation's aesthetic attitude. Moreover, the style that he had acquired in Italy is not untouched here and there by Spanish realism,37 to which he gave his most pronounced manifestation in the See my vol. I, p. 6. Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones, XX ( 1 9 1 2 ) , 93 ff. 3 7 For the distinctions that I make between naturalism and realism, see my vol. I, pp. 1 6 - 2 0 . 35 36

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image of Nuestra Señora de la Soledad. 38 It is, I think, not only by reason of his anatomical proficiency that in the Danae and Medusa, as in the sculptured allegorical figures in the predella of his retable at Astorga, he transmits to us somewhat more of the actual appearance of the unveiled female form and texture of the flesh than his Italian rivals ordinarily cared to cultivate but also because of the Spanish realism which ran in his veins and could not be diluted even by his experiences in Italy and which was to obtain a greater and more decided expression in the reclining nudes of his successors, Velazquez and Goya. The most surprising instance of realism is the nurse in the scene of the shower of gold, the unsparing representation of whose aged body is carried to the point of the unrequired revelation of her sagging breasts. The practicality of the Spanish aesthetic attitude may account also for the materialization of the falling gold, in distinction from the Italian treatments of this detail, as actual necklaces, brooches, and other trinkets, as well as for the theophany of Jupiter himself. For a similar reason Becerra, like other Spaniards, scarcely rises to the ideal, ethereal, as heroic, not even in the triumphant Perseus of the central medallion. Least worthy of all the actors in this respect is the Jupiter dropping the gold, unimaginatively depicted as an important old man without a particle of the augustness of divinity. Indeed, something of the mediaeval Spanish tradition persists in the gilding of Jupiter's body and in the adaptation of the old composition for the Virgin's Nativity to the theme of the birth of Perseus, occasioning again a break with the myth in that numerous assistants in the parturition are introduced, whereas Danae is said to have been imprisoned alone with her nurse, who joined with her in rearing the child in secret until he reached the age of four years. Now and then the actors perhaps exhibited a limited derivation from Daniele da Volterra and even from other members of Michael Angelo's school, and yet Becerra manages to set upon his undeniably Italianate style the impress of his own individuality, modifying the foreign types in some degree and thus making them partially his own creation. Tormo has pointed out the similarity of the recumbent Danae to the Faith in the predella of the Astorga retable, thus adding supererogatory proof of Becerra's authorship of the cycle in E l Pardo} but, with the exception of the allegorical figures in the predella, the Astorga sculptures are less Hispanicized and less imbued 38

See above, p. 153.

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with the master's personality than the paintings of the fable of Perseus. The landscapes are like those which were done in Italy during the Cinquecento, as by Polidoro da Caravaggio in S. Silvestro al Quirinale, Rome, in imitation of the Hellenistic paintings of vistas found in the Renaissance in Nero's Domus Aurea but now practically obliterated. Since the general composition of the subject of the shower of gold was established by the actual details of the story, it cannot be said that the version in the ceiling reveals any very tangible influence of the renderings by Correggio and Titian, both of which were then in the royal collections, in the latter instance still remaining in the Prado. Nevertheless, there may have been no more serious reason 39 for Philip IPs choice of the myth of Perseus to adorn one of the rooms in his palace of E l Pardo than the mere consideration that he perhaps caught the idea from his possession of the two great Italian masterpieces, having himself purchased the canvas by Titian. T o all of his qualities Becerra brings a technique not, to be sure, of the first rank but yet exhibiting the advantages of an unusually long residence amidst the artistically sophisticated ateliers of Italy. The paintings over the lateral altars of the church of the Descalzas Reales, Madrid, depicting St. John Baptist and St. Sebastian, which survived until the civil war in 1936, are to be regarded as documented works of Becerra because in his will 4 0 he states that he had done the retables (plural) in the edifice, which would include not only the one over the high altar, which perished in the conflagration of 1862, but also the two that now concern us; but they add little to our comprehension of the master's art and nothing to our appreciation. The Baptist is one of his sturdy, athletic forms, flanked by an exaggerated instance of his non-functional flights of drapery and set against a landscape only somewhat resembling the Hellenistic imitations in the backgrounds of the frescoes in E l Pardo. W e almost fail to perceive the muscularity of the St. Sebastian because here Becerra makes his greatest concession to mannerism, throwing the body into a long, affected S-curve that produces the impression of effeminacy. The union of external and internal evidence conclusively establishes that the drawing of the Lamentation over the Dead Christ in the Boix Collection, Madrid, is Becerra's sketch for his documented but now destroyed fresco of 1563 in the cloister of the cathedral of 39 40

See above, p. 1 6 2 . See above, p. 1 5 4 .

GASPAR B E C E R R A Toledo.41 Adapted in shape to the upper part of one of the arched spaces in the cloister, it bears an inscription at the lower left in handwriting of the seventeenth century to the effect that it was drawn by Becerra and then executed in paint for the cathedral, with the figures in life size.42 It is scarcely conceivable that the author of the inscription would have falsely coined the statement when the fresco was still in existence and when he was penning the words not so very long after the master's death, but in any case the style fully corroborates the attribution. The mode not only is Michelangelesque, but it is Becerra's interpretation of the inheritance from Buonarroti. Despite the very different nature of the themes, the cycle in the palace of El Pardo affords analogies even in human types. The holy woman twisting her hands at the extreme right in the Lamentation is comparable to the foremost female spectator of the embarcation of Danae and her offspring; two others of the holy women, one in the lower right corner and the other supporting the Virgin at the left, have a counterpart in the Gorgon at the very left in the scene of the decapitation; and the hair of the man (Joseph of Arimathaea?) supporting Christ's shoulders flies forth, as frequently in the Sistine ceiling, in straggling locks exactly like those of Jupiter sending the shower of gold, a kind of coiffure used more than once in the Lamentation in order to make the tragedy throb further with emotional excitement. Although at Astorga, fresh from his immersion in Italian art, Becerra approaches the sacred subjects in a colder, classical manner, yet these sculptures contain precedents for the fresco. The posture and the face of the Saviour in the Astorga version of the Lamentation remain almost unaltered in the sketch for the Toledo rendering, and the holy woman above the Virgin's head constitutes a very close prototype for the one at the left whom we have already mentioned as sustaining the Mother in the drawing. The futto at the left holding the cardinal's hat in the title page of the Spanish edition of Valverde provides a counterpart for the St. John at the upper right in the Lamentation. The intensity of feeling is raised to a pitch, virtually Spanish in its fervor, that goes considerably beyond the treatment in the retable at Astorga and indeed the other compartments in this assemblage, but nevertheless the reminiscences of Michael Angelo are still vital. The woman twisting her hands, for instance, seems directly imitated 41 42

See above, p. 1 5 5 . I take it that this is what the words "tamaño n a t u r a l " mean.

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from the Virgin in the Last Judgment of the Sistine Chapel; her companion just underneath resembles the Persian Sibyl; and the athletic St. John, stripped to the waist, also is indebted to the great Florentine's influence. By reason of Becerra's classicism, the features themselves are not distorted with passionate expression, and yet the agony of the participants in the event is acutely transmitted to us through their attitudes and through the composition. In the frescoes in the palace of E l Pardo a Spanish sobriety saved him from Italian ebullition; and likewise in the Lamentation the extravagant contortions and agitation of his contemporaries in the sister peninsula are avoided in favor of somewhat quieter postures, which, however, are so skilfully chosen and delineated as to incorporate effectively emotions that are deeply rather than frantically felt. The beautifully calculated composition accentuates the strain of profound sorrow pervading the Lamentation, with the curve of Christ's body, relaxed in death, balanced by the corresponding bend of His Mother's form, swooning in anguish, each of the two figures relieved against the attendant mourners. The symmetry of the composition is proficiently managed, and the lines of the participants in the scene are pleasantly adapted to the rounded top of the space, without the means of obtaining either result being made too obvious. Of the paintings that have been attributed to Becerra only on internal evidence, the best known is the horizontal panel of the penitent and recumbent Magdalene now in the Prado (Fig. 68), which, to my eyes, could have been but was not surely executed by him. Its assignment to the master appears to have begun with a cautious remark of Ponz, 43 who says that he saw it as a section of an altarpiece in the sacristy of the Dominican church of Sta. Cruz at Segovia and merely judged it to be in Becerra's style. As has often happened, however, in the history of art and specifically as in the case of Ponz's statements about the works at Huete in which he thought that he discerned Gaspar's manner, such guarded opinions have been set down by subsequent writers as gospel truth, so that both Isidoro Bosarte 4 4 and Valentin Carderera 45 soon after categorically claimed the Magdalene for Becerra, thus wrongly establishing it among modern critics as certainly his creation. Ponz declares that it was a part of a retable Viaje de España, Madrid, 1 7 8 1 , tomo X , carta V i l i , 32. Viaje artistico a varios fueblos de Esfaña, Madrid 1804., P· 77· 45 Quoted by Vinaza, Adiciones, II ( 1 8 9 4 ) , from the notes that Carderera left in handwriting in his edition of Ceán's Diccionario. 43 44

Fig. 68. GASPAR BECERRA (?)· MAGDALENE. PRADO MUSEUM, MADRID {Photo. Mas)

GASPAR

BECERRA

169

dated by an inscription in 1593, but this would not necessarily exclude it from Becerra's lifetime, since Ponz's description of the retable implies that it may have been one of those conglomerations frequently and newly assembled in Spain from various already existing sources. T h e Spanish traveller was probably thinking of the reclining allegorical figures at the base of the Astorga retable in suggesting Becerra's authorship of the Magdalene, who, however, is far less heroic and muscular. There are, nevertheless, counterparts for her head in the artist's production, for example, in a number of the female actors in the cycle of E l Pardo, especially the woman with clasped hands watching the departure of Danae with her infant. T h e Guardian Angel in the clausura of the convent of the Descalzas Reales, Madrid, that we shall find ascribed to Becerra by Tormo with considerable justice, displays a face, emphasized breasts, and fluttering drapery very like the Magdalene's, and indeed the classic countenance of the penitent is more or less a norm throughout his productions. She betrays, moreover, one of his not rare shortcomings, defective delineation of the feet. T h e landscape, however, is different not only from the specimens in the frescoes of E l Pardo but even to a certain extent from the setting to the Baptist in the Descalzas Reales, and there are other possible candidates for the attribution, such as Diego de Urbino, who is known to have been active at Segovia, and the Maldonado Master in the adjoining province of Valladolid, whose women are at least the Magdalene's cousins. There is much to be said, unhappily not determinative, for reviving the old attribution to Becerra of another panel in the Prado, a Flagellation measuring 99 centimetres in height by 71 in width (Fig. 69). Even some objective, circumstantial proof is afforded by the consideration that the picture was once in the Alcázar, Madrid, where Gaspar is known to have been extensively employed. 46 Nor is the internal evidence, to say the least, discordant with the ascription. T h e manner is so like Michael Angelo's that he himself also was in the past proposed as the author, and, although his rights to the panel cannot be maintained, yet the very fact that he was suggested argues for Becerra, who is the only Spaniard approaching so close to Buonarroti as to have aroused in anyone's mind the thought of the great Florentine's candidacy for the painting in the Prado. There would be, of course, the possibility that it might be one of the many Italian paint46

See above, p. 155.

FIG. 69. GASPAR BECERRA. FLAGELLATION. PRADO MUSEUM, MADRID (Photo.

Museo del

Prado)

GASPAR BECERRA

171

ings imported into Spain during the Renaissance or that it was executed by a member of the Italian artistic colony summoned to the peninsula by Philip II, but I am familiar with no Italian to whom it can be so reasonably assigned as to Becerra. Venturi 47 has guessed at Michael Angelo's Italian follower, Marcello Venusti, but this is probably because he has claimed for Venusti a faithful copy, in the Borghese Gallery, Rome, of Sebastiano del Piombo's celebrated Flagellation in S. Pietro in Montorio. It is difficult to see with the Italian scholar, in the Prado panel, any marks of Venusti's softer style, and, as a matter of fact, the picture contains no unmistakable traces of familiarity with the rendering by Sebastiano del Piombo. The most cogent proof for an ascription to Becerra is the impressive similarity of the scourger at the right, in head, anatomy, posture, and even in drapery to the male nude at the left in the engraved title page of Valverde's treatise which we shall subsequently attribute to our master with conviction. Affinities to his other works, however, are not lacking. In the frescoes of El Pardo, the Mercury bestowing his gifts upon Perseus is related to the scourger to whom we have just alluded, as well as to the figure of Christ himself. The helmeted actors in the mythological cycle afford counterparts for the two soldiers dimly visible on the stairs in the background. Both Mercury and his companion, Minerva, as well as the triumphant Perseus in the central medallion, betray, like the two flagellators, Becerra's proneness to give queerly shaped involutions to the flying ends of draperies. There should also be remarked, in the matter of draperies, the similarity of Mercury's strips of loin-cloth to those of the scourged Christ and of his tormentor at the right. The feet in the Prado picture are better drawn than commonly in Becerra's productions, but the position of the Saviour's legs is repeated in the Guardian Angel in the Descalzas Reales at Madrid which we shall forthwith agree with Tormo in assigning to him. The Flagellation, if Becerra indeed deserves the credit for it, would add emphasis to the fact that in types and true appreciation of physical beauty he approached nearer (though still, of course, at a distance) to Michael Angelo than did the majority of the Italian imitators. Having immersed himself in the art of Becerra, Tormo 48 had the right to believe that, merely from the general feeling of the work, he 47 48

See the 1949 edition of the Catalogue of the Prado, p. 395. En las Descalzas Reales, Madrid, 1 9 1 5 - 1 9 1 7 , pp. 81—82.

GASPAR B E C E R R A

172

recognized the master's hand in the painting of the Guardian Angel that exists in the clausura of the convent of the Descalzas Reales, Madrid5 and even I, despite my lesser familiarity with the artist's production, am conceited enough to think that I sense his authentic manner without requiring concrete proof. Such proof, however, is not lacking. The Angel, here imagined as a woman, belongs precisely to the same type of luxuriant femininity, with pronounced abdomen, as the allegorical ladies in the predella of the Astorga retable and as the Danaë undergoing the shower of gold on the ceiling of E l Pardo. We see once more Becerra's favorite ovular shape for the countenances of the fair sex, illustrated, for instance, on the ceiling by the Danaë bidding farewell to Perseus and by Minerva bestowing her gifts upon the hero. I have referred in the preceding paragraph to the similarly posed legs of Christ in the Prado Flagellation ; and the St. Sebastian over a lateral altar of the very church of the Descalzas Reales is recalled by the somewhat less mannered undulation of the form, as well as the inclination of the head. Tormo,49 in suggesting that the cult of the Guardian Angel in the convent may have been occasioned by the fact that the first nuns of the institution came from Gandía in the old kingdom of Valencia, a region where this member of the celestial host enjoyed great popularity, is troubled by his idea that in the Valencian school the Guardian Angel does not carry the attribute of the scourge as well as the crown, both of which are displayed by the effigy in the Descalzas Reales 5 but he is wrong in his assumption, since my volumes V I 5 0 and X I 5 1 have collected in the school a number of examples in which the Angel is distinguished by both emblems. Constantino Candeira y Pérez, in his Guía del Museo Nacional de Escultura de ValladoUdf2 registers, whether on his own or another's authority, as probably by Becerra, a small painted retable in the institution consisting only of a main compartment of the Resurrection (Fig. 70) and a predella of the Entombment (Fig. 7 1 ) ; but it is hard to find much in the work to substantiate even a tentative attribution. The St. John Baptist over a lateral altar in the church of the Descalzas Reales, Madrid, affords somewhat of a facial counterpart for the Redeemer and for the soldier dimly seen at the right in the 49 50

51 52

Ibid., p. 31.

Cf. pp. 154, 298, and 335.

P· 75-

Valladolid, 1945, p. 91.

FIG. 70. FOLLOWER OF GASPAR BECERRA. RESURRECTION. MUSEO NACIONAL DE ESCULTURA, VALLADOLID (Photo.

Mas)

GASPAR BECERRA

175

Resurrection and for the St. Joseph of Arimathaea holding Christ's shoulders in the Entombment. There is also a vague resemblance in the Saviour of the Resurrection to the pose and general anatomical lines of the youths bearing the escutcheon in the title page of the Spanish edition of Valverde's book, and yet the form, like indeed all the figures in the retable, is painfully inferior to the standard of his authenticated productions. W e might attempt to palm the retable off on him by the process of exclusion, since it cannot surely be ascribed to any of the painters active at Valladolid, not even to Jerónimo Vázquez whose manner it approaches more closely than do the modes of his rivals and whom Ceán Bermúdez asserts to have been Becerra's pupil ; 53 but the retable will not for a moment bear comparison with Gaspar's achievements at Astorga and El Pardo, and its weakness and indeed very different style are graphically betrayed when the Entombment is set beside his version of a similar theme, the spirited drawing for the Toledo Lamentation over the Dead Christ. Except for the emphasis on the musculature of the torso, I can discover no tangible reasons for Roberto Longhi's 54 suggestion that we perhaps ought to ascribe to Becerra a canvas of St. John Baptist in the Palazzo Caetani, Rome, a work that was shown in the Exposition, Fontainebleau e la maniera italiana, at Naples in 1952,55 and has been attributed also to northern artists of the period, to Bartholomaeus Spranger or to Johann van Aachen. In addition to the persuasive arguments that I have gathered for an assignment to Becerra of the anatomical illustrations in Valverde's treatise, a strong plea can be made for his authorship of the engraved title pages in both the Italian and Spanish editions. In the case of the Italian edition, published in 1559, I have listed the reasons 56 for thinking that the inscription on the title page declaring him to have made the engraving (i.e., the drawing for the engraving) deserves credence (Fig. 72) ; 57 and, although the nature of the subjects on the page forestalls comparison with his certified achievements, the engraving betrays nothing stylistically discordant with a belief that he was the artist. The background is constituted by a handsome archi53 55 56 57

n. 7.

54 Paragone, No. 43 ( 1 9 5 3 ) , 15, note. See above, p. 93. No. 93 of the Catalogue, and fig. 81. See above, p. 1 5 1 . For the later insertion of the words, "Incisioni del Vessalio," see above, p. 1 5 1 ,

Fig. 72. GASPAR BECERRA. T I T L E PAGE OF VALVERDE DE AMUSCO'S TREATISE, ITALIAN EDITION, 1559

GASPAR

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177

tectural passage, as of a façade, and in front of it two skeletons are represented as upholding a great oval enshrining the title of the book and the place where it was issued, Rome, the publishers, and the date 1559. Above and below decorative details of skulls and bones are liberally disposed, and to these are added, just above the oval, a monkey and a pig, the introduction of which Horst W . Janson 58 explains in the similar title page, engraved by Francesco Valesio, of the Venetian edition of Vesalius, published in 1604, on the grounds that Vesalius in his attacks upon the admirers of Galen had accused him of dissecting only the bodies of apes instead of human beings and that the pig was regularly employed for dissection in the Renaissance because its inner organs were regarded as similar to those of man. It hardly seems possible that Francesco Valesio should not have known Gaspar Becerra's title page or that both did not depend upon some common but as yet undiscovered source. There is no tangible evidence that Becerra did the drawings for the episodes of anatomical research that serve as a kind of predella in the title page of the Italian edition of Becerra or that he had anything to do with the little woodcuts of figured subjects constituting backgrounds for the capital letters at the heads of sections of the text in both editions, and indeed both the predella and the woodcuts are treated in so small and sketchy a way as to forestall any very valid opinion in regard to their designer. T h e engraved title page (Fig. 73) of the Spanish edition of Valverde's book does not, like the one in the Italian edition of 1559, bear an inscription stating it to be by Becerra, but there is every reason to believe that such was its authorship. Against a pleasant, simulated architectural façade, two soaring Michelangelesque male nudes are represented as holding the escutcheon of the then cardinal-archbishop of Santiago de Compostela, Juan Alvarez de Toledo, to whom Valverde dedicated his volume ; at the top two young genii uplift the prelate's ecclesiastical hat; and beneath the heraldry the title of the treatise is framed in a cartouche. It was not to be expected that two different artists would have done the anatomical illustrations within and the nudes on the title page. Nevertheless, the drawing of the forms conforms to Becerra's style, the two mature nudes, for instance, being comparable, except for the appropriate, increased emphasis upon 58 In his exhaustive and authoritative work, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance., published by the W a r b u r g Institute of the University of London, 1952, p. 362.

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Fig. 73. GASPAR B E C E R R A . T I T L E PAGE OF V A L V E R D E D E AMUSCO'S T R E A T I S E , SPANISH EDITION, 1 J 5 6

179

GASPAR BECERRA

the musculature, to the Mercury, who, with Minerva, gives the shield and short sword to Perseus on the ceiling in the palace of El Pardo. The border of the cartouche and that of the oval in the title page of the Italian edition look forward to the frames of the ovals at the summit of his drawing for the retable of the high altar in the church of the Descalzas Reales at Madrid. Of Becerra's preserved drawings, I already have had occasion to take up those that have the great importance of reflecting two of his destroyed works, the retable in the Descalzas Reales, mentioned in the preceding paragraph, and the fresco in the cathedral of Toledo. Since in the drawing 59 for the retable of the Descalzas Reales and in another, belonging to the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, 60 which incorporates the design for the upper part of an altarpiece of unascertained destination (the lower part probably having been lost), only the sculptures are outlined and the spaces for the paintings left blank, the sketches teach us nothing about his pictorial production, except to emphasize the Michelangelesque foundation to his style, in that the reclining forms, meant to be carved, in the plan for the Descalzas Reales, as in the Astorga retable, were suggested by the Medici tombs, and the Evangelists at the top of the other altarpiece had their source in the Prophets of the Sistine ceiling. If we can maintain the general attribution to Becerra of a drawing in the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, which reproduces groups of figures at the bottom of Buonarroti's Last Judgment, we should be provided with supererogatory proof of his dependence upon the great Florentine; and it is to be remembered that Ceán Bermúdez 61 was familiar with a drawing by Gaspar of a part of the Sistine Last Judgment, with which the example now in the Biblioteca Nacional may well be identical. I have not seen reproductions of the four purely anatomical drawings in the Biblioteca Nacional attributed to Becerra by Angel M. de Barcia,62 one of them the same as a plate in the Valverde treatise and considered by Barcia to be the drawing for this engraving; but they would add nothing to our understanding of him as a true artist. Jupiter sending the shower of gold in the cycle of El Pardo is the nearest analogue in his authenticated works to the drawing of Polyphemus in the Academia de San 5Q

Sánchez Cantón, Dibujos españoles, II, pl. C X I . Ibid., pl. C X . 61 Diccionario, I, 107, η. ι. 62 Catálogo de la colección dibujos originales de la Biblioteca 1906—1911, pp. 17 and 18, cat. nos. 6—9. 60

Nacional,

Madrid,

GASPAR

ι8ο

BECERRA

Fernando, Madrid, ascribed to him by Mayer, 6 3 following Sentenach, 64 and there should be taken into account that Gaspar was one of the few masters in Spain to do mythological themes j but the evidence scarcely appears sufficient for a categorical ensconcing among his undoubted achievements. 63

P · 64·

Handzeichnungen

spanischer

Meister,

New York and Leipzig, 1 9 1 5 , p. 3 and

1 z

Narciso Sentenach, Historia y arte, II (Madrid, 1 9 1 2 ) , 3 1 .

CHAPTER V T H E SCHOOL OF

TOLEDO

i. L u i s DE CARVAJAL The painters of the school of Toledo in the High Renaissance resemble one another so closely that it is a delicate task for a critic to descry or define the distinctions between them, and the one to whom we now come, Luis de Carvajal, varies from Blas de Prado 1 chiefly in little more than in a somewhat further degree of Italianism, in a slightly greater vigor of types and draughtsmanship and in a few small, technical characteristics that we shall analyze when we study his works. Our sole source for the date of his birth at Toledo in 1534 is Ceán Bermúdez, 2 not too trustworthy in such matters, nor can we check the Spanish biographer's statements that he was a half-brother of the sculptor Juan Bautista Monegro 3 and a pupil of the painter Juan de Villoldo. If for the moment we leave out of account Ceán's and others' references to his extant works, we are not informed of many pertinent facts in his life. 4 The principal seat of his activity and of his preserved achievements is the Escorial, where his services were in demand from the late seventies through the early nineties, but it is significant for his stylistic relationship with Bias del Prado that Ceán states him to have joined with Blas in 1591 in undertakings in the church of the Mínimos de S. Francisco de Paula at Toledo, which, since the edifice was long ago destroyed, have been lost, unless they lie unrecognized in some public or private collection. Highly apSee below, p. 203. Diccionario, I, 233. 3 Ibid., III, 167. Ceán's words are hermano uterino, meaning· a son of the same mother but of a different father. 4 For Carvajal as appraiser of others' works as a legal witness, and as a participant in financial transactions (in one instance with his brother the sculptor Monegro, see Datos documentales inéditos fara la historia del arte español, published by the Centro de Estudios Históricos, Madrid: I, Notas del archivo de la catedral de Toledo, redactadas sistemáticamente, en el siglo XVIII, for el canónigo-obrero Don Francisco Pérez Sedano, 1914, 74; and II, Documentos de la catedral de Toledo, coleccionados •por D. Manuel R. Zarco del Valle, 1916, part 2, 206 and 244-249; C. Pérez Pastor's summaries of documents in Memorias de la Real Academia Española, X I ( 1 9 1 4 ) , 51, 64, 65, 7J, 80, 93, and 107; and J. Zarco Cuevas, Pintores españoles en San Lorenzo el Real de el Escorial, Madrid, I 9 3 i , p p . 71, 121—124, 135—137, 163—168, and 205. 1

2

182

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predated by Philip I I , as is shown by his lengthy employment in the Escorial and by his appointment, according to Ceán, to the post of court-painter, he continued in favor with his royal successor, collaborating in 1598 in the decorations for the funeral of Philip I I at Madrid 5 and in 1599 in the embellishment of the triumphal arches for the entry of Philip I l l ' s consort, Margaret of Austria, into the same city.6 Indeed he was given the honor of belonging to the group of artists who joined in the redecoration of the palace of E l Pardo, just north of Madrid, after the destructive fire of 1604. T o him was assigned the task here of doing the no longer extant paintings on the vault of the Sala de la Reina, but he died in 1607 while engaged in this enterprise, leaving it to be finished by his son, Francisco. 7 T h e only fact in his career that has recently come to light is not very significant, his application of polychromy, in 1604, t o a statue of the Virgin of the Rosary by the sculptor Agustín de Campos at the town of Sevilla la Nueva in the province of Madrid. 8 T h e extant, authenticated works of Carvajal are limited almost solely to the Escorial, and among these we had best begin, not with the earliest, but with those that give us the amplest outlook upon his capabilities, two large triptychs in the southeast corner of the lower, principal cloister, upon which he was engaged from the spring of 1587 until February, 1590. 9 T h e centre of one triptych (Figs. 74, 75) is occupied by the Adoration of the Shepherds, and the interiors of the wings by their reception of the angelic proclamation and by the Circumcision: the exteriors of these wings, when closed, combine to represent the Nativity of Christ. T h e principal panel of the second triptych (Figs. 76, 77) displays the Epiphany; the interiors of the wings, the Marriage at Cana and the Baptism; and they fold to exhibit together on their exteriors another version of the Adoration of M a r t í y Monsó, Estudios histórico-artístico s, p. 235, η. ι . Ibid., pp. ζηη-ϊ%\. For these activities, see also C. Pérez Pastor, of. cit., 75, 76, 77, and 80. 7 T h e archives of Simancos contain the record of October 26, 1 6 1 1 , that disbursements had been made to him and his son for their work in E l Pardo, but they do not specify the date of the payments: see Rudolf Beer, Archivo general zur Simancas, Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des allerhöhsten Kaiserhauses, X I I ( 1 8 9 1 ) , p. C C I V , no. 8483. Ceán Bermúdez puts the time of Luis's activity at E l Pardo in 1613, but Vinaza (Adiciones, II, 9 8 ) , although he does not quote the documents fixing· the painter's death in 1607, refers to them in such a w a y as to show that he had them at hand. 8 See in an article by the Marqués del Saltillo in Boletín de la Sociedad Esfañola de Excursiones, L I I ( 1 9 4 8 ) , 8. 9 F o r the documents, See Zarco Cuevas, Pintores es-pañoles, pp. 57 and 89—96. 5

6

FIG. 74. LUIS DE CARVAJAL. ADORATION OF THE SHEPHERDS. CLOISTER, SAN LORENZO DEL ESCORIAL {Photo.

Mas)

Fie. 75. LUIS DE C A R V A J A L . ADORATION OF T H E SHEPHERDS (DETAIL) {Photo.

Mas)

FIG. 76. LUIS DE CARVAJAL. EPIPHANY. CLOISTER, SAN LORENZO DEL ESCORIAL (Photo.

Mas)

Fig. 77. LUIS D E C A R V A J A L . M A R R I A G E A T CANA. C L O I S T E R , SAN LORENZO D E L ESCORIAL {Photo. Mas)

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the Magi. T h e commission included also the frescoes of another Nativity, the Baptism, and (two other subjects) that surround the triptychs. Philip I I , who took a lively personal and aesthetic interest in the works with which the Escorial was being elaborately adorned, gave orders 10 that Carvajal's two triptychs soon after their completion, should be repaired and improved by one of the artist's rivals in the decoration of the edifice, Juan Gómez, who enjoyed the sovereign's personal esteem. T h e royal command required in particular that Gómez should correct both the interior and exterior representations of the Epiphany, the Baptism, and the Marriage at Cana, specifying especially for rectification in the last panel the figure of the Virgin and the wine-pourer who, in the foreground, is stigmatized as disproportionately small j but the style alterations are so slight, so skilful, and so in accord with Carvajal's manner, even in the winepourer, that they seem impossible to detect. This style is part and parcel of the general Toledan manner of the period, particularly as embodied by Bias del Prado, and reveals only in minimum degree the influence of the Italians who were laboring together with him in the Escorial, if indeed he had not acquired what in Italianism agreed with his principles by a sojourn in the other peninsula about which we are uninformed. His works unfold no sure evidence of such a sojourn, since the reminiscences of Michael Angelo's Sibyls in a drawing of "Prudence" in the Boix Collection, Madrid, which after all is merely ascribed to our master, might have reached him at second hand. His types and mild compositions are Toledan of the H i g h Renaissance and little touched by Italian agitation or the pre-baroque excitement of the contemporary school at Valladolid. H e has a Spanish lack of interest in Italian nudities and anatomies, and the chief thing that he takes over from the contemporary modes of Italy is, as in the Adoration of the Shepherds (Fig. 74), the filling of the upper parts of his pictures with celestial outbursts of light and of the angelic host, a constituent that in Italian art had largely had its source in the initiative of Correggio. T h e Spaniards had already at the beginning of the sixteenth century extended a hearty welcome to the fut ti, and they are multiplied by Carvajal, occupying even the topmost tier of the heavenly explosion in the Adoration of the Shepherds and soaring and diving downward, in a group of three, above the ruined building of the Epiphany. In their 10

Zarco Cuevas, of. cit., pp. 78 and 112.

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representation, he shows considerable sensibility to infantile charm, but it is when he comes to the Christ Child that, perhaps by reason of his religious devotion, he exhibits an almost unexpected talent in giving delicate expression to this aspect of his art. His gentle women and angels resemble those of Bias del Prado, though not identical with them, but his men are slightly more rugged and more firmly outlined. H e is not a thrilling performer but a conscientious craftsman and no fool. His compositions are pleasant and often interesting adaptations of the traditional schemes, modified chiefly by the Italianate enlivenment of the skies. In the Epiphany he abides strictly by the old Spanish love of symmetry, even balancing a figure at the extreme right, said to be his own portrait, behind the negroid Magus by the rather arbitrary introduction of an angel on the other side looking over the Virgin's shoulder. Twice, in the Proclamation to the Shepherds and in the Circumcision, he somewhat surprises us with the innovation employed by E l Greco in the Resurrection of the Prado, the effective rounding out of the composition at the bottom by projecting forms with their backs toward us. It was partly the necessity of solving the problem of the narrow, vertical spaces of the wings that provoked this peculiarity. In the Circumcision and Marriage at Cana he let the agreeably sober architecture of the edifices take care of the upper parts of these spaces, but in the other two wings he was compelled to fall back upon his Italian lessons, filling the top of the panel of the Proclamation to the Shepherds with a very large angel in the midst of clouds of putti and magnifying the intervention of the First Person of the Trinity in the Baptism by introducing a full-sized figure of God the Father into the opening heavens. As Bias del Prado incongruously admitted a bird-chasing maiden into the Purification, Carvajal seems to have felt the need of relieving the coldness of the style with bits of genre, which, however, too obviously break the classical harmony. H e clutters the foreground of the Proclamation to the Shepherds with their rustic paraphernalia ; at the front of the Adoration of the Shepherds a lamb and the Virgin's work-basket first meet our eyes; a lolling youngster is employed to fill the foremost plane of the Circumcision; and, most conspicuously of all the instances, there looks out at us from the lower right corner of the Marriage at Cana a fine cat, almost compensating for his unsuitable presence by the way in which the painter has captured this animal's na-

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ture that has defied the efforts of so many of Carvajal's artistic superiors. Although the triptychs incorporate a greater number of the aspects of his attainments, he is at his best in the many retables of coupled saints that earlier in his activity at the Escoriai he was called upon to do in the long series of such paintings that were being made by him and others to decorate the multiple altars of the church itself. More than his rivals in the undertakings, he achieves the qualities proper to this kind of ecclesiastical art because he retains to a large degree the monumentality, strong contours, and gorgeousness of spreading vestments by which his Spanish predecessors in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance had imparted to sacred effigies the solemnity of figures of cult and because he contaminates his personages less with Italian sentiment and movement. For this extended commission he was occupied from 1580 to 1585, carrying out the altarpieces of the following paired saints," somewhat larger than life: the martyred prelates, Sixtus the Pope and Blaise; the Spanish virgin martyrs, Leocadia and Engracia; the Greek Fathers of the Church, John Chrysostom and Gregory Nazianzen; the virgin martyrs of general European popularity, Cecilia and Barbara; the early Spanish bishops, Isidor and Leander; the scrapping doctor, Bonaventura, and the angelic doctor, Thomas Aquinas; the episcopal worthies, Martin and Nicholas (Fig. 78) ; and the eminent members of each of the mendicant orders, the Franciscan, Anthony of Padua and the Dominican Peter Martyr (Fig. 79). T h e retables of the founders of the orders of friars, Dominic and Francis, and of the physicians, Cosmas and Damian, had been sketched by Fernández de Navarrete before his death in 1579, leaving to Carvajal forthwith only the actual execution in paint, so that, since they embody rather the former's essential traits, I postpone their discussion to the section of this book in which his art is analyzed. Certain iconographical details should be noted. T h e beautifully rendered little figures or scenes simulated as embroidered on the magnificent vestments are almost all recognizable, and St. Sixtus, in papal regalia, appropriately displays St. Peter at the centre of the orphrey of his chasuble. T h e emblem of his companion, St. Blaise, is a small, kneeling boy pointing to his throat, with reference to the holy bishop's intervention to save him from choking from a fishbone. 1 1 F o r the documents, see Z a r c o C u e v a s , op. cit., pp. 82—89; several of the panels are also signed.

FIG. 78. LUIS DE CARVAJAL. STS. MARTIN AND NICHOLAS. CHURCH, SAN LORENZO DEL ESCORIAL {Photo.

Mas)

FIG. 79. LUIS DE CARVAJAL. STS. ANTHONY OF PADUA AND PETER MARTYR. CHURCH, SAN LORENZO DEL ESCORIAL (Photo. Instituto Fotografico

de Arte Es-pañol)

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Other martyrs are embroidered on his cope, Lawrence, Stephen, and Sebastian, and for further identification the names of Sts. Sixtus and Blaise are inscribed in Latin on the pavement beneath them. In addition, as in some other instances, he sets in the backgrounds of landscapes episodes from their lives, delightfully sketched in much smaller scale with a great deal of E l Greco's spectral manipulation of aërial perspective, for St. Sixtus apparently the episode of his refusal to worship in the temple of Mars and for St. Blaise the commonly represented scene of his companionship with the beasts in the wilds. The Spanish virgins carry palms, and Engracia has even two other emblems, not only her frequent attribute, the nail in her head, 12 but also the forked instrument by which her body was torn. H e r name is written on a stone underneath, and in the background there is enacted, against a building that looks to have been suggested by the Alcázar at Toledo, her dragging behind a horse. 13 In the offing behind St. Leocadia we see her engaged in pious devotions in the rocky hermitage to which she had retired. The two other virgins also are honored with a plenitude of emblems, Cecilia with a crown of roses as well as an organ (on the base of which is written the date 1 5 8 2 ) , St. Barbara with a sword in addition to her tower. The scene in miniature above St. Cecilia's right shoulder probably represents the angel crowning her and her husband with roses, and in the distance behind St. Barbara we see the thunderbolt destroying her cruel father. For the two Greek Fathers Carvajal did not attempt the vestments of the Eastern Church, with which he was probably not familiar, but he clothed them in the copes of the West, omitting, however, the mitres. On the orphreys of Gregory Nazianzen, the Transfiguration, Crucifixion, and Resurrection are clearly discernible, skilfully adapted in draughtsmanship to the undulations of the fabric. In this series of retables he rises almost to the stature of a great artist, exerting his utmost capabilities because, through the Spanish blood that ran in his veins, the monumental, isolated forms of sacred personages were more congenial to him, as to his mediaeval forerunners, than the execution of narrative. Besides the distinguished qualities in the series that I have already specified, he manifests powers of forceful characterization that we should scarcely havfe 12 13

M y vol. V I I I , p. 202, η. i. Vol. X I , pp. 1 4 3 - 1 4 4 .

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suspected if we judged solely from the triptychs: outstanding examples are the St. Isidor (at the left in this retable), St. Nicholas (the figure at the right in the retable in question), and above all, both the St. Anthony of Padua and the St. Peter Martyr. Nor have the women in the triptychs prepared us for the lovely and fresh incarnations of girlish beauty in the Sts. Leocadia and Engracia. T h e gifts of mere technique that he was inspired to call forth in these works which seem to have appealed to the heart of his own essential aesthetics extend to an almost unexcelled rendering of the resplendent vestments of the clerics. T h e records of the Escorial contain allusions to further activities of Carvajal for the institution: in paintings of the Anna selbdritt and of Christ being stripped for the scourging, 14 which have now disappeared j in the decoration of an organ-case,13 also lost 5 in the polychromy of sculpture, nine faces of virgins and two figures of saints ; 16 and at the beginning of his career here, in the actual business of selling 17 to the monastery pictures all or almost all of which had probably been executed by others. One of these, St. Andrew bringing his brother St. Peter to Christ, seems certainly to be a canvas by Navarrete still in the church; and since of the additional works in the list, a Nativity by Navarrete there exists, since an Expulsion of the Money-Changers from the Temple painted by him 18 and several representations of the H o l y Family 19 have disappeared from the edifice, and since the Coronation is so common a theme that he might well have done one, it is likely that immediately after the time when this master died on March 28, 1579, Carvajal was the agent for the purchase of the series on April 24 and in October of the same year, the dates of the documents referring to the transaction, especially when we remember that Carvajal is not recorded to have executed for the Escorial the subjects of the Expulsion of the Money-Changers, the Coronation, or the H o l y Family. N o picture of Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, also enumerated in the list, by Navarrete, Carvajal, or anyone else is now to be found Zarco Cuevas, Pintores esf añales, pp. 84 and 86. Ibid.., pp. 75 and 87-88. 16 Ibid., p. 89. 17 Ibid., pp. 81-82. 1 8 Zarco Cuevas, p. 24. 19 Ibid., p. 16. T h e one sold by C a r v a j a l , which included only the Virgin, Child, and St. Joseph cannot be the example by Navarrete still in the Escorial : Zarco Cuevas, p. i j . 14 15

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in the monastery j and the last remaining item, a penitent Magdalene, raises a question. A mere sketch for a Magdalene by Navarrete is said to have been once in the Escorial, but it no longer there exists ; 20 whereas a Magdalene signed by Carvajal in the very year 1579 and actually depicted as a penitent was removed from the Escorial and for many years shown in the Prado. Did Carvajal in this one instance sell his own product? Or, since the picture is more in Navarrete's manner than in Carvajal's, did the latter take the former's sketch and make it into a finished canvas? As a matter of fact its height, 130 centimetres practically equals the "four feet" by which its vertical measurement is described in the bill of sale. T h e Venetian character of this painting, somewhat similar to the treatment of the theme by Tintoretto's son, Domenico, in the Capitoline Gallery, Rome, a work, however, done too late to have been known in Spain by 1579, would speak for Navarrete as the basic author; but, whatever the truth, the result is a credit to no one. In 1578 Carvajal did the portrait of the archbishop of Toledo, Bartolomé de Carranza, 21 in the series of such likenesses in oil in the Sala Capitular of the cathedral. As in the case of the pair by Francisco de Comontes, 22 it is more firmly characterized than the first two in the series by Juan de Borgoña; but the portraits seem to have been largely regarded by their authors as mere ecclesiastical decoration and matters of routine, so that Carvajal's example gives us no valid idea of what his talents may have been in the representation of his contemporaries. On the grounds of its similarity to one of Carvajal's Nativities in the Escorial, Tormo seems to be right in ascribing to him a version in the lower cloister within the clausura of the convent of the Descalzes Reales at Madrid. H a v i n g enjoyed the rare privilege of entering the clausura of the great convent of the Descalzas Reales at Madrid, T o r m o 23 found and registered there several works in which he discerns Carvajal's craft. On the grounds of its similarity to one of the painter's Nativities in the lower cloister, he seems to be right in ascribing to him a version in the lower cloister. Ibid., p. 22. See the above-mentioned Datos documentales, of the cathedral of T o l e d o , I ( 1 9 1 4 ) , 76, and II, part 2 ( 1 9 1 6 ) , 208. 22 M y vol. IX, p. 348. 23 En las Descalzas Reales, p. 74. Editor's note : A museum was instituted in the cloister in 1960, so that the public may now visit this famous nunnery. 20

21

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Although the internal evidence argues specifically neither for nor against the attribution, Carvajal's execution of a rather handsome drawing of a so-called figure of Prudence formerly in the Boix Collection, Madrid, is strongly supported by the facts that the inscription in the plate's lower right corner, stating him as the author, is in handwriting of the sixteenth century 24 and that his name is spelled in the way in which it occurs in the documents of the Escorial, thus suggesting definite knowledge on the part of someone at the period when the master lived. I cannot find, however, that the horse beside the allegorical lady was ever a distinguishing emblem of Prudence. The historical interest of the drawing would be its general indebtedness to Michael Angelo's Sibyls, though it is not slavishly dependent upon any one of them ; but we have seen 25 that we cannot so prove a journey of Carvajal to Italy. I can discern no reason, stylistic or inscriptional, for assigning to him a drawing in the Albertina at Vienna, representing the return of Saul and David from their victory over the Philistines. 26

2.

M I G U E L BARROSO

W e come next to another artist connected with both the Escorial and Toledo, Miguel Barroso, undeservedly less known than Luis de Carvajal 2 7 to whom in style he was very similar and in attainments quite equal. Ceán Bermúdez 28 gives the date of his birth as 1538, on no yet discovered authority of any document, but he may merely have guessed this year since Barroso is known to have died in 1590 29 and Palomino 30 declares that he was then a little over fifty years old. The place of his birth is stated by Ceán to have been Consuegra, southeast of Toledo and in its province, but the preponderant likelihood is that it was rather the town of Alcázar de San Juan, a little further east and now in the province of Ciudad Real. Alcázar de San Juan was sometimes described as Alcázar de Consuegra because it belonged to the priory of the Order of St. John of 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Sánchez Cantón, Dibujos españoles, II, pl. CLI. P. 1 8 7 . A . L . Mayer, Handzeichnungen spanischer Meister, pl. 2 1 . See above, p. 1 8 1 . Diccionario, I, 93. See below, p. 198. Sánchez Cantón, Fuentes literarias V ( 1 9 4 1 ) , 42.

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Jerusalem situated at Consuegra, 31 and the ways in which Barroso is designated in the documents seem conclusive for establishing Alcázar de San Juan as his native place. In the entries of the year 1585 in the book of accounts of the cathedral of Toledo having to do with his evaluation of others' paintings,32 he is denominated in one instance a citizen of Alcázar and in another of Consuegra (i.e., of Alcázar de Consuegra) ; in the contract of 1587 for his own paintings in the Escorial 3 3 his permanent residence is actually called Alcázar de Consuegra (i.e., Alcázar de San Juan) ; and in his will he dubs the town indiscriminately once Alcázar de Consuegra and twice simply Alcázar, stipulating that his remains be interred eventually there in the church of S. Francisco.34 As Zarco Cuevas 35 points out, he would naturally choose the town of his birth for his burial-place; and the great probability is that he continued there to dwell and that Ceán Bermúdez misinterpreted the Consuegra of the Toledo document as the municipality of Consuegra instead of Alcázar de Consuegra. For the tutelage of many painters of the period we have only indirect evidence or the surmises of later writers, but for Barroso's study under Gaspar Becerra we possess his own statement as reported to the distinguished historian of the Hieronymite Order and of the Escorial, José de Sigiienza, 36 who, during the artist's activity in the institution became a close friend and an admirer of his abilities. Since Barroso's placid style is different from Becerra's somewhat perturbed energy, he evidently learned little from his master except the rudiments of painting and a knowledge of the modes of the Italian Renaissance, for José de Sigiienza categorically states that Barrosa had never visited Italy, thus unconsciously warning against assuming a sojourn in the sister peninsula merely because Spanish artists of the period exhibit an Italianate manner and showing us that they could acquire such a manner from the elements of Italianism thoroughly established in their own country. Although we are not informed of any professional activity of Barroso before as late as 1585, he must have produced already im31 See the article on Alcázar de San Juan in Espasa Calpe's Enciclofedia universal ilustrada., Barcelona, IV ( 1 9 0 7 ) , p. 262. 32 See below, p. 197. 33 See below, p. 197. 34 Zarco Cuevas, Pintores españoles, pp. 7 0 - 7 1 . 35 Ibid., p. 53, η. ι. 36 Historia de la Orden de San Jerónimo, edition of Madrid, II ( 1 9 0 9 ) , 547.

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portant works in order to have gained such renown as to be chosen with Hernando de Avila to evaluate frescoes by Luis de Velasco in the cloister of the cathedral of Toledo, the financial accounts of which record payment to him on January 15 of this year for the appraisement.37 No document has been published that substantiates the statement of Ceán Bermúdez that at this time Barroso did an Annunciation over the lateral altar at the left in the church of the Hospital de Afuera at Toledo; and in any case no such painting exists in the edifice. The dates of the contract and emoluments to him for his two extant triptychs in the corner of the cloister of the Escorial next to the entry of the Portería stretch from April 6, 1587, to April 10, 1590, but these documents include reference also to other works of his in the edifice, four frescoes which, as in the corresponding commission of Luis de Carvajal, 38 flanked the triptychs and only two of which are preserved, and in the coro of the church figures of the Saviour and of the Virgin are spaced above two doors, which are supposed to have been lost but which, as we shall find, are just conceivably identical with panels in the Hermitage at Leningrad. During his employment in the Escorial he acted, in conformity with the general practice of artists at the time, as a jack of all trades, doing eleven drawings for subjects to be represented in gold on vestments 39 and restoring and cleaning works of others,40 especially those of E l Mudo. It is possible that the sketches for the ornamentation of vestments are preserved in two books of drawings in the Escorial that have never been published. On November 9, 1589, he gave to his brother power of attorney to collect payments for him 41 in a document where he already calls himself painter to the king, although the royal order 42 bestowing the honor upon him is dated a few days later on the fifteenth of the month. In this order he is denominated also as an architect, and his exercise of this profession is corroborated by Sigüenza,43 who shows us that Barroso was possessed of the versatile humanism of the Renaissance by de37

Documentos de la catedral de Toledo, coUeccionados for D. Manuel R. Zarco del Valle, Madrid, II ( 1 9 1 6 ) , 2 2 3 - 2 2 5 . 38 See below, p. 200. 39 Zarco Cuevas, Pintores españoles, pp. 65—66. 40 Ibid., p. 72. 41 Ibid., p. 66. 42 Ibid., p. 69, and E. Llaguno y Amírola, Noticias de los arquitectos, II ( 1 8 2 9 ) , 263. 43 See above, p. 196.

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daring him likewise adept in perspective, music, Latin, modern languages, and perhaps ancient Greek. T h e archives of the Escorial definitely establish that he died on September 17, 1590, having made his will six days previously. T h e Murcian man of letters and scholar of the seventeenth century, Francisco de Cascales, states 44 that Barroso had some connection with a work far distant from the ordinary region of his activity, the retable over the high altar of the church of the monastery of San Ginés de la Jara, near Cartagena, but from the writer's language it is difficult to tell whether he means that the master did all the paintings or, as the words have been usually interpreted, only two at the top of the structure depicting Christ and the Virgin accompanied by angels. Since neither the church nor the retable is extant, the whole matter becomes largely an academic question ; and yet, if Cascales was rightly informed and referred to the complete retable, we should be faced with the extraordinary fact of such a diffusion of Barroso's fame that he would have been summoned to a spot in a remote corner of the peninsula, since he could not have shipped the many panels of so large a structure from his home in Castile. H a d such an unusual journey truly taken place, Ceán Bermúdez and the other Spanish writers upon art would have known of it and capitalized it in their accounts of him ; and Baquero Almansa 45 is probably right in conjecturing that only the Christ and the Virgin were Barroso's work and that they had been acquired in Castile by a traveller from the southeast, brought to San Ginés, and inserted in the altarpiece. T h e y can scarcely have been the two pictures executed by Barroso for the coro of the Escorial, in which the figures are not described as in the midst of angels. T h e two triptychs in the Escorial enshrine events in the N e w Testament immediately succeeding the Resurrection and are formed like the pair by Carvajal in the cloister. In one of them, when the wings are open, we see in the centre the Ascension (Fig. 80) and in the lateral compartments two appearances of Christ during the forty days after the Resurrection, at the left what is probably meant as the one described in the first verses of the Acts of the Apostles and 4 4 Since the original book is inaccessible to me, I refer to the apposite passage as quoted by A . Baquero Almansa, Catálogo de los profesores de las bellas artes murcianos, Murcia, 1 9 1 3 , pp. 64—65. Vinaza (Adiciones, II, 49) was cognizant of the statement of Cascales, although he misspells Jara as Hara. 45 Of. cit.

Fig. 8O. MIGUEL BARROSO. T R I P T Y C H OF T H E ASCENSION. CLOISTER, SAN LORENZO DEL ESCORIAL

{Photo. Mas)

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at the right the manifestation of Himself "to above five hundred brethren at once" ( I Corinthians, X V , 6). T h e central theme of the other opened triptych is Pentecost (Fig. 81), flanked at the right side by the scene of St. Peter delivering his great sermon on the first Whitsunday and at the left by a representation of this Apostle and St. John laying their hands upon the Samaritans in order to impart to them the H o l y Ghost. In the case of each triptych as in the examples by Carvajal, a replica of the principal interior compartment is spread over the wings, so that the spectator may enjoy its contemplation even when the shutters are closed. T w o of the four frescoes that he did to accompany the triptychs remain to us, narrow compositions between the architectural members of the cloister and, according to the curious repetitive practice on the exteriors of the actual triptychs, displaying, with only slight variations, the same scenes as the interiors of the wings that frame the Ascension. T h e gentle styles of Barroso and Carvajal are so analogous that it is difficult but important to single out the shades of difference. T o begin with, we cannot easily escape the conclusion that he had fallen somewhat under the spell of his contemporary, Veronese. Since he has definitely informed us that he had not visited Italy, we are compelled to believe that he had seen and admired works of the great Venetian which had reached Spain, if we are right at all in postulating the influence. Now a series of works by Veronese are listed in the Escorial by the Hieronymite historian and describer of the institution, José de Sigiienza, publishing his book Historia primitiva y exacta, del monasterio del Escorial46 in 1600. One of these, an Annunciation, still in the monastery, is dated 1583, too late for Barroso to have studied it; but another, Cain and his family going into exile (mistaken by Sigiienza for Abraham with his wife and child), now in the Prado, as well as the others, which have disappeared from knowledge, might conceivably have been in the Escorial while Barroso was laboring there. A St. Agatha, which also has passed to the Prado, was already understood by Sigiienza to have been executed by Veronese's son, Carlotto, and so would have been acquired after Barroso's decease; but, since it is not impossible that some pictures by Veronese himself reached the Escorial considerably earlier, we do not necessarily have to explain the resemblances in the Spaniard to the Italian by the theory of independent but parallel de46

Edition of Madrid, i 8 8 i , p. 483.

FIG. 8I. MIGUEL BARROSO. T R I P T Y C H OF T H E PENTECOST. CLOISTER, SAN LORENZO DEL ESCORIAL {Photo. Mas)

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velopment. T h e mother with the child in the foreground of St. Peter's audience and the two maidens in the scene in Samaria seem to reflect Veronese's glorious embodiments of femininity. H e is fond also of another favorite type of Paolo, a young man with moustache, slight beard, and luxuriant hair, as, for instance, in the St. John at Samaria and again at the right of the Virgin in the Pentecost. Like Veronese, furthermore, he is prone to set his scenes in solemn architecture, emphasizing it and making it more extensive than Carvajal. T o the stress upon architecture Barroso might have been stimulated by the works that the Italian, Romulo Cincinnato, was doing in the Escorial. A pyramid very like that in the background of St. Peter's sermon occurs in the fresco of St. Sixtus led to martyrdom, at least finished by Romulo, on the coro of the church, a painting done just before we have record of Barroso's employment in the institution} and the façade of the temple in front of which Sts. Peter and John lay their hands upon the Samarians resembles the Italian's representation of Christ and the woman taken in adultery on the wing of a triptych in the monastery executed by him while, or immediately prior to the period when, the Spaniard was carrying out his commissions. T h e austere grandeur of Barroso's settings, in the manner of Juan de Herrera and of the Escorial, corroborates the esteem in which he was held as an architect by Philip I I . T h e pictures that I have mentioned above as not impossibly identical with the figures of Christ and the Virgin done by Barroso for the coro of the Escorial are two half-lengths in the Hermitage, Leningrad, which, since they are not accompanied by angels, cannot logically be thought the same as the pair reported to have embodied his craft in the monastery of San Ginés de la Jara. 47 O f the small size 48 to have fitted into the spaces over doors where the document tells us they were set, the Saviour is still attached to the original panel, but the Virgin has been transferred to cloth. T h e painters of the H i g h Renaissance in the school of Toledo and Madrid, to which the pictures obviously belong, so resemble one another for the most part that it is a ticklish business to attribute works like these consisting merely of two personages, whose representation, moreover, had become rather traditional and uniform. T h e Catalogue of the Hermitage ascribes them to Bias del Prado, but Barroso seems a more likely 47 48

See above, p. 198. T h e dimensions are 68 centimetres in height by 52 in width.

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candidate than he or even than Carvajal, who is Miguel's closest artistic relative, or indeed than any other member of the coterie. T h e Virgin does not accord precisely with the type of woman in which Barroso recalls Veronese, but he does not confine himself to this type, as Our L a d y in the Pentecost reveals. T h e most persuasive factor for the attribution is the head of Christ, incorporating the kind of heavily moustached and light-bearded young man with abundant hair whom I have indicated as very characteristic of our master. T h e Redeemer does not exhibit the stray lock or locks that Barroso often allows to fall upon the masculine brow, but the painter by no means follows the practice without exception. In the Hermitage also there is a painting 49 of St. Andrew once actually assigned to Barroso, according to Von L o g a by an old tradition, but in the Catalogue of 1912 ascribed to Juan de Juanes. I descry nothing in the picture to justify the latter attribution, nor is it easy to find any specific links with Barroso ; and as a matter of fact, in the midst of the general unity of style in Spanish painting of the H i g h Renaissance, a single figure of an old, bearded man like this against a simple background obtrudes an almost insoluble problem of connoisseurship.

3.

BLAS DEL PRADO

It was only on the authority of such older writers on Spanish art as Palomino and Ceán Bermúdez that the birthplace of Bias del Prado is regularly set down as Toledo, a natural surmise, however, since he was a leading figure in the city's school. Nor is the date commonly stated for his birth, 1545, derived from any known documents, and it is indeed passing strange that, if he first saw the light thus early, he should not be definitely recorded as active until the eighties of the sixteenth century. Although Ceán makes him a pupil of Francisco de Comontes, who died in 1565, he shows a closer stylistic relationship with another painter active at Toledo, Juan Correa de Vivar, who cannot be proved to have survived after 1 5 6 1 ; but Bias may have learned what he knew of the art of these masters by merely examining the works that they had left, without undergoing their personal tutelage. 4 9 T r a n s f e r r e d f r o m wood to canvas: the dimensions are 79 centimetres in height by 56 in width.

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The first sure date in his life does not occur before January 20, 1583, when in his own name and that of Luis de Velasco (whom the documents reveal to have been the main person in the undertaking) he names appraisers for three paintings in black and white, depicting scenes from the story of St. Leocadia, and for ten figures of the color of bronze in niches that were to be executed by the two masters in collaboration for decorating the arch that was to be constructed for the ceremony of the reception at Toledo of St. Leocadia's relics. The authorities were indeed forehanded in ordering these works, since the hallowed virgin's body did not actually arrive until four years later, on April 26, 1587, and the other documents referring to those (lost) achievements of Bias del Prado and Luis de Velasco are not dated prior to February and March of this year and show that the paintings had then been completed.50 The archives prove, furthermore, that Bias alone by 1587 had done two other works for the arch that are fortunately preserved in the Museo de Sta. Cruz at Toledo, a portrait of Philip I P s daughter, Isabella Clara Eugenia, and, united in a single painting, portraits of the future Philip I I I as a lad of nine years and his aunt, the sister of Philip I I , Mary, who after the death in 1576 of her husband, the emperor Maximilian I I of Germany returned to Spain, august personages introduced on the arch because they had arranged to attend the solemnities for St. Leocadia. 51 From March 1 1 , 1586, to March 2, 1592, we have documentary references to Bias's employment in the Sala Capitular of the cathedral, when he restored the frescoes by Juan de Borgoña and did some or all the escutcheons and inscriptions of the frieze of archbishops of Toledo, as well as repairs upon the actual figures of the prelates.52 T o his col50 Datos documentales inéditos fara la historia ¿el arte español, published by the Centro de Estudios Históricos, Madrid, II, Documentos de la catedral de Toledo, coleccionados for D. Manuel R. Zarco del Valle, 1 9 1 6 . In the first volume of this publication, Notas del archivo de la catedral de Toledo, redactadas sistemáticamente, en el siglo XVIII, for el canónigo-obrero Don Francisco Pérez Sedano ( 1 9 1 4 ) , 65, it is stated that in 1558 the sculptor and painter, Nicolás de Vergara the elder, was paid a small sum for his preliminary efforts in connection with a picture for the cathedral that was never carried out, that his son, Nicolas the younger, interested himself in the sketches made by the father for the work, and that Bias del Prado was one of the appraisers of the sketches' value; but, since the picture was not ordered until 1564, the year 1558 must be a misprint, and, moreover, inasmuch as it is not specified when, after 1564 and perhaps subsequent to his parent's death in 1574, the son took up the matter of the sketches, we have no means of arriving at a possibly earlier record of Bias than his labors on the arch. 51 Vol. I of the Datos documentales, 98-99, and II, part 2, 248-249. 52 Ibid., I, 56-57 and 1 2 7 , and II, part 2, 237 and 3 0 1 ; and the other book by Manuel R. Zarco del Valle, Documentos inéditos fara la historia de las bellas artes en

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laboration with Luis de Carvajal in 1591 in now lost paintings for the church of the Mínimos at Toledo, we 53 have had occasion to refer. H e acquired such esteem with the ecclesiasts that on July 27, 1590, he was given the title of painter of the cathedral, an honor already bestowed on Luis de Velasco, but in May, 1593, only a part of his April salary in this office was entered in the book of accounts because he was declared to be absent from Spain.54 It must have been, therefore, at this time that, sent by Philip I I , he made his famous visit to the court of the Sultan of Morocco who had some work for a painter to do and is said to have been particularly gratified with a portrait of his daughter which Bias executed. We cannot doubt that the journey took place, since it is mentioned by several writers 55 who, living in the immediately succeeding years of the first half of the seventeenth century, would have been accurately informed: for instance, Pacheco in his Arte de la fin tur a 56 says that he saw paintings of fruit by Bias when, evidently stopping at Seville, he was carrying them on his way to Africa. The accounts of the trip state that eventually he returned to Spain, having acquired such an addiction to Moorish habits of life as to indicate that he prolonged his foreign sojourn. It was probably because of his representations of fruit for the Sultan that Charles Sterling, 57 following a first58 but eventually renounced 59 opinion of Julio Cavestany, wrongly equated Bias del Prado with his contemporary at Granada, the painter of still life, Blas de Ledesma. As a matter of fact, there are no details in Bias del Prado's known works to indicate that still life had a special interest for him. A document of March 2 1 , 1600, 60 telling of the negotiations at Madrid in connection with a jewel that he had bought, describes him as a painter of Toledo and declares that he was at the point of death España, in Colección de documentos inéditos para la historia de España, L V ( 1 8 7 0 ) , 614—617. See also my vol. I X , p. i 8 i , n. 3, and p. 194. 53 P. 1 8 1 . 54 Datos documentales, I, 57, 1 2 7 , and 1 3 2 . 55 For these writers, see, under the entry Bias del Prado, the indices of vol. II of Sánchez Cantón's Fuentes literarias. 56 In Sánchez Canton, of. cit., I I , 185. 57 Catalogue of the exhibition at Paris in 1952, La nature morte de l'antiquité à nos jours, pp. 36-38, and Still Life Painting, Paris, 1959, pp. 69-70. 58 Catàlogo de la exfosición de floreros y bodigones, Madrid, 1940, p. 67. 59 Article on Blas de Ledesma in Arte español, X I V ( 1 9 4 3 ) , tercer trimestre, pp.

16-18.

60 E. Garcia Chico, Documentos Valladolid, I I I ( 1 9 4 6 ) , 379.

para el estudio del arte en Castilla,

Pintores,

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when consulted on the matter; and, although we are not informed of the actual year of his decease, he certainly was no longer alive on March 12, 1607, when his heirs are mentioned in the will of a Christóbal de Toledo. 61 In his Discursos fracticables del nobilísimo arte de la f intura,6î finished between 1673 and 1682, Jusepe Martinez, whether disposing of sources unknown to others or merely making a good story, alleges Bias del Prado to have been twice in Africa and to be reported to have there died; and Viñaza,63 trusting in Martinez's accuracy, supposes the first visit to have occurred about 1580 before the painter's recorded activity at Toledo. The sure foundation upon which we must rear the edifice of our estimate of Bias's attainments is unfortunately slight, consisting merely of a painting in the Prado, authenticated by an accompanying inscription, and of the documented portraits for the arch of St. Leocadia. There is no reason to doubt that the inscription is contemporary with the painting, especially since it records the pious sentiments of the donor, or that in meaning Bias del Prado as the artist it embodies anything else than the truth. Inasmuch as the picture comprises a number of different sorts of figures, it supplies a rather broad outlook upon the master's style, but the two works from the arch scarcely amplify our conception, because they include little more than the likenesses and because, moreover, we know sketches for the heads to have been provided by Alonso Sánchez Coello. It has been usual to regard as thoroughly established creations of Bias del Prado the paintings for the chapel of S. Bias in the cloister of the cathedral of Toledo, but the attribution constitutes one of the many cases in which the surmise of an authority in the past has been set down by his successors as a definite fact. Ponz 64 stated that the paintings, which are undocumented, merely seemed to him achievements of Bias del Prado, and yet Ceán Bermúdez and the others ever since have gone a step further and placed them in the group of his unquestioned productions. Nevertheless, though Ponz confused in general the manners of Bias del Prado and Luis de Velasco, I am disposed to believe, on internal evidence, that, as if by divination, he rightly hit upon the former rather than the latter in ascribing the altarpieces of the chapel of S. 61

Rafael Ramirez de Arellano, Catálogo de artífices que trabajaron en Toledo, 1920, p. 229. 62 See the extracts in Sánchez Canton's Fuentes literarias., III, 74—75. 63 Adiciones, III, 274. 64 Viaje de Esfaña, Madrid, 1772, tomo I, carta II, 81.

Toledo,

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Bias. W e shall find also that we must rely only on stylistic proof when weighing the attributions of other paintings and also of drawings to our master. T h e picture in the Prado (Fig. 82) not only provides us with our basic ideas of Bias's artistic personality but possesses the adventitious interests of being a commission from the painter's Toledan contemporary, the man of letters to whose book, Flos sanctorum, I have so often in my volumes been obliged to resort in problems of hagiography, Alonso de Villegas Selvago. Under an outspread curtain, the Virgin, holding the Child, is seated upon a high dais, over one molding of which, to her right, there leans St. Joseph. T h e three figures below are depicted in half-length, at the right the donor presented by his name-saint, Ildefonso, in order to receive the divine benediction, and at the left St. John Evangelist, holding his frequent emblem, the poisoned cup, but conceived as an old man and not, in the much commoner way, as still a youth. T h e Latin inscription at the bottom of the canvas may be translated, " T o his patrons, Blessed Mary, John Evangelist, and Ildefonso, Master Alonso de Villegas in the year 1589 dedicates this painting, which was executed by Bias del Prado." 65 There is a likelihood that the picture may be the one that Ponz 66 saw in the church of S. Juan Bautista at Toledo and registers as an achievement of Bias, describing it as a representation of "Our Lady with St. Joseph, the Child, St. John Evangelist, etc.," for he goes on to say that it was taken to Madrid, and the Catalogues of the Prado state it was in the Royal Palace, Madrid, in 1818. T h e "etc." of Ponz would comprise the portrait and St. Ildefonso. His qualities practically compel us to postulate study to Italy, and, if prior to this he had had a Spanish training, we have already seen that the works of Correa are more likely to have inspired him than those of Francisco de Comontes, who is Ceán's candidate for his teacher, since Bias shares the former's placid breadth rather than the latter's tendencies to mannerism. I found occasion in volume I X 67 to touch upon a certain kinship between Correa and Fra Bartolommeo, and Mayer is entirely right in asserting this Italian's influence upon Bias del Prado. T h e death of Fra Bartolommeo had taken place in 65 In the datives, Mariae and Evangelistae, the simple e, as often at the time, is substituted f o r ae; fictore Biasio del Prado constitutes, of course, an ablative absolute; dedicat is abbreviated to D j and the word for year strangely appears in Spanish, año. 66 Viaje de España, Madrid, 1772, tomo I, carta IV, 24. 67 P. 3 1 1 .

FIG. 82. BLAS D E L PRADO. MADONNA A N D SAINTS. PRADO MUSEUM, MADRID {Photo. Mas)

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1 5 1 7 , but our master must have admired and assiduously scrutinized the pictorial legacy that he had bequeathed to Italy, perhaps because his own temperament and the previous history of the Toledan school under Juan de Borgoña and Correa were already attuned to the Florentine's serene modes. Like his Italian predecessor, Bias sought monumentality and obtained it through the analogous means of tranquil forms clad in ample, sweeping, and uncomplicated draperies, of great, simple, symmetrical compositions, and of solemn architectural setting. Fra Bartolommeo also prefers terraced thrones such as that upon which Bias has seated the Virgin, and in order to unite the levels of a painting, he is fond of depicting the Child as gesturing to the persons below in exactly the way in which the young Saviour blesses Alonso de Villegas. Even the Spaniard's types of human beings resemble the Italian's, especially the bearded old men not only in features but also in chiaroscuro and sfumatezza. Indeed in the notes that I first took before the original, I find set down my impression that it might be mistaken for an Italian creation, were it not for the Iberian features of the portrait. Although Bias cannot vie with the best Italian craft of the period, he is a thoroughly competent exponent of his profession; and the lack of warmth which troubles Mayer results perhaps from a purposed restraint in accord with the severity that he thought necessary to his monumental aims and from a conscious abjuration of the peculiarity by which the mannerists pique our interest. The unaffected but incisive and forceful likeness of the donor demonstrates that Bias, like many another mannerist, when he came to portraiture, abandoned the idiosyncrasies of the style and revealed unexpected power in forthright, direct presentation of an individuality. The Madonna is said by Mayer to be based upon a work of Girolamo Muziano, engraved by Villamena, but although Bias must have been conversant with the achievements of many Italians and Spaniards of the Cinquecento, it is the relationship to Fra Bartolommeo that is most tangible. In inventories of possessions of Philip I I I drawn up in 1607 68 and 1621, 6 9 there is mention of a picture, now lost, by Bias representing Philip I I offering his son to an angel and probably, as Vinaza 70 believed, suggested by Titian's well-known, similar composi68

José M . Florit, "Inventario de los cuadros y objetos de arte," Boletín Sociedad Esfañola de Excursiones, X I V ( 1 9 0 6 ) , 156. 69 Vinaza, Adiciones, III, 2 7 5 . 70 Ibid.

de la

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tion in the Prado Museum, but it is hard to descry in the Spaniard's soberly colored productions any general Venetian influence of significance. T h e documented monochrome paintings on canvas from the arch of St. Leocadia, now in the Museo de Sta. Cruz, Toledo, add little or nothing to our understanding of Blas del Prado in the field of portraiture or in other respects, since Coello furnished the sketches for the heads 71 and since the canvases comprise only the life-sized figures of the child who was to be Philip I I I with his aunt (Fig. 83), and his sister. T h e great mantle in which he has clad the aunt, the dowager German empress, afforded him an opportunity for attaining monumentality through one of his customary ways, a wide expanse of smooth drapery. T h e works in the cloistral chapel of S. Bias in the cathedral of Toledo that on stylistic grounds may be ascribed to Bias del Prado comprise: in the main altar, in the architectural spaces about the central statue of the Virgin, a representation of the chapel's patron, St. Blaise, surrounded by further canonized dignitaries, and in other sections of the monument figures of the four Evangelists j and above each of the lateral altars, a retable of a single picture, in one instance, the Purification (Fig. 84) and in the other St. Anthony Abbot standing in the midst of members of his Order, the Antonines. T h e general style obviously lies very close to that of the pictures that we have already assigned to Bias del Prado, and many specific factors imply an identity of authorship. T h e aged, bearded types in the painting commissioned by Alonso de Villegas are practically repeated a number of times in the productions for the S. Bias chapel; and the eyes have precisely the stare with which our master evidently modified the sketches given him by Coello for the portraits on the arch. W e shall find, moreover, that the drawing most credibly attributed to him shows in a St. Francis a countenance virtually identical with the faces of two younger monks at St. Anthony's left. T h e embellishments of the chapel of S. Bias are not likely to enhance our appreciation of the painter but reveal him as no more than a sound supplier of the demands of the trade in religious art. T h e solidly realized, peaceful, broadly draped forms are grouped together in the simplest and most symmetrical compositions, which merely encircle the principal theme with the other actors in a compactness 71

Datos documentales.,

I (1914), 99.

Fig. 83. BLAS DEL PRADO. PHILIP III AND MARY, DOWAGER EMPRESS OF GERMANY. MUSEO DE STA. CRUZ, TOLEDO {Photo.

Mas)

FIG. 84. BLAS DEL PRADO. PURIFICATION. CATHEDRAL, TOLEDO {Photo. Mas)

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that makes for the master's desired monumentality. As if he felt the dullness, he sought to alleviate it in the Purification by a false note entirely incongruous with the solemnity that he otherwise spreads over the theme, since in the very foreground he conspicuously features a handmaid of the Virgin seeking to recapture one of the doves which has escaped. In the Pafers (No. I , June 1 , 1 9 5 3 ) of the Museum at Norfolk, Virginia, I have ascribed with conviction on internal evidence to Bias del Prado an Epiphany, manifestly once the centre of an otherwise lost triptych and in the employment of this form for altarpieces one of his few concessions to Flemish usages ( F i g . 85). T h e intimate affinity to Correa's renderings of the theme once more demonstrates how deeprooted were Bias's origins in the previous evolution of the school of Toledo and suggests that the Norfolk panel falls early in his career. Generally, and, I believe, rightly, there is credited to Bias del Prado a painting in the Academia de San Fernando at Madrid, as agreeable as the donation of Alonso de Villegas and depicting Sts. Francis and Anthony of Padua presenting a family to the Madonna and (clothed) Child enthroned upon a ruin (a symbol of the collapsed elder dispensation?) in the midst of angels and cloud-banks ( F i g . 86). T h e family consists of a kneeling gentleman in early middle life, his wife, 72 and son, who is a child about six years of age, under the protection of his guardian angel. Anyone who has an intimate acquaintance with Bias's achievements senses instinctively and yet confidently that once again he is in contact with the master, but concrete proof is not lacking. In the Virgin he has aimed at nobility more than at the winsomeness of her representation in the picture in the Prado, and he has given her a narrower face 5 but he repeats the right arm and hand, as well as the swelling piece of drapery at her side. T h e raptly expressive countenance of St. Anthony of Padua should be compared with that of St. Ildefonso, and the family's effigies surprise us with precisely the same kind of simple but effectual portraiture as the Alonso de Villegas. T h e two Franciscan saints gesticulate as expressively with their hands as Anthony Abbot and his companions in the lateral retable of the chapel of S. Bias. It will subsequently appear also that the picture in the Academia and certain drawings mutually confirm one another in 72 Von Loga (Die Malerei in Spanien, Berlin, 1923, p. 1 1 0 ) saw long ago in the Vindel Collection, Madrid, a portrait that he considered to represent the same lady, but he does not state whether he believed Bias to be the author.

Fig. 85. BLAS DEL PRADO. EPIPHANY. MUSEUM, NORFOLK, VIRGINIA

FIG. 86. BLAS DEL PRADO. MADONNA AND SAINTS WITH DONORS. ACADEMIA DE SAN FERNANDO, MADRID (Photo.

Mas)

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the matter of attribution to Bias del Prado. Since José Amador de los Ríos 73 states that some of the paintings in the church of S. Juan Bautista at Toledo by Bias and other artists were acquired by the Academia de San Fernando, we may reasonably assume that the work with which we are now concerned may have been one of the lot, and we must not forget that such perhaps was the provenience 74 of the altarpiece which Alonso de Villegas ordered. No very tangible evidence substantiates the claims of Bias del Prado to a Deposition, painted on cloth, that from the sacristy of the church of S. Pedro, Madrid, reached in 1 8 1 0 , by a strange peregrination, the alien surroundings of the cathedral of Valencia, where it survived the Spanish civil war. Generally accepted as his creation at least as early as the days of Ponz, 75 it is now at present so soiled and blackened that judgment is hampered; but an inscription placed on the picture when it was acquired by the Valencian cathedral or shortly thereafter dates it in the vicinity of 1581, 7 6 and so specific a piece of chronological information may imply that other, now unascertainable data, were at hand, corroborating Bias's authorship. With this possibility in mind and with the realization that we have no sure works of this tragic nature by him to set beside it, we do not experience too much difficulty in extracting some affiliations to his manner, however little concrete. For example, the holy woman at the left supporting Our Lord's body is not facially very different from the two maidens beside the Virgin in the Purification in the cathedral of Toledo, and she looks out of the painting at us in the same way as one of these maidens and as the Madonna herself and the guardian angel in the altarpiece in the Academia de San Fernando. The erect, sorrowing Mother (at the right) reiterates the upward gaze of emotional expressiveness of such figures as the St. Ildefonso protecting Alonso de Villegas, and the Joseph of Arimathaea (or Nicodemus?) recalls one of Bias's regular types for bearded old men. We must definitely reject Von Loga's 77 tentative attribution to Bias of the painting of the Madonna, Child, St. Anne, and St. Cajetan of Thienna, No. 239 of the Harrach Gallery, Vienna, and maintain the usual ascription to the Italian, Fabrizio Santafede. 73

Toledo fintoresca, Madrid, 1845, Ρ· 163· See above, p. 207. 75 Viaje de Esfaña, Madrid, 177 2 > tomo I, carta II, 8 ι , η. ι 76 Teodoro Llórente, Valencia (in the series, Esfaña, sus monumentos y I (Barcelona, 1 8 8 7 - 1 8 8 9 ) , 606. 77 Die M aieri in Sfanien, p. 110. 74

artes),

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The attribution of drawings to Bias del Prado rests on stylistic and circumstantial evidence rather than on the accompanying inscriptions of his name on some of them, which seem late additions and not his own signatures. No less than forty-three were ascribed to him by Santarelli 78 in the vast collection of drawings with which he enriched the Uffizi at Florence ; but Angulo, 79 who has examined them, says that not all really belong to our Spaniard, and he definitely and logically transfers to Luis de Velasco the sketch for the painting of Nuestra Señora de Gracia and saints that this artist did for a corner of the cloister of the cathedral at Toledo. In his authoritative work, Dibujos españoles,80 Sánchez Cantón publishes no more than three drawings at Bias's achievements, but I take it that this does not necessarily imply his rejection of all the others. Of the triad, the one most likely to embody his handicraft was formerly in the collection of examples of graphic art in the Instituto de Jovellanos at Gijón and represents St. Francis kneeling in ecstasy (receiving the stigmata?) as well as, on the same sheet, and in the same medium of a red pencil, a sketch for a piece of drapery. I have already alluded to the figure's facial similarity to a pair of St. Anthony's companions in a lateral retable of the chapel of S. Bias in the cathedral of Toledo, and he should be compared also with the St. Anthony of Padua in the altarpiece in the Academia de San Fernando. The circumstantial evidence is that Ceán Bermúdez, 81 who probably in such a case would have more than a mere tradition of authorship to go upon, boasts of a red chalk drawing of St. Francis by Bias del Prado in his own possession, which there is no reason for doubting is the sheet formerly at Gijón. Executed with more true feeling for beauty of person and spirit than Bias ordinarily infuses into his productions, the drawing, if he is indeed its creator, should be placed among his most memorable bequests to us. Greater charm than he usually exerts upon his large paintings attaches likewise to one of the Uffizi examples,82 done with pen and representing a young woman (Fig. 87) holding a bird on her hand. Sánchez Cantón surmises that it may be a study for one of the Virgin's attendants in a lost Purification, and, if in the version of the theme 78 Catálogo della raccota di disegni autografi donata dal Prof. E. Santarelli alla R. Galleria di Firenze, Florence, 1870, p. 697. 79 Archivo esfañol de arte y arqueología, III ( 1 9 2 7 ) , 346. 80 Vol. II ( 1 9 3 0 ) , pis. CXLV-CLXVII. 81 Diccionario, IV, ι ι 8 . 82 No. 14 of Santarelli^ list.

Fig. 87. BLAS DEL PRADO. YOUNG WOMAN HOLDING A BIRD. UFFIZI, FLORENCE {Photo.

Gernsheim)

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in the cathedral of Toledo he could show such a maiden chasing an elusive dove, there is no reason that in another rendering he should not have introduced the novelty of the girl displaying the bird on her hand rather than in the customary basket. The actual stylistic evidence does not appear to me absolutely sufficient for a categorical attribution to Bias del Prado, when we remember the several other Spanish artists of the time working in very much the same modes, and the same may be said of the third drawing included by Sánchez Cantón, a sheet in the Uffizi in the medium of pen and wash and entitled by the Spanish critic, Prophecy of the Peaceful Government of Philip I I I , since, probably a study for a non-extant painting, it represents the young prince and future sovereign enthroned and receiving the gifts of symbolical figures, Commerce who offers a ship, Agriculture with the fruits of the earth, an allegorical lady accompanied by a cow as a token of the raising of livestock, and an American Indian with the produce of the New World. The figure with the cow recalls the St. Ildefonso of Alonso de Villegas's painting, but we must not forget that a drawing by Luis de Velasco, somewhat similar in composition and done for an existing picture, had hitherto been mistakenly placed under Bias del Prado's name.®3 Nevertheless, Sánchez Cantón 84 wonders whether a separate sketch of angels, in the Boix Collection, Madrid, only for the upper part of the existing picture may not after all accord with the old attribution to Bias, since its technique is not that of Velasco's study for the whole bit of the prophecy of Philip I l l ' s reign, and whether therefore our master at the beginning may not have had something to do with the project which was eventually carried out by Luis. A considerable number of the other drawings in the Uffizi attributed by Santarelli to Bias del Prado have been photographed by Mr. Walter Gernsheim of London, but of these, so far as I can judge from the reproductions, there are few that with anything like conviction I should be willing to accept as possibly, though far from certainly, by his hand. Among several representations of the Annunciation in the series, the one in question, done in pen and ink, shows Gabriel (at the right) on a bank of clouds pointing upward with a finger and accompanied by a futto, and the drawing is made on a sheet containing in the upper background dimly outlined sketches of 8

3 See above, p. 217. Dibujos españoles, II, pl. CXLIV.

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human forms in black chalk. T h e altarpiece in the Academia de San Fernando would help somewhat, by reason of its compositional resemblance, to authenticate a drawing in which the Madonna and Child are adored by Sts. L u k e (painting her), Anthony Abbot, and Catherine, all conceived as exalted to the cloud-strewn heaven; but the forms are somewhat frail for Bias del Prado. On a single sheet, the grief-stricken Virgin reminds us vaguely of the mode in which she is depicted in the Deposition of the cathedral of Valencia, and the St. Anthony Abbot has a type of head reconcilable with his conceptions of old men. A n Anna· selbdritt, with both Mary and her mother standing, exhibits in the former's countenance, pose, and drapery a not entirely negligible analogy to the girl with the bird, also in the Uffizi, in which we have not been unwilling to detect Bias's draughtsmanship.

4.

H E R N A N D O DE A V I L A

T h e staidness of the school of Toledo in contrast to the emotional intensity, manneristic exaggerations, and inventive precocity of the production that centered at Valladolid degenerates with Hernando de Avila almost into a fault, making of him little more than a dull classicist. Indeed it is probable that, if the lost book that he composed is ever discovered, he will prove, like Vasari, more significant as an historian of art than as one of its exponents. W e know the book, entitled El arte de la pintura, only through a brief notice that a contemporary of Hernando's, also a writer on aesthetic themes, Diego de Villalta, included in his own volume of 1590, De las estatuas antiguas, where he states that it contained discussions of a series of eminent Spanish painters of the time and immediate past, as well as lists of their works, and extols it as "very curious and worthy of being esteemed." In his great publication, Fuentas literarias -para la historia del arte esfañol,8s Sánchez Cantón analyzes what information we possess about Hernando's book, pointing out how superlatively important its contents would be to us as the witness of one who lived at the same period as many of those of whom he wrote and just a little later than the others, so that in the earlier parts of the present series I have in several instances 86 had occasion to refer to Hernando's as yet unfound treatments of painters who have fallen within our cognizance. 85

Madrid, I (1923),

86

B e g i n n i n g · w i t h v o l u m e I X , consult the indices u n d e r the e n t r y " A v i l a ,

nando de."

295—304. Her-

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By the pictorial profession Hernando came naturally, for Diego de Villalta, probably quoting the autobiography comprised in the Arte de la -pintura, tells us that he was the son of the painter Lorenzo de Avila, whose figure-style, however, still remains an absolute blank to us.87 T h e date of his birth is unascertained, but the evidence of his works perhaps shows that Ceán Bermúdez 88 is nearer to the truth than in the case of Bias del Prado when he makes Hernando a pupil of Francisco de Comontes. In any case, at the death of Comontes on February 10, 1565, he succeeded him in the office of painter-in-chief to the cathedral of Toledo, a distinction that he continued to enjoy until 1581, and beginning with 1564, when he first emerges to the light of history, and almost until his death, we find him constantly employed in every kind of task in the church that then fell to the lot of an honest craftsman — not only as a painter of retables and an illuminator but also as a gilder and polychromer, a performer in the minor arts and in small decorating jobs, a restorer, a designer of projects, an appraiser of others' works and a witness to their contracts. For our purpose we need attend only to the commissions at Toledo and elsewhere for major paintings that are preserved, and it is not incumbent upon us to itemize his other, varied activities which the interested reader may find in the general account of Hernando's life in Sánchez Cantón's above-mentioned book and by consulting the indices at the end of the Datos documentales fara la historia del arte español (concerning the cathedral of Toledo) published by the Centro de Estudios Históricos at Madrid in 1914 and 1916. 89 A t least by April 9, 1585, he had transferred his residence to Madrid, but orders at Toledo still continued to fall to his lot. T h e enviable reputation which his art enjoyed but which, so far as we can judge from his extant works, was undeserved, is illustrated by the fact that, of the unsuccessful rivals in 1592 for the commission to do the polychromy of the sculptured retable of the high altar of the cathedral of Burgos, he alone was remunerated for his travelling expenses.90 His death must have taken place between November 9, 1594, when he contracted to do a retable for the Ermita del Rosario at Colmenar Viejo 87 For our meagre acquaintance with Lorenzo de A v i l a , see my vols. I l l , p. 264, and IX, p. 389. 88Diccionario, I, 82-83. 89 For a commission of his in polychromy dated in 1585, see Cristóbal Pérez Pastor, Colección de documentos inéditos fara la historia de las bellas artes en España, Memorias de la Real Academia Esfañola, X I ( 1 9 1 4 ) , j o . 9 0 Manuel Martínez y Sanz, Historia del temflo catedral de Burgos, Burgos, 1866, pp. 48-49.

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(north of Madrid), and April 20, 1596, on which date Philip I I ratified the payment to his widow and heirs for two books of miniatures and for painted copies of the sculptured busts of the kings of Spain in the Alcázar at Segovia. 91 Since the sovereign here calls him " m y painter," it is evident that his phenomenal appreciation by his contemporaries extended to the office of a court-artist. From 1565 to 1569 Hernando de Avila was at work upon paintings for one of the two lateral retables in the Capilla de la Torre in the cathedral of Toledo, but, when in the latter part of the nineteenth century this Capilla became the repository for the treasure of the cathedral,92 the retable was transferred to the chapel of the Seminario Mayor or Conciliar in the city, and eventually the central panel of St. John Baptist was dissociated and consigned to the Seminario Menor, leaving a vacuum in the structure that was filled with a modern statue of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception. The sculptured frame of the retable, including a predella with a relief of the raising of the brazen serpent for the Israelites in the wilderness, was made by Pedro Martínez de Castañeda in 1564-1565. 9 3 Hernando de Avila's activity upon the central panel of the Baptist (Fig. 88) is recorded from February 14, 1565, to the final payment on May 4, 15685 94 and for the Epiphany in the pinnacle he was remunerated on May 10, 1569. 95 The style that emerges is a not too distinguished or original manifestation of the characteristic classicism of Europe in the sixteenth century, fused from reminiscences of Raphael, Michael Angelo, and Correggio. It is from Buonarroti's contribution to the amalgam that there perhaps derives Hernando's predilection for burly masculine physiques. The Madonna in the Epiphany recalls the women of Raphael's Roman period, but the Child, as possibly also the pretty ladies in the background, could scarcely have been painted without some knowledge of Correggio's achievements. Hernando de Avila's authorship of the paintings in the retable (Fig. 89) in the Ermita de S. Eugenio at Toledo is established by 91

For the document, see Sánchez Cantón, Los fintores de cámara de los reyes de Es-paña, Madrid, 1 9 1 6 , p. 56. 92 See my vol. IX, p. 344. 93 Pérez Sedano, Notas del archivo de la catedral de Toledo, 1 9 1 4 , p. 6 1 ; and Zarco del Valle, Documentos de la catedral de Toledo coleccionados, II ( 1 9 1 6 ) , 109—110. 94 Zarco del Valle, o f . cit., 110—112. 95 Pérez Sedano, ofκ cit., 61 and 76, and Zarco del Valle, o f . cit., II, 1 1 j and 193.

Fig. 88. HERNANDO DE AVILA. ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST. SEMINARIO MENOR, TOLEDO (Photo. Mas)

FIG. 89. HERNANDO DE AVILA. RETABLE. ERMITA DE S. EUGENIO, TOLEDO {Photo.

Gudiol)

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documents covering his employment upon the project from August 4, 1569, to the ultimate quittance on January 30, 1572. 96 For the carved framework and predella an otherwise unrecorded sculptor of the period, Diego Vázquez, received partial payment on November 21, 1571 j 97 but the statue of St. Eugenius in the principal compartment, which he probably also executed, has been lost, and a modern image of the same patron of the Ermita substituted. A t the sides of this compartment Hernando painted four scenes from the story of the more or less mythical St. Eugenius, the martyred first bishop of Toledo who is assigned to the early days of Christianity. 98 T h e panel at the lower left shows him engaged in his mission of evangelization, and at the upper right we view his decapitation. T h e opposite compartment at the upper level appears to represent a man named Hercolio recovering the body of St. Eugenius from the lake into which the pagans had cast it in northern France, where his martyrdom is said to have occurred, and the remaining panel is consigned to a representative of the solemn procession that, on November 18, 1565, attended the reception at Toledo of his body, which was given by the French king Charles I X to Philip I I , who amidst the marching devotees is depicted at the right wearing the Order of the Golden Fleece. In the retable's pinnacle, Hernando painted the stock Toledan theme of the miraculous bestowal of the chasuble upon St. Ildefonso. Neither our understanding nor our appreciation of Hernando de Avila is increased by the altarpiece in the Ermita. One gets the impression that he tended to look upon the demands of his profession as hack work and that he was not troubled by any high aesthetic ambitions or by the desire for invention. T h e scene of the translation of the relics will not suffer comparison with the stimulating representa9 6 P é r e z Sedano, of. cit., 53—54, and Z a r c o del V a l l e , of. cit., I I , 1 7 5 and 1 9 3 . T h e document o f A u g u s t 4, 1 5 6 9 , describes the E r m i t a as San Diego; but this must be t h r o u g h a slip of the pen, since the reference is obviously to the same retable, and indeed in an entry of M a y 1 7 , 1 5 7 1 , concerning· payment to H e r n a n d o , the edifice is w r o n g l y designated as of " S a n t o A n t ó n , " a l t h o u g h in the other financial records of 1 5 7 1 and 1 5 7 2 the dedication to S. E u g e n i o is r i g h t l y put d o w n . In the statement about the first p a y m e n t on A u g u s t 4, 1 5 6 9 , H e r n a n d o is made responsible f o r both the sculpture and p a i n t i n g , but the document of N o v e m b e r 2 1 , 15 7 1 , shows that he turned o v e r the f o r m e r to D i e g o V á z q u e z .

Z a r c o del V a l l e , of. cit., I I , 1 7 5 . N o t the same, of course, as the historical St. E u g e n i u s I I I , bishop o f T o l e d o f r o m 646 to 6 5 7 . F o r the l e g e n d a r y account of the m a r t y r e d bishop, see A l o n s o de V i l l e g a s S e l v a g o , Flos sanctorum, M a d r i d , I ( 1 5 9 3 ) , 6 1 7 , and f o r one of several less credulous treatments, E n r i q u e F l ó r e z , Esfaña Sagrada, I I I ( 1 7 4 7 ) ) Ι(>4> and V , 224· 97

98

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tions of such ceremonies by Pedro Nunyes at Barcelona," and the attempted likeness of Philip II betrays that he was less justified than Bias del Prado in venturing into the field of portraiture. Vol. X I I , pp. 194 and 198. Editor's note: Hernando de A v i l a received payments ( 1 5 7 5 — 1 5 7 6 ) f o r designs of the high altar of Santo Domingo el Antiguo in Toledo, but he was superseded by E l Greco whose work there comprises his first great masterpieces in Spain. For the documentation see F. de Bor j a de San Román, Documentos del Greco referentes a los cuadros de Santo Domingo el Antiguo, Archivo esfañol de arte y arqueología, Χ ( 1 9 3 + ) > 12. ΐ 3 · 99

APPENDIX

APPENDIX ADDITIONS TO

EARLIER

VOLUMES

THE FRANCO-GOTHIC STYLE Since the publication of volume X 1 w e have neglected the ramifications of this phase of Spanish painting, and it is now high time that w e return to the subject, recording the new examples that have emerged and the fresh information on productions that w e have already studied. In the Catalan school it is particularly urgent that w e enlarge our list, for here there has recently come to general attention a work decidedly superior in quality to the average of Franco-Gothic craft, a retable 2 in the parish church of Serdinya, near Prades west of Perpignan, in the part of C a t a lonia n o w belonging to France, but originally in the now destroyed church of near-lying Marinyans. T h e r e is the great, added interest of a Latin inscription on the lowest molding, with the name of the donor, the chief ecclesiastical dignitary of the Marinyans, Bernardus Palasci (in Catalan, Bernat Palasc), 3 and the date, the third of the Ides (the eleventh) of August, 1 3 4 2 , when already the moribund Franco-Gothic style had to vie with the newly arisen Italo-Gothic manner. T h e centre of the retable is occupied by a Crucifixion ( F i g . 9 0 ) , as firm in craft as the about contemporary example at Pamplona, 4 and round about in two tiers are ranged scenes from the lives of Christ and the Virgin, a pair on each side. T h e subjects in the upper tier are the Annunciation, the Visitation, Nativity, and, as a separate scene, the Proclamation to the Shepherds; and the lower row aligns the Massacre of the Innocents, the Adoration of the M a g i , the Flight into Egypt, 5 and the Dormition. Frequently in the Catalan R o m a n esque antependia the three Wise M e n had been depicted in a lateral compartment as worshipping the group of the M a d o n n a and Child in the ' P . 295. O r w a s it rather an antependium? 3 T h e b e g i n n i n g of the Christian name is b l u r r e d , but the distinguished scholar of Roussillon, M a r c e l D u r l i a t , k i n d l y writes me that a n e w examination reveals that it w a s surely Bernardus, and he seems to be r i g h t in deciphering the surname as Palasci. F o r a previous defective r e a d i n g , see the c a t a l o g u e o f the exhibition of Les Primitifs méditerranéens-^ B o r d e a u x , 1 9 5 2 , p. 1 1 0 . 4 V o l . I I , p. 1 1 2 . 5 A f t e r w r i t i n g this p a r a g r a p h , I h a v e read M a r c e l D u r l i a t ' s i l l u m i n a t i n g discussion of the retable in his article on La Peinture roussillonnaise à l'é foque des rois de Majorque in Etudes roussillonnaises, I I ( 1 9 5 2 ) , 1 9 1 , and in his m o n u m e n t a l w o r k , Arts anciens du Roussillon, P e r p i g n a n , 1 9 5 4 , p. 4 8 : he points out that the maiden w i t h the H o l y F a m i l y in the F l i g h t into E g y p t (as not infrequently in the i c o n o g r a p h y of the s u b j e c t ) is p r o b a b l y the g i r l w h o d u r i n g their experiences in this c o u n t r y was healed of leprosy b y the w a t e r in w h i c h the C h i l d w a s bathed and henceforth w a s their t r a v e l l i n g c o m p a n i o n : see M . R . James, The Afocryphal New Testament, O x f o r d , 1 9 2 4 , the s u m m a r y of the A r a b i c Gospel of the I n f a n c y , p. 8 1 . 2

FIG. 90. CRUCIFIXION.

PARISH CHURCH, SERDINYA

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231

central, main division ; and tradition was so strong that very curiously they are so represented in the Marinyans painting, although in the middle there were no mother and her infant Son for them to adore but instead the Crucifixion. A fine painted Crucifix of the same style, in the hermitage of L a Trinité in the municipality of Prunet et Belpuig (southwest of Perpignan), has been published by Marcel Durliat. 6 T h e Franco-Gothic mural remains in Catalonia have received an accretion in a group of frescoes that have been removed from one of the lateral walls of the ruined church at the abandoned town of Peralta, just northeast of Tarazona, and, having been transferred to canvas, now have found a home in the Diocesan Museum of this city. Published with fine scholarly accuracy and acumen by Batlle Huguet and reasonably dated by him about 1 3 2 4 , probably the year when the wall upon which they were painted was constructed, they are rather provincial in quality but possess the interest, as so often in Catalonia, of betraying the Franco-Gothic style as still vitally saturated with Romanesque reminiscences. T h e subjects do not constitute a homogeneous iconographie ensemble. T h e Crucifixion and the sin of Adam and Eve are in a sense intimately affiliated, since the former was the result of the latter, but the other themes are not so closely related. T h e representation of the Pantocrator surrounded by the signs of the Evangelists is still as Romanesque in composition and feeling as in the very similar board canopy, said to come from a region of Aragon bordering on Catalonia, now in the Museum of Vich. 7 Then follow an effigy of St. Christopher and a schematized tree, which Batlle guesses to be perhaps the heraldic emblem of Peralta, which could be so divided as to mean in Catalan "high pear." 8 A second, smaller, and simpler fresco of the Crucifixion, removed from a pilaster of the church, was evidently executed by the same craftsman but is surmised by Batlle to have belonged to a series of Stations of the Cross. When we pass into Aragon, we find that the wealth of the territory of Huesca in extant Franco-Gothic frescoes is emphasized by the discovery of another cycle in the church at Pompién, not far south of this city, which has been transferred to canvas and acquired by a private collector at Madrid. Persuasively dated by Ricardo del Arco 9 about 1 3 1 5 when a Gilbert Redón became squire of the place, they are less proficiently executed than the majority of nearby mural paintings, for instance at S. Miguel de Foces and Bierge, but they partially compensate, as often in Franco-Gothic productions, by their elements of iconographie significance. T h e sections that have survived from the vault of the east end of the building include, first, an effigy of the Pantocrator, who may have been 6

First o-p. cit., 1 9 9 - 2 0 0 ; and second o f . cit., p. 50. See my vol. I, fig·. 84. 8 The actual Catalan word for pear-tree is ferera, and the Catalan form of Peralta, Peralte. 9 Catálogo monumental, Provincia de Huesca, ρ. 168 ; and cf. my vol. X , p. 401. 7

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conceived as coming in the Last Judgment since there is preserved a small fragment, perhaps from an arch beneath, depicting in its middle a nude mortal rising from his tomb. Of the signs of the Evangelists that surrounded Christ, two are extant, the lion of St. Mark and the ox of St. Luke, as well as two practically identical figures of a kneeling, adoring, haloed woman, probably the Virgin who was often introduced supplicating her Son in the Last Judgment and who would at Pompién be strangely repeated. T h e rest of the walls in this part of the church unfolded the beginning of the epic of the creation, the most interesting piece of which is the scene of God (evidently in the form of the Second Person of the Trinity) calling the terrestrial globe into being, a composition similar to that with which Pedro Serra was to treat the theme at the end of the same century in his retable at Manresa. Deity at the left blesses a great circle upheld by angels and bound by three zones in all probability symbolizing the sky, the sea, and the land, since the shapes of fish can still be distinguished in the second. T h e whole centre of the circle is filled with a conventionalized dove, which materializes "the Spirit of God moving upon the face of the waters" (Genesis, I, 2). T w o other compartments seem to depict further creation activities of the Lord, in each case in the presence of two angels and in the one where kneeling He points upward to the clouds perhaps intended to be making the sun and moon. T h e section representing the creation of the beasts and birds is very clearly outlined, but I do not know how to interpret two passages in which a masculine saint, not the Saviour since he lacks the cruciform nimbus, protects an unhaloed man and a young girl is seen beside her mother, 1 0 both likewise without haloes, unless we have to do with an early instance of the donors and their heavenly patron. Beneath the vault two angels framed a window, holding a scroll from which the inscription is now blotted out. T h e zones of narrative along the church's lateral walls have been left to us; from early Genesis, the creation of Adam and Eve, the admonition to them about the T r e e of Life, their sin, and the expulsion from Eden; and, of the history of the new dispensation, an extended representation of the driving of Sts. Joachim and Anne from the Temple, the Annunciation, Visitation, Nativity, Purification, Herod questioning the Wise Men, the Flight into Egypt, and a further episode in the story of the Flight so far erased as to be unidentifiable with certainty but perhaps depicting the Holy Family watched by the reaper who was to deceive their pursuers. 11 Several of the scenes exhibit original compositions, as if the painter, like many Spanish exponents of the Franco-Gothic style, had never seen other renderings of the subjects and was relying upon his own, naturalistic imagination. In the absolutely symmetrical treatment of the Nativity, for example, the sleeping Virgin and St. Joseph balance each other about a central, elevated trough from which the ox and the ass are eating, while the newborn Saviour lies upon one of its lower ledges. In the Purification, the divinity 10 11

Del Arco wrongly supposes them to be St. Anne and her daughter. See my vol. IV, p. 188.

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of the Child is stressed by His actually standing erect upon the altar and blessing His parents and the priest. A few other bits of the mural paintings exist but preserving too little for the recognition of their themes. T h e relics of Franco-Gothic painting in Castile are so scanty that even the few examples recently discovered at Segovia acquire significance, particularly since their style indicates a date in the middle or second half of the thirteenth century, earlier than the majority of the works in this style in Spain. O n two piers in the church of S. Millán, 12 there have been uncovered nicely executed, standing, frescoed figures of four saints, one of them identified by an inscription as Basilissa, so that her companion would be her husband, Julian, 1 3 but the other pair, also a man and a woman, exhibiting no means for their recognition. One of the apses in the ruined and secularized church of S. Nicolás contains a tomb of a gentleman of the Ibáñez family, 14 on which mural paintings have been relieved of whitewash. Above the sepulchral arch there is depicted one of the regular themes on Gothic tombs in Spain, 15 the translation of the deceased's soul to Paradise, and at the left of the scene an angel does homage to the Madonna, holding not only the Child but also, as in the probably FrancoGothic Virgin in the new cathedral of Madrid, 1 6 a fleur-de-lis. T h e balancing space at the right is filled with the dead man's escutcheon, which is repeated as decoration on the mausoleum's moldings. T h e arch's spandrels display two angels, and the tympanum under it is reserved for a representation of the funeral ceremony, a subject encountered in the sculpture of Gothic tombs of the period but preserved to us in mortuary painting only in the lamentation for the dead on the sarcophagus from Mahamud in the province of Burgos, 17 now in the Museum of Catalan Art, Barcelona, and in a very fragmentary panel from a similar coffin belonging to the same Museum. 1 8 T h e recent years have brought not only fresh data in regard to FrancoGothic frescoes in Navarre with which we were already familiar but also the discovery of other cycles. In the apse of the church of S. Saturnino (also called the Iglesia del Cerco) at Artajona there has been revealed a partially preserved cycle which has been removed to the Museo Provincial, Pamplona, and which Cook and Gudiol 19 would like to believe to have been executed by the master who decorated the walls of the east 12 See F. J . Cabello y Dodero, La parroquia de San Millán de Segovia, Estudios segovianos, I ( 1 9 4 9 ) , 4 1 3 and plate opposite p. 420. 13 For Sts. Julian and Basilissa, see my vol. X I I , p. 216. 14 See the Marqués de Lozoya in Archivo es-pañol de arte, X X I V ( 1 9 5 1 ) , 274; E. Colorado y Laca, Estudios segovianos, I ( 1 9 4 9 ) , 476; and Luis F. de Peñalosa, ibid., II ( 1 9 5 0 - 1 9 5 1 ) , 147. 15 Estudios segovianos, II, 59. 16 /¿¿¿., 153. "Ibid., 156. 18 W. W. S. Cook and J . Gudiol Ricart, Pintura e imaginería románicas (vol. VI in the series, Ars Hispaniae), Madrid, 1950, p. 2 7 1 . 19 Ibid., p. 128.

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end of the church in the convent of Sijena; 2 0 but, although, with Professor A . Kingsley Porter, I am disposed to think that mediaeval artists travelled more largely than w e have realized and although I discern the stylistic similarities even in human types, I am not entirely convinced of the unity of authorship with the Aragonese series. F o r one thing, the apsidal frescoes at Sijena are more touched by Franco-Gothicism, whereas in the A r t a j o n a group the style is essentially a belated manifestation of the Romanesque manner, indebted to the nascent Gothic tendencies for little else than some alleviation of primitive severity. T h e church at A r t a jona contains other frescoes dated in 1 3 4 0 that will subsequently concern us, but the cycle with which we now have to do must have been painted about 1 3 0 0 immediately upon the edifice's completion. T h e subject is the L a s t J u d g m e n t : above the apsidal w i n d o w the seated Christ (preserved only f r o m the waist d o w n w a r d ) ; at a slightly l o w e r level two majestic standing angels balancing each other and both carrying staffs, the one at the left holding also a c r o w n , which scarcely at this early date would identify him as the Guardian A n g e l , 2 1 but his companion at the right exhibiting no such additional emblem that I can discern; beside the w i n d o w the erect Sts. Peter and P a u l ; to the left of St. Peter, a seated group of the redeemed (the corresponding piece at St. Paul's right having been lost) ; the mere l o w e r legs of two figures at the left of the Guardian A n g e l ; and passages of handsome pure design, decorating especially the w i n d o w ' s frames. T h e chapel beneath the tower in the church of S. Pedro at Olite has also yielded to investigation two cycles of frescoes that have been transferred to the M u s e u m of Pamplona, and the earlier of these constitutes an inferior manifestation of that we have just studied in the set from A r t a j o n a , although I cannot bring myself to follow Cook and Gudiol 2 2 in assigning them to the same master, even at a hypothetical more aged and decadent stage in his career, any more than I am willing to recognize in the A r t a jona painter the immigrant from Sijena. T h e pieces preserved are: from correspondingly large spaces on the walls between the vaulting's ribs, the Pantocrator surrounded by the Evangelistic signs, the Coronation, and an enthroned episcopal saint (probably St. Saturnin us, popular in N a v a r r e ) ; f r o m similar smaller mural intervals, three angels, all holding crowns; at a lower level on the walls, Sts. Peter and Paul (by comparison with these figures at A r t a j o n a , patently unworthy of the same h a n d ) ; beneath them narrative scenes, so ruined that only the Epiphany can be deciphered; and on the arch of entrance to the chapel, half-lengths of sacred personages, one above the other, at one side, Christ, the Virgin, and St. Peter, and on the other the two St. J o h n s and St. Paul. I n an article 2 3 admirable for its scholarly thoroughness, breadth, and intelligence, Miss G a l e Guthrie Callahan has analyzed with enviable 20 21 22

23

My vol. II, p. 51. See my vol. VI, p. 154. Of. cit., p.

137.

Art Bulletin, X X X V ( 1 9 5 3 ) , 181.

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clarity the great fresco of the Passion and Resurrection which by its transfer from the refectory of the cathedral of Pamplona to the Provincial M u seum of the city has been revealed in all its parts and which w e have already found 2 4 to have been executed about 1330 by a distinguished artist w h o m w e can n o w definitely name, Juan Oliveri. T h e removal to the Museum and the cleaning have shown that in the topmost zone, which in the church had been hidden under repaint, the subjects are the Flagellation and Via Dolorosa. Miss Callahan has itemized the twelve personages of the old dispensation w h o are ranged vertically at the sides to constitute a frame and w h o , for the most part the usual cycle of Prophets, here include not only John the Baptist and Simeon, the "just and devout" old servant of G o d , present at the Purification, but even Caiaphas, the Jewish high priest at the time of O u r L o r d ' s trial; and, with two exceptions, 25 she has read the inscriptions on their customary banderoles, finding the Biblical sources of the words. She has also identified the two central escutcheons in the lowest zone of the fresco as those of the kingdom of Navarre and of Gaston I I , count of Foix and Béarn, the great Navarrese warrior of the period who rivalled the military prowess of his better known homonym of the beginning of the sixteenth century and w h o must have had some as yet unascertained connection of donorship with the painting. It should also be pointed out that in the explanatory inscriptions above the scenes not only is the good thief, Dysmas, named in the Crucifixion but even the much more rarely denominated, unredeemed malefactor Gestas (here in the form Egastas), one of several appellations given to him by tradition. In the style, Miss Callahan wishes to see a dependence upon the aspects that the general and broadly diffused Franco-Gothic manner assumed in southern England. Because it is only very recently that there has appeared in print 26 even a part of the hitherto unpublished book by C e á n Bermúdez, Historia de la pintura en España, neither Miss Callahan nor I had realized that he 27 was cognizant of the existence of a painter Juan de Oliva or Oliver, active in Navarre during the fourteenth century, w h o almost certainly was our Oliveri or a successor of the same name. He refers also to as yet unpublished financial accounts in the Pamplona archives, of the works done by Juan de Oliva for Charles I I of Navarre, who, although he did not begin to reign until 1349, could easily have been the patron of the artist of the fresco of 1330 for that refectory. T h e other date given by Ceán for Oliva, 1 3 7 2 , when he took part in the pomp attendant upon the See m y v o l . I X , p. 739. O n e of these lacunae I can fill, since the sentiment g i v e n to S o l o m o n is p l a i n l y taken f r o m Ecclesiasticus, V , 8 " N o n tardes c o n v e r t i . " In the other instance, the scroll of D a v i d seems to read, " C u m venerit Sanctus sanctorum, cessabit unctio ( f o l l o w e d b y an undecipherable w o r d ) , " w h i c h m a y be another translation or a g a r b l i n g of the end of the t w e n t y - f o u r t h verse of his ninth chapter, w h i c h reads in the V u l g a t e , " u n g e t u r Sanctus s a n c t o r u m . " 2 6 In the n e w l y named periodical, Academia, of the A c a d e m i a de Bellas Artes de San F e r n a n d o , M a d r i d , I ( 1 9 J 0 — 1 9 5 1 ) , 2 0 9 . 27 Ibid., 2 2 9 . 24

25

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•236

f u n e r a l of the s o v e r e i g n , c o u l d still be r e c o n c i l e d w i t h o u r p a i n t e r ' s span of l i f e ; b u t C e á n is w r o n g in p l a c i n g in 1 3 7 2 the k i n g ' s d e a t h , w h i c h did n o t o c c u r until 1 3 8 7 , p r o b a b l y too late a y e a r f o r a p a i n t e r a l r e a d y d o i n g in 1 3 3 0 a n i m p o r t a n t c o m m i s s i o n . the C o n d e de l a V i n a z a

28

W e s h o u l d , h o w e v e r , h a v e n o t e d that

h a d l o n g a g o published the b u l k of the i n f o r m a -

tion a b o u t J u a n de O l i v a , e v e n q u o t i n g bits of the d o c u m e n t s . A m o n g the m u c h less w e l l - p r e s e r v e d frescoes that f r o m the cloister of the c a t h e d r a l of P a m p l o n a h a v e n o w also been r e m o v e d to the

Museum,

the o n l y c y c l e t h a t , a f t e r l o n g study a n d c o m p a r i s o n s w i t h w h i c h I w i l l n o t bore the r e a d e r , I should n o t be m u c h a v e r s e to c l a i m i n g f o r O l i v e r i a n d his shop is the o n e o v e r the t o m b of the Bishop S á n c h e z de A s i a í n . 2 9

The

better a n d u n o b s t r u c t e d l i g h t of the M u s e u m has r e v e a l e d that the u p p e r m o s t section exhibits C h r i s t a n d the V i r g i n petitioning the F a t h e r f o r m a n kind;

but n o t e v e n

the m o r e

advantageous

conditions of the

i l l u m i n a t e the f u r t h e r dilapidated T r e e of Jesse

30

Museum

f r o m a n e a r b y bay of

the cloister to such a d e g r e e as to p e r s u a d e m e of its e x e c u t i o n by O l i v e r i ' s atelier, despite the design in the h a l o e s t h a t appears in the o t h e r paintings of P a m p l o n a .

mural

A l t h o u g h the m e r e s t vestiges are l e f t f r o m

the

third f r e s c o e d b a y , 3 ' t h e y p r o v e , on inspection, n o t entirely to n e g a t e the hypothesis of affiliation w i t h O l i v e r i ' s style, a n d w e c a n n o w d i m l y m a k e o u t , in the M u s e u m , the t h e m e s of the parts t h a t time has spared, in the t y m p a n u m the d r e a m of St. J o a c h i m a n d , a l i g n e d in the z o n e b e n e a t h the A n n u n c i a t i o n of St. A n n e , the M e e t i n g at the G o l d e n G a t e , a n d the V i r gin's Nativity.

H e r e , as I h a v e of old s u g g e s t e d f o r the fresco o v e r the

B i s h o p ' s t o m b , I should still be s o m e w h a t inclined to d e s c r y a slight strain f r o m the I t a l i a n T r e c e n t o , so that, if M i s s C a l l a h a n

correctly

perceives

in O l i v e r i an E n g l i s h i n f l u e n c e , w e p e r h a p s o u g h t to g r a n t to h i m a cosmopolitan education. M o r e s a f e l y than in the case of the frescoes f r o m the P a m p l o n a cloister, w e can assign to O l i v e r i a m u r a l c y c l e w h i c h f r o m the chapel of the t o w e r in S. P e d r o at O l i t e h a s also been r e m o v e d to the P a m p l o n a M u s e u m a n d to the e x e c u t i o n of w h i c h , r o u g h l y a r o u n d the m i d d l e of the

fourteenth

c e n t u r y , 3 2 the l o w e r sections of the earlier frescoes in the c h a p e l w e r e sacrificed;

but in m a k i n g the attribution w e m u s t postulate that O l i v e r i

was

o n l y the h e a d of a shop the p r o d u c t i o n s of w h i c h , e v e n in a single a s s e m b l a g e , v a r y in quality, as w e l l as slightly in style, a n d t h a t the O l i t e paintings a r e equal o r m o r e t h a n equal to the best passages in the shop's p r o d u c t i o n elsewhere.

T w o scenes f r o m the history of the J e w s are c o m p r i s e d w i t h i n

28 Vinaza, Cipriano Muñzo y Manzano, conde de la, Adiciones al Diccionario histórico . . . de d. Juan Agustín Ceán Bermúdez, Madrid, I ( 1 8 9 4 ) , 109. 2Q See my vol. II, p. 109. 30 Ibid., p. 108. 31 Ibid., pp. 109—110 32 In all probability, too early for the activity of any of the painters whom Ceán Bermúdez found in the archives to have been employed at Olite in the first two decades of the fifteenth century: see his Historia de la f>intura en Esfaña in Academia, I ( 1 9 5 0 1 9 5 1 ) , 230-231.

APPENDIX

237

the sadly limited fragments, what is evidently a representation of Seth planting the T r e e of L i f e over Adam's grave, i.e., the first stage in the legend of the Cross, and then Samson's slaying of the lion. T h e r e ensues the narrative of the Holy Childhood in the episodes of the Annunciation, Visitation, Nativity, Proclamation to the Shepherds, then an event from which only the Virgin's form survives, followed by the Purification, and finally the young Saviour among the Doctors. When in the Museum one passes from the fresco of the refectory of the cathedral at Pamplona to the Olite cycle, he at once realizes that he is in the presence of precisely the same style and only has to reassure himself by such comparisons as between the holy women in the Pamplona Crucifixion and the Virgin with her handmaid in the Purification of the Olite series or between the Longinus raising his hand before his blinded eyes in this Crucifixion, and, at Olite, the similarly gesturing aged shepherd receiving the announcement of the herald angel, or between the Christ of the Flagellation in the refectory and the Seth setting the tree in the ground, not to speak of such subsidiary matters as the analogies in the figuration of the haloes and in the nature of the accompanying Latin defining inscriptions and the forms of the letters. T h e craft, however, appears superior to anything that we find in the cycles from the cathedral of Pamplona, perhaps only because of the better preservation of much in what remains to us from Olite, reaching often a captivating delicacy in feeling and execution, for instance in the Virgin and Child of the Purification. Nevertheless, the struggle of Samson with the (amazingly veristic) lion proves that, when the subject demanded, the master could achieve, within the nicety of draughtsmanship, unexpected vigor. This scene from the Old Testament is also an instance of the formality in composition that the Franco-Gothic painters, in this respect discarding realism, so often attained. T h e raised tail of the lion balances the tree, and the vertically is energetically relieved by the obliquity of Samson's mantle, flying forth in the strains of his combat. Other such compositions demonstrate also the frequent, Franco-Gothic originality in dealing with the time-worn themes. In the Nativity, the seated Virgin holding the Child, while the ox and ass lie placidly below at her side, is given symmetrical pendants in the figures of the midwife and St. Joseph. Most unusual of all is the Proclamation to the Shepherds, which not only is made into a separate subject but almost becomes solely a remarkably psychological study of the aged keeper of flocks who constitutes the central axis. T h e other participants are grouped about in a lovely symmetrical balance, the angel and the younger piping shepherd, the traditional goat nibbling at the foliage and the dog (again showing the author a prematurely perceptive animalier) alerted to the supernatural vision, and two groups of reverently bowing sheep. If this second cycle from Olite incorporates the best of which the Oliveri shop was capable, a second series still remaining on the left wall at the east end of S. Saturnino at Artajona (Figs. 9 1 , 9 2 ) betrays the hand of a

FIG. 92. MASTER ROQUE. LIFE OF ST. SATURNINUS (DETAIL) {Photo.

Mas)

240

APPENDIX

s o m e w h a t less subtly p e r f o r m i n g m e m b e r of the atelier w h o m an a c c o m panying inscription permits us to n a m e , M a s t e r R o q u e , and whose collaboration with J u a n Oliveri m a y be detected here and there in the frescoes at P a m p l o n a , f o r example in the H o l y W o m e n at the tomb in the refectory of the cathedral. T h e series is m a d e , as the inscription reveals, of episodes in the f a v o r a b l e response of a K i n g C h a r l e s to the petition of a F r e n c h embassy that the body of St. Saturninus be returned to the canonized bishop's church, St. Sernin at T o u l o u s e ; but, despite m y rather extensive search, I have been unable to ferret out in the standard accounts 3 3 of the vicissitudes of the saint's relics that they ever left his city, so that the paintings must be based on a local legend or an obscure, actual historical event, either of which is u n k n o w n both to m e and others. 3 4 T h e king is denominated on the banderole that he carries as " C a r l o s , " w h o w o u l d be a m o r e or less l e g e n d a r y sovereign 3 5 or C h a r l e s I of N a v a r r e ( C h a r l e s I V of F r a n c e ) . I have not come upon any such translation of the body of St. Saturninus as an event in C h a r l e s I ' s career, but, if perchance the thing did occur, it w o u l d h a v e had to take place between 1 3 2 1 — 1 3 2 8 , the period of his rule of N a v a r r e , in which case w e should be confronted in the art of the time with the unusual phenomenon of the representation of an almost contemporary happening. C h a r l e s I I and I I I of N a v a r r e are out of the question, since their reigns postdate the frescoes, which are assigned in the inscription to 1 3 4 0 . 3 6 So f a r as it is preserved, I read the inscription (transliterated into m o d ern S p a n i s h ) , which describes the succession of episodes: " A q u í está el R e y en su cátedra asentado. Viene el pueblo de F r a n c i a á suplicarlo que torne este cuerpo santo en T o l o s a . A q u í sale el obispo con sus canónigos y con el pueblo de T o l o s a . L o pintó R o q u e ( w o r d or w o r d s obliterated) a ñ o de mil y C C C y X L . " 3 7 W e m a y translate: " H e r e is the K i n g seated on his throne. T h e people of F r a n c e come to beg him that this holy body return to T o u l o u s e . H e r e there issues ( f r o m the city) the bishop with his canons and with the people of T o u l o u s e . R o q u e painted it (in t h e ) y e a r 1 3 4 0 . " T h e n a section is blotted out, and there f o l l o w the w o r d s , " v e c i n o de P a m p l o n a " (citizen of P a m p l o n a ) , applying probably to the donor, whose n a m e w o u l d have occupied the erased passage. G u d i o l R i c a r t 3 8 publishes a reading of the inscription m a d e by a cleric in 1 7 2 2 and 33

See especially P. Guérin, Les petits Bollandistes, Paris, XIII (1888), 674. No such occurrence has come within the ken of the distinguished scholar, Pedro de Madrazo: see his Navarra y Logroño, vol. III in the series Esfaña, sus monumentos y artes (Barcelona, 1888), 29-32. 35 Madrazo guesses at a legendary act of Charles the Bald of France, whose sway from 823 to 877 extended over Navarre. 36 Madrazo excluded Charles I of Navarre, since he thought the frescoes were dated in 1 3 1 1 . 37 The only old Spanish spellings that really need comment are : Ffrancia for Francia, such doubling of the " f " being not uncommon at the time ; Thollosa for Tolosa ; and saylle for sale, with a superfluous doubling of "1." 38 Princife de Vianay V ( 1 9 4 4 ) , 287. Madrazo (of. cit., p. 30) quotes the cleric with some slight variations but still with errors. 34

APPENDIX

241

containing a few errors, of which the only significant one is the date 1 3 1 1 instead of the correct year 1340. A f t e r " R o q u e , " the cleric discerned the characters E L M ; but only the E is now clearly visible, and I wonder whether the words were not merely E N E L before the preserved A Y N O ( = A ñ o ) , year. But this reading does the service of enabling us to reconstruct the sentence on the K i n g ' s banderole which was less faded in the early eighteenth century, " E l rey Carlos manda que torne el cuerpo de Sant Cerni á T o l o s a " ( K i n g Carlos commands the return of the body of St. Saturninus to T o u l o u s e ) . T h e compartments of the frescoes illustrate the inscriptions: the enthroned monarch, with his favorite dog at his feet; three of his retainers, two of them receiving the royal orders and the third, the most striking figure on the wall, fiercely holding off the group of petitioners like a modern policeman protecting a celebrity from the crowds, according to the general and charming naturalistic tendency of FrancoGothic art; the aggregation of kneeling suppliants, mostly w o m e n ( ! ) , thus with a realization, on Master Roque's part, of the ordinarily more intense piety of the gentler sex; the bishop and his attendants coming forth from Toulouse, whose bells are ringing lustily; and the arrival of the cart with the saint's body, the two last scenes a worthy precedent for Huguet's representation of the reception of the relics of Sts. Abdon and Sennen at Arles-sur-Tech. 3 9 T h e interpreter of the eighteenth century records also an inscription accompanying now destroyed frescoes on the opposite wall, which had to do with St. Exuperius, the almost immediate successor of St. Saturninus in the see of Toulouse.

T H E INTERNATIONAL M O V E M E N T IN NORTHWESTERN CASTILE AND ESPECIALLY ITS U L T I M A T E PHASE

In the recent volumes of this series we have been able to bring more order out of the considerable mass of paintings in the international style that have remained to us in the provinces of Palencia, L e ó n , Zamora, and Salamanca. A n appreciable number of works in the Palencian school are grouped and accounted for by our isolation of the personality of the Villamediana Master, 1 by w h o m a further work has come within my cognizance, an Annunciation of the Virgin's Death in the Collection of M r . W . W . Crocker at Burlingame, California ( F i g . 9 3 ) . Properly in so solemn a theme, the types, costumes, and treatment so far renounce his usual capriciousness that I fear that I should not have recognized the authorship, if I had not been informed that M r . James Rambo, on the staff of the Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, had keenly perceived that the figuration of the carved frame and the dimensions 2 demonstrate the panel to have belonged to the same original retable as the Birth of the Virgin in M y vol. V I I , p. 53. Vols. I X , p. 7 8 9 ; X , p. 330 ; and X I , p. 407. 2 T h e differences are negligible : the Johnson panel measures 31 inches in height by 22 ¡54 in width, the Crocker picture 3 3 ^ by 2 3 39 1

Fig. 93. T H E VILLAMEDIANA M A S T E R . ANNUNCIATION OF T H E VIRGIN'S DEATH. COLLECTION OF W. W. CROCKER, BURLINGAME, CALIFORNIA

APPENDIX

243

3

the Johnson Collection, Philadelphia. T o these identities w e may join additional similarities in appurtenances — beneath the Virgin and behind the angel the same kind of geometrically designed, conspicuous pavements, as in so many of the Villamediana Master's other productions, and on O u r L a d y ' s bed the same brocade, a favorite with the painter, that is used for the parturient St. A n n e ' s couch. E v e n one of the great circles that interrupt the general pattern of the brocade in the Johnson panel reappears on the fabric of the bed in the Crocker picture. Although the M a s t e r foregoes in the types his characteristic eccentric coiffures and so might have made it harder to detect the presence of his brush, yet counterparts for both heads peer forth here and there in his other works, f o r the Gabriel, e.g., in some of the maidens listening to St. Ursula's homily in the series at Port Sunlight, and f o r the Virgin in the M a g d a l e n e in the piece of a predella in the Z o r n M u s e u m at M o r a , Sweden. T h e panel of the Annunciation of M a r y ' s Death measurably enlarges our conception of the Villamediana M a s t e r and increases our esteem for him, showing that, when the subject required, he could abjure his peculiarities and attain in the angel a captivating delicacy and in the Virgin true seriousness. T o his following w e may now assign the fragments of a retable of A l l Saints 4 f r o m Becerril de Campos which I discussed in volume V I 5 then in the episcopal palace, Falencia, but now in the Viñas Collection, Barcelona, except for the panel that comprises St. Bernardine and other members of the heavenly host, which is now in the Collection of M r . E l l e r y Sedgwick at B e v e r l y , Massachusetts. T h e assemblages of the blessed, all but one of w h o m are identified by banderoles with Castilian inscriptions of their names in Gothic lettering as capricious as the delineation of the forms, contain elements of iconographie interest. A s figure 2 7 2 in volume V I , I illustrated the only one of the four panels that admits canonized females, whose faces and hair are so schematized that they look like late mediaeval editions of Modigliani's women. Reading from right to left, they are the virgin martyrs Catherine, Cecilia, 6 L u c y , and A g a t h a , but between the two former there is interposed the single figure lacking an inscribed scroll, an archangel who, though garbed in an alb and stole instead of armor, should probably be recognized as St. Michael because of the emblem of the large cross that he holds. Beneath the angel and under his protection there kneels the lady of the family which donated the retable, accompanied by the six girls w h o were among her numerous offspring. I n the balancing panel the male members of the family are introduced on their knees, the father and three boys, as well as another mature w o m a n and a maiden, 3

Vols. II, fig·. 2 4 5 , and I X , p. 790. F o r altarpieces dedicated to A l l Saints, see my vols. II, p. 2 6 4 ; I I I , pp. 1 1 8 and 1 7 7 ; and I V , p. 5 9 4 . 5 P. 6 1 4 . 6 Her banderole reads merely " C i l i a , " but, since there is no saint of this name, I take it that the preceding " C e " have been obliterated and that upon the plate which she carries and upon which only leaves are now visible, there were to be seen originally the roses, St. Cecilia's emblem. 4

244

APPENDIX

perhaps sister or aunt and a niece. T h e saints above this group of donors are A n d r e w , Macarius (not infrequently encountered in Spain), 7 Peter, Dominic, and John Baptist. O f the two other, narrower panels, each of which also displays five sacred personages to our veneration, one aligns Bernardine (thus dating the retable after 1 4 5 0 ) , 8 Francis of Assisi, Christopher, James M a j o r , and the martyred youth w h o enjoyed a cult in the Palencian diocese, Zoilus 9 ( F i g . 9 4 ) ; and the balancing compartment marshals Benedict, Sebastian, Bartholomew, L a z a r u s (to w h o m a church in the city of Palencia is dedicated), and, as a counterpart to Zoilus, another young champion of the faith, George. T h e author of the Becerril pieces approaches very close in places to the Villamediana Master, but a careful study of the problem inclines me to believe that he is a different and somewhat later artist, a disciple more given to the mannered whimsicalities of the international movement in its moribund stages. He exhibits marked similarities also to his contemporary w h o m w e know as active in the regions of L e ó n and Zamora, the Villalobos Master, but again without convincing me of identity. T o realize, nevertheless, how their attainments impinge upon one another, it is necessary only to observe, among many striking analogies, the likeness of the St. James and Zoilus to the bearded magistrate and the moon-faced spectator behind him in the Villalobos Master's panel of the carding of St. Felix in the Harding Collection at Chicago 10 or the resemblance of the virgin martyrs to the angels in his fragment in the Museum of Catalan A r t , Barcelona. 1 1

F E R N A N D O G A L L E G O A N D HIS S C H O O L

I n an enlightening article, Gudiol Ricart 1 has brought into clear relief many of the technical, aesthetic, and thematic characteristics of w h a t is preserved of Gallego's astronomical, mural cycle for the vault of the old library of the University of Salamanca 2 that, cleaned, restored, and transferred to canvas, has now been moved to one of the halls of the Escuelas Menores in the institution. O u r understanding of the painter and his shop has also been much clarified in a thorough-going and perceptive article by G a y a Ñ u ñ o 3 on the retable of the high altar of the cathedral at Ciudad Rodrigo, 4 whose complicated peregrinations he carefully traces until from the Cook C o l Vols. V I , p. 306; V I I , pp. 33, 141, and 308; and I X , p. 546. Vol. V I , p. 614. 9 Vols. I X , p. 491, and X , p. 331. 1 0 Vol. VII, fig. 331. 1 1 Vol. X , p. 330. 1 Goya, no. 13 ( 1 9 5 6 ) . 8. 2 See my vol. IV, p. 122. 3 Archivo esfañol de arte, X X X I ( 1 9 5 8 ) , 299, in addition to his enlightening monograph on Fernando Gallego, Madrid, 1958. 4 M y vol. IV, p. 138; R. M . Quinn, The Retable of Ciudad Rodrigo by Fernando Gallego, Tucson, 1961, summarizes previous studies and adds a technical report. 7

8

Fig. 94. FOLLOWER OF T H E VILLAMEDIANA MASTER. DETAILS OF A RETABLE OF ALL SAINTS. VIÑAS COLLECTION, BARCELONA (Photo.

Mas)

246

APPENDIX

lection at Richmond, England, it reached the Kress Foundation at N e w Y o r k ; but to this information I am able to add that it has been given or lent by the Foundation to the Gallery of the University of Arizona at Tucson. He first argues persuasively that, although as many as twentysix panels comprised the set in the Cook Collection, the retable must be supposed, on iconographie grounds, to have been even a much vaster affair and to have contained originally about double the number of compartments. Second and more importantly he champions a decidedly larger participation of Fernando himself than had been allowed by me, who was disposed to assign the panels largely to the assistant whom Bertaux dubbed the Maître aux Armures. F o r Fernando Gaya Ñuño claims the Circumcision, Christ and the Woman of Samaria, the Commission of Christ to St. Peter, the Resurrection of Lazarus, the Agony in the Garden, the Betrayal, the Ecce Homo, the Last Judgment, and the three panels of paired Apostles from the predella; and even if I cannot follow him quite so far and ascribe all these compartments wholly to the head of the shop, he has guided me to believe in Fernando's much more considerable share in the execution than I was before ready to acknowledge. T h e majority of the other panels he attributes to the Maître aux Armures, for whom he prefers the title of the Master of the Sinister Countenances, but he agrees with Bertaux in distinguishing a second collaborator, to whom he parcels out the Marriage at Cana and the Healing for Blind Man. A further, significant contribution of G a y a Ñuño is his recognition of a half-length of St. Paul (which he illustrates) in the possession of a dealer at Madrid as a hitherto unrecorded section of the predella of the retable from Ciudad Rodrigo. W e have already noted in the school of Valencia two examples 5 of the repainting of panels of the fifteenth century within as short a period as a hundred years; and sometime ago I perceived that the Castilian school also provided an instance, an Epiphany in the cloister of the Old Cathedral of Salamanca (Figs. 95, 9 6 ) under the retouching of which it was easy to discern clearly the hand of Fernando Gallego (or, just conceivably, of one of his immediate followers). T h e recent laudable campaign of cleaning and restoring the works of art in the city has revealed that I had seen the truth, for it has uncovered an Adoration of the Magi that, among Fernando's other, very similar renderings of the theme, perhaps finds its closest compositional counterpart in the version in the retable at Trujillo. T h e particular significance of two panels by Fernando Gallego in private collections, Barcelona, is that we are at liberty to presume them to have been lateral compartments of the retable in the centre of which was the enthroned Apostle in the Pani Collection, Mexico City. 6 One, in the Prats T o m á s Collection, depicts the common subject, the " Q u o vadis" episode in the story of St. Peter, but the other, in the Merelo Collection, incorporates a theme which I do not remember to have encountered before 3 6

Vol. VI, p. 3 3 6 ; Vol. XI, p. 79. Vol. VI, fig. 276.

Fig. 95. F E R N A N D O GALLEGO. E P I P H A N Y . C L O I S T E R OF OLD CATHEDRAL, SALAMANCA {Photo. Mas)

Fig. 96. FERNANDO GALLEGO. EPIPHANY (DETAIL) {Photo.

Mas)

APPENDIX

249

and for which I have found no definite biographic authority, St. Paul visiting at R o m e the fettered St. Peter in prison ( F i g . 9 7 ) . T h e acquisition for the Gudiol Collection, Barcelona, of a large fragment of a Mass of St. G r e g o r y , which has been justly recognized as a work of Fernando Gallego ( F i g . 9 8 ) , possesses the additional interest for me of lending support to an idea that I have entertained but scarcely dared to promulgate, the tentative attribution of a very similar version of the theme to his follower, Pedro Bello. Last k n o w n to me as in the C o l lection of Prince Joseph-Clemens von Bayern at Munich ( F i g . 9 9 ) the version 7 practically repeats the composition of the Gudiol panel, especially in the strange relegation of the figure of Christ to the right side of the altar, standing upon a paten; and it is to be noted that ordinarily in the subject the Saviour stands at the altar's centre, as in Gallego's other treatment of the theme in the Schlayer Collection, Madrid. 8 T h e r e was already much internal evidence for Pedro's authorship of the Munich panel, such as the wildly bulging eyes and the ill-favored types of St. G r e g o r y and the deacon at the left, betraying the same sort of ugliness as St. Catherine's two guards and the sage at the left in Bello's scene of her dispute with the philosophers in the Museum of the cathedral of Salamanca 9 or as the youth at the extreme right in the Lamentation belonging to M r . Buttery at L o n d o n ; 10 but there are some departures from Bello's usual procedure, for example the face and modelling of Christ's body (unless these are due to restoration), so that, despite the composition, I do not dare even n o w to remove the question-mark after the artist's name in the caption under the illustration. In rightly assigning to Gallego a large panel of the Flight into Egypt in the Collection of D o n T o m á s Allende, Madrid, A n g u l o 1 1 correctly states that I had not yet included it in my volumes. A s a matter of fact, I have known the picture for some time in an illustration in Sánchez C a n ton's Ή acimiento é injancia de Cristo,12 and had arrived at the conclusion that probably it was a work of Gallego, but I neglected to publish it because I was not informed in just what collection it existed and because I was not sure of Fernando's own execution. Indeed A n g u l o explains the variations (except in the positions of the ass's legs) from the rendering in the T r u j i l l o retable 13 by the hypotheses either of a difference in date or the intrusion of the atelier. I have no substantial doubt that he has seen justly in transferring to Gallego the bust of a saint in the Museum of D i j o n that M a y e r came near to persuading me 14 to ascribe to Bermejo, w h o m , however, I should not T h e dimensions are 80^2 centimetres in height by 4 9 ^ in width. Vol. IV, fig·. 30. 9 Ibid., p. 108. 1 0 Vol. X , fig. 130. 11 Archivo esfañol de arte, X X V I I ( 1 9 5 4 ) , 321. 1 2 Madrid, 1948, fig. 2J3. 1 3 See my vol. IV, fig. 21. ' " V o l . V I I , p. 873. 7

8

Fig. 97. FERNANDO GALLEGO. ST. PAUL VISITS ST. PETER IN PRISON. MERELO COLLECTION, BARCELONA {Photo.

Mas)

FIG. 98. FERNANDO GALLEGO. MASS OF ST. GREGORY. COLLECTION OF JOSÉ GUDIOL, BARCELONA {Photo.

Mas)

Fie. 99. PEDRO BELLO (?). MASS OF ST. GREGORY. COLLECTION OF PRINCE JOSEPH-CLEMENS VON BAYERN, MUNICH

APPENDIX

253

wish to discard entirely as a candidate. Angulo can scarcely be wrong in thinking the figure to be that of an Evangelist, and he aptly compares it to the busts of saints which Fernando set in predellas and, in the T o r o retable, also at the summit of the structure. For belief in Gallego's right to the Dijon panel, indeed, one should compare particularly with the bust of Santiago in the T o r o predella and, above all, with the upper part of the full-length effigy of St. Luke at Trujillo, 1 5 where the resemblance is so close as to suggest the same period in the artist's career. T o say the least, as good a case can be put up for retaining the general attribution to Gallego of the Crowning with Thorns in the Museo del Greco, Toledo, 1 6 as for another proposition of Angulo, 1 7 its assignment to the circle of the Master of St. Ildefonso. Despite an extended investigation I am bound to confess that I have been unable to find the follower of Fernando Gallego to whom should be ascribed two panels obviously by a single hand, that I was permitted to study in the Schaeffer Galleries, N e w York. One, a rather large version of the Crucifixion 1 8 (Fig. 1 0 0 ) , exhibits, both in types and landscapes, analogies to Fernando's disciple whom Bertaux christened the Maître aux Armures, 1 9 but the artist does not betray this painter's peculiar addiction to attenuation, flabbiness, and disjointed articulation of the body. T h e resemblances to the modes of Pedro Bello are rather marked, and yet no more so than one would expect from two men of similar temperaments, both trained in the Gallego atelier. Someone has proposed as a candidate the presumptive Francisco Gallego, who seems to me an impossibility, and we must reject also the assistants of Fernando both at Trujillo and in the series now at Arcenillas. 20 T h e second work by the unidentified follower of Fernando Gallego is of considerable iconographie interest, a half-length of the Madonna and Child set in a frame of simulated architecture and sculpture, as of the portal of a church, with canopied figures of Sts. Michael and Joseph in the door's embrasures, an effigy of God the Father in the lintel, and tondi of the actors in the Annunciation in the spandrels. 21 T h e unity of authorship with the Crucifixion is sufficiently established by the identity in type that exists between the Madonna and the Magdalene just at the left of the cross. T h e principal iconographie interest of the panel of the Virgin and Child is that such half-lengths of the subject appear very rarely in Hispano-Flemish painting and that, when they do occur, one directly inspired by precedents of the L o w Countries. Neither Roger van 15

Vol. I V , fig. 22. Vol. I V , pp. 1 3 2 - 1 3 4 . 17 Of. cit., 3 2 5 . 18 T h e dimensions are 3 5 ^ in height by 4 5 ^ inches in width. 19 See above, p. 246. 20 T h e r e were two panels in the series, depicting the Noli me tangere and Pentecost, that I was not shown and have now been presented to the cathedral of Zamora by donors, bringing the number of compartments preserved to seventeen (or eighteen, if we include the Ecce Homo in private possession at M a d r i d ) . 21 T h e dimensions are 1 9 inches in height by 1 3 / 4 in width. 16

FIG. ioo. FOLLOWER OF FERNANDO GALLEGO. CRUCIFIXION. SCHAEFFER GALLERIES, NEW YORK

APPENDIX

2 55

der W e y d e n nor D i e r i c k Bouts, the latter of w h o m w e should particularly expect a disciple of F e r n a n d o G a l l e g o to have h a d in m i n d , furnishes any prototype that the Spaniard here actually copied, although there are several approximations a m o n g their w o r k s .

T h e nearest analogues in composition,

with the C h i l d f i n g e r i n g a book, are f o u n d in the f u l l - l e n g t h s by R o g e r ' s tardy f o l l o w e r , the M e i s t e r mit d e m gestichten L a u b , 2 2 w h i c h , h o w e v e r , are probably later in date than the Spanish picture, so that w e o u g h t to postulate that both masters depended upon one of R o g e r ' s lost achievements.

I f only the original provenience of the S c h a e f f e r panels could be

ascertained, w e m i g h t be guided to their definite creator.

I t is conceivable

that he w a s active in the Palencian region since his w o r k s exhibit some ties w i t h

those of the C h a l a n d o n

M a s t e r , although

the similarities are

inadequate for a definite assignment to the same h a n d .

PAINTERS OF T H E L O W C O U N T R I E S A C T I V E FOR S P A I N DURING T H E E A R L Y RENAISSANCE

I n the last years there have been within m y vision f u r t h e r w o r k s by Flemish and D u t c h masters so w o v e n into the fabric of Spanish art that I have felt obliged to consider t h e m in m y f o r m e r v o l u m e s and in special articles.

T o m y accretions

1

to the copious Spanish record of the activities

of the painter n o w ordinarily held to be n a m e d A d r i a e n Y s e n b r a n t ,

we

must add, I believe, a panel of St. I l d e f o n s o ' s investiture w i t h the chasuble in the M a r c h Collection at Sa V a i l , M a j o r c a ( F i g . ι ο ί ) , an achievement that can be regarded as executed in or for the peninsula by reason of the subject and its possession by a Spaniard.

Since the picture does not fall

precisely within the annals of Spanish painting, I w i l l not irk the reader with the detailed comparisons for proof of the attribution that usually enc u m b e r s m y pages, but I will baldly state m y conviction of the authorship, l e a v i n g to him the detective's pleasure of verification. N o r w i l l I labor the ascription of a panel of St. J a m e s M a j o r ( F i g . 1 0 2 ) in the possession of the w i d o w of m y late l a m e n t e d friend, D o n R a i m u n d o R u i z , at M a d r i d , to the D u t c h m a n w h o s e career in Spain has been m y particular interest, J a n Joest. 2

Since the attribution is n o w generally ac-

cepted, I confine myself to pointing out the entire accordance w i t h a c o n 2 2 M a x J . F r i e d l ä n d e r , Die altniederländische Malerei, L e y d e n , 1 9 2 4 , I V , pis. 84 and 85. 1 V o l . I X , p. 12. Since the p u b l i c a t i o n of this v o l u m e , H a v e r k a m p B e g e m a n n has increased o u r debt to h i m f o r clarification of artists of the L o w Countries active in Spain ( c f . m y v o l . V I I I , pp. 1 2 - 6 4 ) b y defining· the personality of a painter of the late fifteenth century, the M a s t e r of the Saint G o d e l i e v e L e g e n d , and b y c o n c l u s i v e l y a s c r i b i n g to him not o n l y the triptych f r o m Salinas de A n a n a , n o w in the M u s e u m of V i t o r i a ( c f . m y v o l . I X , p. 9 ) , but also another t r i p t y c h , devoted to the Passion, in the C a r t u j a de M i r a f l o r e s , B u r g o s : see his article in the Bulletin des Musées Royaux de Beaux-Arts, Brussels, I V ( 1 9 5 5 ) , nos. 1—3, 1 8 5 . 2 See m y article, A Second Retable by Jan Joest in S fain, in the Gazette des beauxarts, series 6, X X I I ( 1 9 4 2 ) , pp. 1 2 7 — 1 3 4 .

FIG. i o i . ADRIAEN YSENBRANT. ST. ILDEFONSO'S INVESTITURE WITH THE CHASUBLE. MARCH COLLECTION, SA VALL, MAJORCA {Photo. Mas)

FIG. ι ο ί .

JAN J O E S T . ST. J A M E S M A J O R . C O L L E C T I O N OF R A I M U N D O RUIZ, M A D R I D (Photo. Mas)

258

APPENDIX

stant, sternly virile, bearded, deeply furrowed type of his, as especially in the turbaned personage at the right in the compartment of St. Bartholomew exorcising in the temple of Astaroth 3 in the retable dedicated to the Apostle in the church of S. Lesmes, Burgos. T h e small panel 4 representing St. James in half-length and probably deriving from a predella, the Ruiz painting is reported to have come from the region of Burgos and thus would further demonstrate the extension of Joest's patronage to this province. I am familiar with a pair of much more important and hitherto unregistered works by him the former presence of which in Spain is proved because they were used as models for parts of the great Hispano-Flemish retable of the Reyes Católicos, 5 but the lady who owns them is loath to have them published. Ever since I first began an intensive study of early Spanish painting now these many years ago, I have been troubled off and on by an inability to find an artist to father a rather impressive panel of a half-length of St. Bernard at my last knowledge in the Cobo Collection at Madrid. I have never been satisfied with August L . Mayer's attribution, made as far back as 1 9 2 2 in the German edition of his Geschichte der spanischen Malerei 6 and describing the picture as "very near" to Pedro Berruguete. Admittedly the ascription of a single figure of this kind is a difficult proposition, but at the very start of the problem the competent technique is so decidedly Flemish as to speak for an actual painter of the L o w Countries instead of a Spanish imitator. I doubt whether I should ever have perceived who this northerner was unless I had suddenly realized the near identity with the St. Bernard in a panel in the Collection of Don Francisco Bernal Otero at Jerez de la Frontera, a work that I claimed for the Flemish personality, whom, having created, I christened the Master of Santa Inés in an article in the Ga%ette des beaux-arts of 1 9 5 3 , 7 when I should already have seen, and not waited until now to discern, that the Cobo picture is by the same hand. T h e nearness of the two representations extends even to the bald head, the silkiness of what hair there is, the drawing of the ear, the folds of the cowl and sleeves, and the nature and obliqueness of the pastoral staff. One could demur that both figures might be based upon some precedent by another Fleming, but the answer to this is that the type appears throughout the production of the Master of Santa Inés, for instance, from the retable of the church of Santa Inés, Seville, in one of the Apostles in the Ascension and Pentecost and especially in the oldest Magus in the Epiphany, or, from the triptych of Santo Domingo de la Calzada, in the St. Gregory of his Mass and the singer at the extreme left in the group of choristers. T h e St. Bernard of the Cobo Collection is somewhat less gentle and more individualized than the counterparts whom I have just listed, 3

Of. cit., fig. 4. T h e dimensions are 52 centimetres in height by 40 in width. 5 See my vol. I V , p. 4 1 8 . 6 P . 158. 7 P. 2 1 7 . T h e St. Bernard at Jerez de la Frontera is illustrated as figure ι 6, but I did not then know in what private collection in the city the work was. 4

APPENDIX

259

but in these respects he is closely approximated in the bishop at the left in the Mass of St. G r e g o r y . T h e individualization is such that M a y e r describes the figures as a portrait of an abbot, but that St. Bernard was intended is plainly shown by the monastic habit, by his similarity to the representation at Jerez de la Frontera, and by the words on the banderole that supply by no means the sole instance in which they distinguish him in sacred art, " M o n s t r a te esse m a t r e m , " from the hymn Ave maris stella, which he was then ( w r o n g l y ) supposed to have written. He lacks a halo, but the Master of Santa Inés generally dispenses with this adjunct. T h e hands are the objects of a little more care than the painter usually took the pains to apply to these extremities, but w e cannot, of course, confine an artist to making no exception to the commission of his faults. I t was reported to M a y e r that the picture, then in the U h a g ó n Collection, Madrid, comes from Tordesillas, southwest of Valladolid, and, if the report is correct, there is no reason that the Master should not have received an order at this time, which lies between the places for which he is definitely ascertained to have labored, Seville and Santo D o m i n g o de la Calzada. T h e Cobo panel appears, like the example at J e r e z de la Frontera, to be a fragment of a larger production. It is pleasant to be able with practical sureness to round out with another work our inheritance from the Master of Santa Inés. A n additional interest attaches to the work, a Crucifixion in the Cartwright Collection at A y n h o Park, England ( F i g . 1 0 3 ) , since, of unascertained provenience, it might possibly be the sole recognized achievement by him done before or after his employment in Spain. T h e general, close affinity with his manner is at once clearly perceptible, and it remains only to pick out intimate correspondences in detail in order to render the attribution virtually inevitable. O f anatomical characteristics, there should particularly be noted the light, rippling hair and one of the artist's shortcomings, the negligent delineation of the hands in precisely the same form as in his soundly authenticated productions. In actual type, the Magdalene is comparable to the Virgin in the Epiphany of the Seville retable, and the St. John is a youthful variant of the spectacled Apostle in the Pentecost of this retable and of the St. Bernard in the fragment in the Collection of D o n Francisco Bernal O t e r o at Jerez de la Frontera. Perhaps even more persuasive is the nature of the captivating landscape, belonging exactly to the class of the backgrounds especially in the Seville Epiphany, in the J e r e z fragment, and in the compartment of St. Jerome in the triptych at Santo Domingo de la Calzada. If w e accept the Madonna and Child in the L á z a r o Galdeano Foundation, Madrid, 8 as a production of the Master of Santa Inés, it is hard to question his claims to a small 9 circular version of the theme in the Ashmolean Museum, O x f o r d ( F i g . 1 0 4 ) , since the Virgin is practically identical in countenance, sober downward glance, and undulating hair. 8 9

Gazette des beaux-arts, 1953, fig. 32 centimetres in diameter.

18.

FIG. 103. T H E M A S T E R OF S A N T A INÉS. CRUCIFIXION. C A R T W R I G H T COLLECTION, A Y N H O P A R K , E N G L A N D (Photo. Courtauld)

Fie. 104. T H E M A S T E R OF SANTA INÉS. MADONNA AND CHILD. ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM, OXFORD

2Ö2

A P P E N D I X

T h e Child can easily be accommodated to the standard of the Master of Santa Inés, and the parts of the composition are placed as in the Lázaro panel. T h e Madonna with her son occupies something more than the left of the space, and reading upward at the right we see the arm of her seat, then a parapet, and finally a landscape not unlike the vista that the Lázaro picture unfolds. W e have entertained some doubts, however, in regard to the attribution of the Lázaro example to the Master of Santa Inés, whose right to the Oxford painting would be at least equally bedimmed. I say "at least" because there is one little bar to a belief in a single authorship for the panels at Oxford and Madrid. T h e panel in the Ashmolean Museum does not betray the neglect of the drawing of hands which is an almost omnipresent defect of the Master of Santa Inés and disfigures the Madrid rendering; but on a former page 1 0 I have alluded to such a not very significant departure from his ordinary procedure. A precedent for the treatment of the subject in the round had been set in the Pax by the Andalusian Master of the Military Orders 1 1 and suggests that, if the Master of Santa Inés be indeed the painter, it was executed by him during his period at Seville. A n inscription runs about the edge of the frame which, with the aid of a friend, an expert in such matters, I have succeeded in deciphering, although the words are usually not separated and there are one or two instances of letters (now erased) above the line, of abbreviations, and of blottings out by the effects of time. Since it appears approximately to date the painting, it had best be quoted in full: "Quien rezare la Magnificat ó la Salve Regina á Nuestra (abbreviated to Nra) Señora gana trienta mil años de perdón otorgados por el Papa Clemente" (Whoever recites the Magnificat or the Salve Regina to Our Lady gains thirty thousand years of pardon granted by the Pope Clement). T h e probability is that the indulgence was bestowed, at about the time which the style shows the panel to have been done, by Clement V I I , the years of whose pontificate are 1 5 2 3 — 1 5 3 4 , rather than subsequently conferred upon the picture by one of his successors of the same name.

T H E E A R L Y RENAISSANCE AT F U E N T E O V E J U N A

(CÓRDOBA)

T h e distinguished notary and student of the Fine Arts at Fuenteovejuna, Don José Valverde Madrid, in friendly correspondence with me, in two articles, 1 and in a section of his book, 2 has thrown more light upon the problems of the paintings in the parish church of this Cordovan town. In the first place, he points out to me that the possible candidate for the authorship of the fine retable in the Capilla del Sagrario, whom I 3 called Andrés Pérez, was really named in the document Antón Pérez. I was 10

P. 259. See my vol. X I I I , Appendix, p. 3 3 3 . 1 In the publications at the town, Semana santa, 1 9 5 5 , p. 5, and Fons Mellaría, September, 1 9 5 J , pp. 2 3 - 2 4 . 2 La fintura sevillana en la frimera mitai del siglo XVI, Seville, 1956, pp. 22—25. 3 Vol. X , p. 2 1 9 . 11

APPENDIX

263

betrayed into the error because A n g u l o 4 in summarizing the document entitled him by a lapsus calami Andrés, and although in the next paragraph he gave the Christian name as A n t ó n , I wrongly surmised that his earlier printing, Andrés, was correct. Señor Valverde also writes me that the Capilla del Sagrario cannot be as R a m i r e z de Arellano supposed, 5 the one founded by the precantor of the cathedral of Cordova, Antón R u i z de Morales, 6 because it is not his escutcheon which is seen in the chapel but the shield of some other personage not yet identified, so that the difficulty in assigning the retable to so early a date as the time of the cleric at the end of the fifteenth and very beginning of the sixteenth century would be removed. I t is believed by Valverde that the chapel of R u i z de Morales is the one in the church containing another retable, dedicated to St. Barbara, and, thus, according to my chronology, since this retable is recorded as already in place by c. 1 5 2 4 , it cannot be the altarpiece for which the contract was signed in 1 5 3 1 by Antón Pérez, whose claims to the example in the Sagrario would therefore be strengthened and w h o m Valverde actually proposes for the honor. 7 A m o n g Valverde's discoveries is a document of February 10, 1 5 2 7 , declaring Antón P é r e z to have then become a student of one of the six painters of the period at Cordova called Pedro F e r n á n d e z ; 8 and he had also found record that Bartolomé R u i z , whether or not the assistant of Antón P é r e z on the retable of 1 5 3 1 , collaborated in 1 5 4 1 on a (lost) altarpiece at a town south of Cordova, L a Rambla. I myself should have noted, when I wrote volume X , 9 that on January 27, 1530, an artist, Pedro V á z q u e z , transferred at Seville to A n t ó n P é r e z of Fuenteovejuna labor, seemingly polychromy of statuary, on a retable at Segura de L e ó n , 1 0 in the extreme southern part of the province of B a d a j o z , far east of Fuenteovejuna but in the same latitude. A t present it appears impossible to determine whether the painter of Fuenteovejuna is the same as an A n t ó n Pérez, described as a citizen of Seville and extensively and importantly employed in the city and in Andalusia from 1535 through the third quarter of the sixteenth century; but, if M a y e r 1 1 rightly thinks the altarpiece on the west wall of the chapel of Santiago in the cathedral of Seville to be the Sevillian's creation, the homonym of Fuenteovejuna, if he be the author of the retable in the Sagrario in the Archivo español de arte, X V I I ( 1 9 4 4 ) , 240. M y vol. X , p. 219. 6 For its foundation, see Juan Gómez Bravo, Catálogo de los Obispos de Cordova, Cordova, I ( 1 7 7 8 ) , 390. 7 He ascribes to the author of the retable of the Sagrario also the sculptured retable over the high altar of the church, a proposition about which I have no right to an opinion since I did not study adequately the latter at my visit to Fuenteovejuna. 8 See notes 1 and 2 above. 9 Volume X , p. 188. 10 Documentos para la historia del arte en Andalucía, Seville, V I I I ( 1 9 3 5 ) , 51. See the indices in my vols. I, V I , and I X and the Thieme-Becker Künstler-Lexikon, Leipzig, 1932, X X V I , 404. 11 Die Sevillaner Malerschule, Leipzig, 1 9 1 1 , 79—80, and Geschichte der spanischen Malerei, Leipzig, edition of 1922, p. 199. 4

5

APPENDIX

264

c h u r c h of this t o w n , c a n n o t be identical, since e v e n in the course of y e a r s h e c o u l d n e v e r h a v e d e v e l o p e d into j u s t the k i n d of e x p o n e n t of the m a t u r e R e n a i s s a n c e a n d of m a n n e r i s m w h i c h the altarpiece embodies. T h e equation of the a u t h o r of the retable in the S a g r a r i o w i t h

Antón

P é r e z of F u e n t e o v e j u n a c o n t i n u e s to be s o m e w h a t b l o c k e d by the possibility that it w a s painted by the C a s t i l i a n w h o did the panel of the m i r a c l e of Sts. C o s m a s a n d D a m i a n in the P r a d o a n d w h o m I a m n o w

somewhat

m o r e inclined to predicate w a s F e r n a n d o del R i n c ó n , a l t h o u g h less r e a d y to a c c e p t the p a n e l ' s a u t h o r as the F u e n t e o v e j u n a M a s t e r . 1 2 of the

retable

kindly

given

me

by

Señor

Valverde

T h e photographs

contribute

nothing

f u r t h e r to the equation, e x c e p t p e r h a p s the facial similarity of the S t . C o s m a s ( a t the l e f t ) to the l o w e r soldier at the l e f t in the R e s u r r e c t i o n , w h i c h he states, in a l e t t e r to m e , to h a v e b e e n o r i g i n a l l y a p a r t of the retable but to h a v e been m o v e d to a w a l l of the c h a p e l . 1 3 I n d e e d , if w e d o u b t the loosely c a l c u l a t e d date of c. the retable of St. B a r b a r a a g r e e m e n t of 1 5 3 1

then

to be a l r e a d y

1 5 2 4 as s h o w i n g

in place, A n t ó n

m i g h t h a v e to do w i t h this w o r k ;

Pérez's

or he m i g h t h a v e

c o n t r a c t e d f o r the retable in some y e a r prior to 1 5 2 4 in a n u n d i s c o v e r e d document.

I n w r i t i n g v o l u m e X , I p e r h a p s belittled s o m e w h a t the quality

of the retable of St. B a r b a r a because I relied u p o n the impression that I received

just

after studying

the

greater

S a g r a r i o w h e n I visited the c h u r c h ;

in

the

but the p h o t o g r a p h f o r w h i c h I

glory

am

a g a i n o b l i g e d to S e ñ o r V a l v e r d e ' s c o u r t e s y

of

(Fig.

the 105)

altarpiece

s h o w s it to h a v e

been e x e c u t e d by so c o m p e t e n t a f o l l o w e r of the c o n t e m p o r a r y l e a d e r of the C o r d o v a n school, P e d r o R o m a n o , t h a t at times I h a v e b e e n l u r e d into ascribing it to the l a t t e r h i m s e l f .

almost

T h e f e m a l e heads, f o r instance,

are v e r y similar, a n d t h e r e is the s a m e predilection f o r g a t e s of t o w n s in the settings of his scenes.

I n the r e t a b l e ' s m a i n c o m p a r t m e n t St. B a r b a r a

stands, a g e n t l y m o n u m e n t a l

figure,

u p o n a classic capital, w o r s h i p p e d by

a clerical d o n o r , w h o , a c c o r d i n g to V a l v e r d e ' s r e c k o n i n g , w o u l d be A n t ó n R u i z de M o r a l e s .

T h e f o u r s u r r o u n d i n g scenes represent h e r s e r m o n i z i n g

h e r f a t h e r , d r a g g e d by h i m f r o m h e r m o u n t a i n o u s r e f u g e ,

flagellated,

and

decapitated. Q u i t e u n u s u a l l y f o r the t i m e , the paintings are on c l o t h instead of w o o d , a n d it is s t r a n g e t h a t he should h a v e w o r k e d in a n o t h e r m e d i u m used at the period, e m b e l l i s h i n g the w a l l s of the c h u r c h

with

rarely

recently

u n c o v e r e d frescoes, the k n o w l e d g e a n d p h o t o g r a p h s of w h i c h are a m o n g m y m a n y debts to V a l v e r d e ' s g e n e r o s i t y .

Except

f o r an E p i p h a n y ,

the

t h e m e s , difficult to r e c o g n i z e in s o m e instances b y reason of the dilapidated c o n d i t i o n , a r e single or c o u p l e d effigies of sacred p e r s o n a g e s , the M a d o n n a w i t h t h e C h i l d , St. B a r t h o l o m e w

( ? ) , St. T h o m a s A q u i n a s ( a p p a r e n t l y a

D o m i n i c a n w i t h the r e g u l a r e m b l e m s of a n ecclesiastical D o c t o r , a c h u r c h in one h a n d i l l u m i n e d by r a y s f r o m the o t h e r h a n d ) , St. L u c y ,

another

v i r g i n m a r t y r , a n d c o u p l e d Sts. S i m o n a n d J u d e ( t h e i r feast o c c u r r i n g on 12 13

See my vol. IX, pp. 271—272. Vol. X , p. 220.

FIG. 105. FOLLOWER OF PEDRO ROMANO. R E T A B L E OF ST. BARBARA. PARISH CHURCH, FUENTEOVEJUNA

266

APPENDIX

the same day, October 2 8 ) , and Sts. Cosmas and Damian. T h e unity with the retable of St. Barbara is adequately demonstrated by such correspondences as exist between the figure of this martyred maiden and the frescoed St. L u c y or between the bearded companion of St. Barbara's father at her decapitation and Sts. Simon and Jude. O n e of the high arches of the church is also decorated with mural paintings of the period, the author (or authors) of which I do not detect — surely not the artist of the retable in the chapel of the Sagrario and scarcely the same as the pupil of Pedro Romano w h o has concerned us in the last paragraphs. T h e heterogeneous subjects are: in the apex, Christ at the C o l u m n adored by a hallowed w o m a n ; at the lower left, the standing St. Catherine of Alexandria, trampling upon Maximin and with her name inscribed above her; and, balancing at the right, the Baptism of O u r L o r d , oddly isolated from the adjacent themes by being ensconced in a painted frame.

INDICES

INDEX OF NAMES OF ARTISTS In cases where there are two or more entries after a name, italics indicate the pages on luhich the frincifal discussions of the artists in question may be found; for masters who are mentioned only incidentally, italics have not been used in such instances.

Abezames Master, 46, 55—61. Alvarez, Manuel, 39. Amberes, Francisco de, 32. A v i l a , Hernando de, 197, 220—226. A v i l a , Lorenzo de, 221. Bacchiacca, 7. Bandinello, Baccio, 1 1 . Barroso, Miguel, xxi, 195—203. Bartolommeo, Fra, 207, 209. Bassano, Jacopo, 65. Becerra, Antón, 148. Becerra, Gaspar, xii, 13, 93, 148-180, 196. Becerril Master, 79, 87, 89. Bello, Pedro, 249, 253. Belorado Master, 89. Bergamasco, II: see Castello, Battista. Bermejo, 249.

Giovanni

Berruguete, Alonso, xii, 3—31, 32, 33, 37; 43) 45) 4 6 ) 4 8 ) S3) 55) 58, 64, 7°> 73> 76, 91, 102, 103, 104, 1 1 2 , 114, 1 1 5 , 124, 148, 154, 163. Berruguete, Inocencio, 63. Berruguete, Pedro, 3, 4, n. 4, 258. Bouts, Dierick, 255. Borgoña, Juan de, 48, 134, 194, 204, 207. Bronzino, 7, 20. Buonarroti: see Michael Angelo. Calvo, Antón, 90. Campagnola, 150. Campos, Agustín de, 182. Caravaggio, 6 ¡ . Caravaggio, Polidoro da, i 6 j . Carrion, Leonardo de, 93. C a r v a j a l , Francisco de, 182.

C a r v a j a l , Luis de, xii, 181—1Ç5, 202, 203, 205. Castello, Giovanni Battista, 157. Cavaro, Pedro, 153. Celma, Benito, 156. Chalandon Master, 255. Cincinnato, Romulo, 157, 202. Cisneros Master, 79, n. 42, 1)4—102. Comontes, Francisco de, 114, 127, 203, 207, 221. Correa de Vivar, Juan, 43, 45, 46, 203, 207, 213. Correggio, 104, 125, 127, 162, 187, 222. Cosimo, Pier di, 5, 7, 8, 20. Cuadra, Pedro de la, 156.

200,

194, 73, 165,

Donatello, 17, 1 1 5 . Durham Master, 132, 134. Dürer, 89. Estense, Baldassare, 17. Fernández, Pedro, 263. Fernández de Navarrete, xxii, 65, 189, 193, 194. Flandes, Juan de, 96. Fuenteovejuna Master, 264. Gallego, Fernando, 58, Giralte, Francisco, 90. Girard Master, 139. Gómez, Juan, xxii, 187. Goya, 164.

244—255.

Greco, El, xxii, 24, 28, 188, 228. Heras, Pedro de las, 90. Hernández, Bartolomé, 125. Herrera, Cristóbal de, 29, 32—43, 96.

INDEX OF NAMES OF ARTISTS Herrera, Juan de, 202. Herrera, Pedro de, 122. Holy Cross Master, 115. Huguet, 241. Joest, Jan, 2 5 5 - 2 5 8 . Juanes, Juan de, 203. Juni, Isaac de, 1 5 5 - 1 5 6 . Juni, Juan de, 24, 65, 90, 125. Ledesma, Blas de, xxi, 205. Lences Master, 137—140. Leonardo da Vinci, xxi, 10, 58, 107. Lippi, Filippino, 4, 5, 7, 20. Lippo, Fra Filippo, 5, η. 8. Luna Master, 109. Maître aux Armures, 246, 253. Maldonado Master, 169. Mantegna, 162. Martínez de Castañeda, Pedro, 222. Masaccio, 17. Master of St. Ildefonso, 253. Master of San Andres de Arroyo, 140— '47• Master of Santa Inés, 258—262. Master of the Military Orders, 262. Master of the Saint Godelieve Legend, 255, η. ι . Master of the Sinister Countenances: see Maître aux Armures. Master Rocque, 240—241. Meister der v. Grooteschen Anbetung, 137. Meister mit dem gestichten Laub, 255. Melozzo da Forlì, 148. Michael Angelo, xxi, 7, 10, 1 1 , 13, 17, 20, 24, 25, 55, 58, 109, 1 1 4 , 1 1 5 , 120, 122, 149, 150, 157, 163, 164, 166, 169, 1 7 1 , 177, 179, 187, 195, 222. Monegro, Juan Bautista, 181. M u d o , el: see Fernández de Navarrete. Murillo, 58. Muziano, Girolamo, 209. Nunyes, Pedro, 226. Oliva, Juan de : see Oliveri, Juan. Olivares Master, 60, ιογ—ι22, 136. Oliver, Juan de: see Oliveri, Juan.

Oliveri, Juan, 2 5 5 - 2 3 7 , 240. Palencia, Gaspar de, 37, 60-70, 91, 93, 127, 140, 144, 146. Pantoja de la Cruz, xxii. Pereda, Juan de, 109, 132. Pérez, Andrés: see Pérez, Antón, of Fuenteovejuna. Pérez, Antón, of 2 66.

Fuenteovejuna,

262—

Pérez, Antón, of Medina del Campo, J 2 2—1 2Ç. Pérez, Antón, of Seville, 122, 263-264. Perugino, 4. Pintoricchio, 27. Poliamolo, Antonio, 148. Portillo Master, 76. Prado, Blas del, xxi, 181, 187, 188, 202, 203—220, 221, 226. Rabuyate, Benito, 63, 90, 125. Raphael, 10, 15, 24, 25, 27, 55, 104, 122, 222. Ribera, Gregorio, 65, 71. Rincón, Fernando del, 264. Rodríguez, Diego, 93. Rodríguez de Solis, Juan, 43, 89, 139. Romano, Giulio, 26. Romano, Pedro, 264—266. Rosso, Florentino, xxi, 7. Rubiales, Francisco de, 149, n. 2. Rubiales, Pedro de, 149, 151. Ruiz, Bartolomé, 263. Sánchez Coello, Alonso, xxii, 206, 210. Sansovino, Jacopo, 10, 20. Santafede, Fabrizio, 216. Schongauer, 89. Sebastiano del Piombo, 122, 1 7 1 . Serra, Pedro, 232. Solibes, 140, n. 15. St. Nicholas Master, 130. Stephan von Calar, Jan, 150—151, 152. Tintoretto, Tintoretto, Titian, 31, Tordesillas,

65. Domenico, 194. 150, 165, 209. Gaspar de, 29, 48, 5 1 , 71,

73» 125· T o r o Master, 31, 43-55. Toschi, Pier Francesco, 7.

INDEX OF NAMES OF ARTISTS Urbino, Diego de, 169. Vasari, Giorgio, xii, 149, 150, 1 5 1 , 163, 220. Vasco de la Zarza, 3, η. %. Vázquez, Antonio, 43, 7 0 - Í 9 , 90, 91, 96, 98, 100, 102. Vázquez, Diego, 225. Vázquez, Jerónimo, 63, 8 ç - ç j , 175. Vázquez, Pedro, 263. Vázquez de Barreda, Gabriel, 90. Velasco, Luis de, 197, 204, 205, 206, 217, 219. Velázquez, 146, 164. Vélez, Luis, 96, 102—108. Veneziano, Agostino, 18, 26. Ventosilla Master, 130—r37.

Venusti, Marcello, 1 7 1 . Vergara, Nicolás de, the η. 50.

27I

elder,

204,

Vergara, Nicolás de, the younger, 204, η. 50. Veronese, 200, 202, 203. Veronese, Carlotto, 200. Villalobos Master, 244. Villamediana Master, 241-24 Villoldo, Isidro, 32. Villoldo, Juan de, 32, 181. Volterra, Daniele da, 150, 163.

Weyden, Roger van der, 253—255.

Ysenbrant, Adriaen, 255—256.

INDEX OF PLACES In cases where there are two or more numerical references after an entry, indicate the fages on which the frincifal discussions of the paintings in question may be found. Asterisks denote the •presence of illustrations.

Abezames, E l Salvador, panels from a retable Master, 55-58*,

by

Abezames

60.

panels from a retable by T o r o Master, 46-47*, 51· Amsterdam, panel, formerly in, by Girard Master, 139. Arcenillas, panels by Fernando Gallego and an assistant, 253. Artajona, S. Saturnino, frescoes of life of St. Saturninus by Master Rocque, 234, 237-241*. Astorga, cathedral, retable by Gaspar Becerra, 154, 163, 164, 166, 169, 172) 175) 179· Atienza, L a Trinidad, pieces of a predella from Sta. M a r í a del Rey by Olivares Master, 118-122*. A v i l a , cathedral, retable of high altar by Juan de Borgoña, 48. Aynho Park, England, Cartwright Collection, Crucifixion by Master of Santa Inés, 259—260*. Bamba, retable by Becerril Master, 89. Barcelona, Archivo of the Palacio Real Menor, portrait by Flemish school, 28. Badrinas Collection, triptych by A n tonio Vázquez, 85. Gudiol Collection, Mass of St. Gregory by Fernando Gallego, 24g, 251*. Mateu Collection, Adoration of the Shepherds by Master of San A n dres de Arroyo, 144—14 7*. Merelo Collection, St. Paul visits St. Peter in Prison by Fernando Gallego, 246, 24Ç, 250*.

italics

Museum, two panels from A m e y u g o by Olivares Master, 115—118*. Museum of Catalan A r t , fragment by Villalobos Master, 244. fragments of a panel from a coffin in Franco-Gothic style, 233. lamentation for the dead on the sarcophagus from Mahamud in Franco-Gothic style, 233. Prats T o m á s Collection, Quo vadis by Fernando Gallego, private collections,

246.

fragment of a predella by Becerril Master, 89. triptych of the Epiphany by Master of San Andrés de Arroyo, 140— 144*, 146. Viñas Collection, retable of A l l Saints by follower of Villamediana Maste!·) 243-245*. Beverly, Massachusetts, Sedgwick Collection, panel of St. Bernardine by follower of Villamediana Master, 243-244. Bierge,

murals in Franco-Gothic 231.

style,

Bilbao, Museo de Bellas Artes, Ecce Homo by Gaspar de Palencia, 65-67*, 70. Epiphany by Gaspar de Palencia, 69. Martyrdom of St. Agatha by Gaspar de Palencia, 60—65*, 66. Boadilla del Camino, parish church, retable of the Passion by Cristóbal de Herrera, 42—43. Budapest, Museum, portrait of a man

INDEX OF PLACES ascribed

to

Alonso

Berruguete,

10. Burgos, Cartuja de Miraflores, triptych of the Passion by Master of the Saint Godelieve Legend, 255, n . i . S. Lesmes, retable by Jan Joest, 258. Sta. Agueda, Baptism by Ventosilla Master, 134-136*. Burlingame, California, Collection of W . W . Crocker, Annunciation of the Virgin's Death by Villamediana Master, 241—243*.

Caracas, Venezuela, Collection of Don Luis A . López Méndez, triptych by Cisneros Master, 100—102*. Cartagena, San Ginés de la Jara, two paintings from retable of high altar (non-extant), formerly in, by M i g u e l Barroso, 198, 202. Castil de Lences, Franciscan nuns, St. Ursula by Lences Master, 139140. triptych by Lences Master, 13 7-/59*, 140. Castrogonzalo, retable described by Gómez-Moreno in 1927, 48. Chicago, Illinois, Harding Collection, carding of St. Felix by Villalobos Master, 244. Cisneros, S. Facundo, retable by Cisneros Master, 9 4 - 9 7 * , 98.

Dijon,

Museum, bust of a saint Fernando Gallego, 249—255.

by

Escorial, church, Anna selbdritt and Christ being stripped for the scourging (lost), formerly in, by Luis de C a r v a j a l , 193. Coronation by Fernández de Navarrete, 193. decoration of an organ-case (lost), formerly in, by Luis de C a r v a j a l , 193. Expulsion

of

the

money-changers,

273

formerly in, by Fernández de Navarrete, 193. fresco of St. Sixtus by Romulo Cincinnato, 202. Nativity by Fernández de Navarrete, 193. nine faces of virgins by Luis de C a r v a j a l , 193. paintings of the Holy Family, formerly in, by Fernández de Navarrete, 193. polychromy of sculpture by Luis de C a r v a j a l , 193. retables of coupled saints by nández de Navarrete, 189. retables of coupled saints by

FerLuis

de C a r v a j a l , 189—193*. sketch for Magdalene, formerly in, by Fernández de Navarrete, 194. St. Andrew bringing St. Peter to Christ by Fernández de Navarrete, 193. two figures of saints by Luis de C a r v a j a l , 193. Virgin, Child, and St. Joseph by Fernández de Navarrete, 193, η. 19. cloister, figures of the Saviour and the Virgin, formerly in, by Miguel Barroso, 197, 198, 202. frescoes by Luis de C a r v a j a l , 187. triptych by Romulo Cincinnato, 202. triptych of Adoration of the Shepherds by Luis de C a r v a j a l , 182— 189*. triptych of the Ascension by Miguel Barroso, 197, 198—202*. triptych of the Epiphany by Luis de C a r v a j a l , 182—189*. triptych of the Pentecost by Miguel Barroso, 197, 198—202*, 203. two frescoes by M i g u e l Barroso, 197, 200. two triptychs and frescoes by Luis de C a r v a j a l , 197, 200. monastery, Annunciation by Veronese, 200. Ferrara, Massari Collection, Dormition ascribed both to Alonso Berrug-

INDEX OF PLACES

274 uete

and

to

Baldassare

C a p i l l a del S a g r a r i o , retable by

Estense,

*9> n · 54·

'5~'7>

ton P é r e z , 262—264, church,

Florence, Annunziata,

Deposition

by

frescoes

Filippino

drawing· of Anna selbdritt, the

Annunciation

retable

of

(?),

Madonna

15.

and

Child

Peaceful

the

Prophecy

Government

of

of

the

Philip

I I I b y B i a s del P r a d o ( ? ) ,

drawing

of

the

Virgin

and

del P r a d o , 2 2 0 . a bird by Bias del P r a d o , 2ig*,

La

Pedraga

for

Christ

Transfigured

by

Alonso Berruguete, 15—16*. studies

of

male

Berruguete, Virgin

and

nudes

by

Alonso

13—14*.

Child by A l o n s o

Ber-

ruguete, 8, n. 1 6 . f o r the Battle

(destroyed), and

Child

St. J o h n 8—g*,

of

formerly

Michael Angelo, π , Virgin

by A l o n s o

Cascina in,

by

young

Berruguete,

10.

32

de P o r t i l l o ,

S. A n t ó n ,

polychromy

of

and three paintings formerly

in, by

re-

sculpture,

(destroyed),

Gaspar

de

Pa-

lencia, 64. L a R a m b l a , retable ( l o s t ) , f o r m e r l y in, by Antón

Pérez

and

Bartolomé

Ruiz, 263. Leningrad,

Hermitage,

panels by M i g u e l B a r r o s o

(?),

197,

202—203. painting

of

St.

Andrew

ascribed

to

J u a n de J u a n e s , 2 0 3 . León,

S.

Isidoro,

St.

Ursula

London,

Collection

Lamentation lego,

of by

by

Juan

139. Mr.

Buttery,

Fernando

Gal-

249.

Madrid, A c a d e m i a de San

Fernando,

d r a w i n g of Polyphemus ascribed to Conception

by Pier Francesco T o s c h i , 7. (Cordoba),

high

polychromy

13.

with the

Santo Spirito, I m m a c u l a t e Fuenteovejuna

and

R o d r i g u e z de Soli's,

P a l a z z o Vecchio* cartoon

sculptured

gilding

table,

and saints by Luis de Velasco, 2 1 7 , 219.

19.

M a s t e r of Santa Inés, 2 5 8 , 2 5 9 .

217—

8—10.

(de-

Francisco B e r n a l Otero, panel by

panel of Salome ascribed to A l o n s o Berruguete,

frescoes

J e r e z de l a F r o n t e r a , Collection of D o n

220.

sketch f o r Nuestra Señora de G r a c i a

264-

η. 4·

Bias

d r a w i n g of Y o u n g W o m a n holding

to

follower

263,

o f , by Cristóbal de H e r r e r a ,

St.

A n t h o n y A b b o t ascribed to

Real,

Colegiata,

altar,

217.

by A l o n s o Berruguete ( ? ) , 1 5 .

Capilla

Husillos,

d r a w i n g of St. F r a n c i s in Ecstasy by B i a s del P r a d o ( ? ) ,

ascribed

Romano,

Berruguete,

2i9.

d r a w i n g of torso of a nude youth

altar

s t r o y e d ) , f o r m e r l y in, by A l o n s o

del P r a d o , 2 2 0 . of

Pedro

Granada,

adored by saints ascribed to B i a s drawing

high

2 66*.

d r a w i n g of Christ at the C o l u m n b y A l o n s o Berruguete

of

retable of St. B a r b a r a by

2/9-

220.

of

Pedro

A n t ó n P é r e z , 2 3 6 , η. η.

as-

scribed to B i a s del P r a d o ,

drawing

of

arch, 266.

ascribed

to B i a s del P r a d o , 2 2 0 . of

follower 264-266.

murals of early Renaissance on high

G a l l e r y of the Uffizi,

drawing·

by

Romano,

L i p p i and P e r u g i n o , 4.

study

An-

266.

Gaspar Becerra, leaf

with

two

179—180.

saints

Alonso Berruguete,

ascribed ij.

to

INDEX OF PLACES Madonna and saints with donors by Bias del Prado, 2 ¡ ¡ — 2 1 6 * , 217, 220. studies for a crucifixion by Alonso Berruguete, 11—12*. Alcazar palace, frescoes

(destroyed),

formerly in, by Gaspar Becerra, ' 5 5 -

Biblioteca Nacional, drawing· ascribed to Alonso Berruguete, 15. drawing of plan for destroyed retable of high altar for Descalzas Reales by Gaspar Becerra, 154, 1

5 5 >

1 7 9 -

drawing of sections of Sistine Last Judgment ascribed to Gaspar Becerra, 150, ι γ ρ . four anatomical drawings ascribed to Gaspar Becerra, 179. Boix Collection, formerly in, drawing for fresco for cloister of Toledo Cathedral by Gaspar Becerra, 155, 1 6 5 - 1 6 7 , 175, 179. drawing of Prudence, formerly in, by Luis de Carvajal, 187, ζ 95. sketch of angels by Bias del Prado, 219. Capilla del Obispo, paintings by Juan de Villoldo, 32, n. 3. Cobo Collection, St. Bernard by Master of Santa Inés, 258-259. Collection of Don Luis Ruiz, two panels, formerly in, by Cisneros Master, 102. Collection of Don Raimundo Ruiz, St. James M a j o r by Jan Joest, 255— 258*.

Collection of Don Tomás Allende, Flight into Egypt by Fernando Gallego, 249. Collection of the Conde de los Andes, Epiphany by Abezames Master, 58-60*.

Collection of the Conde de Torre Arias, wings of a triptych by Gaspar de Palencia, 69-70. dealer, St. Paul from predella of retable from Ciudad Rodrigo by Fernando Gallego, 246.

275

Descalzas Reales, Guardian Angel ascribed to Gaspar Becerra, 169, 171, ζ72. Nativity by Luis de Carvajal, 194. retable of high altar (destroyed), formerly in, by Gaspar Becerra, ' 5 4 ,

155,

ιδ5>

179·

Sts. John Baptist and Sebastian (destroyed), formerly in, by Gaspar Becerra, 165, 172. E l Pardo palace, frescoes by Gaspar Becerra, xxi, 148, i 6 9> 155J ¡ 5 6 - i 6 5 * , ι " , I7I> i72> I 75> 1 7 9 · paintings on the vault of the Sala de la Reina (non-extant), formerly in, by Luis de Carvajal, 182. Fundación Lázaro Galdeano,

Annunciation by T o r o Master, 48, 5 ° * J

5 3 ·

book of sketches ascribed to Alonso Berruguete, 15. Coronation by Jerónimo Vázquez, 9 4 - 9 5 * ·

Madonna and Child by Master of Santa Inés, 259, 262. Resurrection by Gaspar de Palencia, 66-68*, 69. Museo Cerralbo, predella with the Mass of St. Gregory by Abezames Master ( ? ) , 60—6

I * .

Purification and Crucifixion from Montuenga by Ventosilla Master, 136.

Sts. Bartholomew and James M a j o r by Ventosilla Master, 1 3 6 - 1 3 7 . triptych by Abezames Master, 60. new cathedral, Virgin in FrancoGothic style, 233. Nuestra Señora de la Victoria, paintings (lost), formerly in, ascribed to Gaspar Becerra,

154-

' 5 5 -

Virgen de la Soledad (carved) (destroyed), formerly in, by Gaspar Becerra, 153, 154, 164. Prado, Cain and his family going into exile by Veronese, 200.

276

INDEX OF PLACES D o r m i t i o n by Juan Correa de V i v a r ,

Munich, A l t e Pinakothek, panel of

45Flagellation

by

169—ιγι*,

Gaspar

172.

Madonna

and

saints

by

Child,

Becerra, Bias

del

(?),

249,

N a v a del R e y , Santos Juanes,

M i r a c l e of Sts. D a m i a n and Cosmos

Agatha

by

of

formerly

P é r e z , J27, triptych

165.

Carlotto

York, Epiphany,

Resurrection by E l Greco, 188. Perseus by T i t i a n ,

New

by

Parke-Bernet Galleries,

by Fernando del Rincón, 264. f r o m the story

paintings

107—108*.

Luis V ê l e z ,

içj.

shower of g o l d

252*.

f r o m a retable of O u r L a d y

M a g d a l e n e penitent by Luis de Car-

by

in,

by

Antón

129*. Master,

140—

Crucifixion

and

Lences

Veronese, Schaeffer

200. private

Joseph-Clemens

(?),

167—169*.

St.

Prince

by Pedro Bello

216, 219.

vajal,

10.

von Bayern, Mass of St. G r e g o r y

Prado, 206, 2 0 7 - 2 0 9 * , 2 1 0 , 2 1 3 , M a g d a l e n e by Gaspar Becerra

as-

cribed to A l o n s o Berruguete, of

young

Madonna,

St. John

Collection

and

Galleries,

M a d o n n a and Child by f o l l o w e r

collections,

Ecce H o m o f r o m Arcenillas by Ferfrescoes f r o m Pompién

in

of Fernando G a l l e g o , Norfolk,

nando G a l l e g o , 253, η. 2o. Franco-

Virginia,

253-255*.

Museum,

by Bias del Prado,

Epiphany

213—214*.

Gothic style, 25/—233. Nativity by Antonio V á z q u e z ,

87-

88*.

of h i g h altar by Olivares Master,

retable of the Crucifixion by

Toro

Master, 5 3 - 5 5 * .

49*>

48—

Master,

Collection,

Stephen by

disputation

Gaspar

de

of

ory by Fernando G a l l e g o ,

249.

M a l a g a , retable of St. Pelagius by BeManresa,

Master,

Serra,

232.

103-

Alonso

desert

and

gilding

of

altar

by

Pamplona, in

Franco-Gothic

style,

228. Provincial^

fresco f r o m above tomb of

Bishop

Sánchez de Asiaín by Juan O l i v -

104, 107. M e x i c o C i t y , Pani Collection, enthroned by

Fernando

Gallego,

en,

236.

frescoes f r o m A r t a j o n a in

Franco-

Gothic style, 233—234.

246. Saibene η.

to

29.

S. Pablo, St. John the Baptist in the

Museo

Berruguete, 29. S. M i g u e l , retable by Luis V ê l e z ,

Child

retable ascribed

Berruguete,

Crucifixion

Campo,

S. M a r t í n , retable ascribed to Alonso

Milan,

259-262*.

Cristóbal de Herrera, 32 η. 4·

89.

retable by Pedro

Apostle

Museum,

Palencia, cathedral,

Schlayer Collection, Mass of St. G r e g -

M e d i n a del

Ashmolean

M a d o n n a and child by Master of

St.

Palencia,

70.

cerril

1 1 8 , 120, 122.

Santa Inés,

53·

66—69,

107—115*, Oxford, England,

three panels by T o r o Puncel

Olivares de D u e r o , parish church, retable

Collection,

by Alonso

Virgin

Berruguete,

and 8,

Museum,

Magda-

lene by Villamediana Master, 243.

from

Olite

Gothic style, great

ι6.

M o r a , Sweden, Z o r n

frescoes

fresco

of

Resurrection 2

35~23^>

in

Franco-

234. the by

Passion Juan

*37> 240·

and

Oliveri,

INDEX OF PLACES mural from Olite by Juan Oliveri and his shop, 256-237. Paredes de Nava, Sta. Eulalia, retable of St. Lucy by Cristóbal de Herrera, 28—29, 3 7~39*· triptych, school of Burgos, 147. Sta. M a r í a , retable of St. Anthony Abbot by Cristóbal de Herrera,

277

Sistine chapel, ceiling by Michael Angelo, 17, 58, 112, 114, 122, 166, 179. Last Judgment by Michael Angelo, 150, 167, 179. Sta. Maria del Popolo, Sibyls by Pintoricchio, 27. Trinità dei Monti, paintings Daniele da Volterra, 150.

by

39-41*.

Paris, Louvre, Coronation and saints by Filippino Lippi and Alonso Berruguete, 5 - 7 * , 8. Philadelphia, Johnson Collection, Birth of the Virgin by Villamediana Master, 241—243. Pinilla de T o r o , S. Martín, retable by follower of T o r o Master ( ? ) , 48. Port Sunlight, Cheshire, England, St. Ursula by Villamediana Master, 243. Pozaldez, Sta. María, retable by Antón Pérez, /24, 125, 127. Prunet et Belpuig, L a Trinité, painted Crucifix in Franco-Gothic style, 23 j . Quintanilla de A b a j o , parish church, retable of high altar by Jerónimo Vázquez, 90—93*, 94. Rabano, parish church, fragments of a retable by Ventosilla Master, 132— '33*>

i34>

136·

Roa, parish church, retable by Olivares Master, 118—119*. Rome, Borghese Gallery, copy of Sebastiano del Piombo's Flagellation ascribed to Marcello Venusti, 1 7 1 . Virgin, Child, St. Elizabeth, and her son, by Alonso Berruguete, 8. Cancelleria Palace, frescoes by Giorgio Vasari and Gaspar Becerra, xxi. Capitoline Gallery, Magdalene penitent by Domenico Tintoretto, 194. Palazzo della Cancelleria, frescoes by Vasari, 149. S. Silvestro al Quirinale, landscape by Polidoro da Caravaggio, i 6 j .

S. M i g u e l de Foces, murals, 231. Sa Vail, M a j o r c a , March Collection, St. Ildefonso's investiture with the chasuble, 255—256*. Salamanca, cathedral, St. Catherine disputing the philosophers by Pedro Bello, 249. Colegio de Nobles Irlandeses (Colegio del Arzobispo), retable over high altar by Alonso Berruguete, 2 7 28.

Old Cathedral, Epiphany by Fernando Gallego, 2 46—248*. University, murals by Fernando Gallego, 244. Santa Maria la Real de Nieva, church, paintings for retable by Antonio Vázquez, J4. Santa Domingo de la Calzada, triptych by Master of Santa Inés, 258, 259. Saragossa, Sta. Engracia, retable (destroyed), formerly in, by Alonso Berruguete, 18. tomb of Jean le Sauvage (destroyed), formerly in, by Alonso Berruguete, 18. Segovia, S. M i l l á n , fresco of four saints in Franco-Gothic style, 233. S. Nicolás, murals on tomb in FrancoGothic style, 233. Segura de Léon, retable,

263.

Serdinya, Parish church, retable of the Crucifixion from Marinyans in Franco-Gothic style, 228—231*. Sevilla la Nueva, statue of the Virgin of the Rosary by Agustín de Campos, 182. Seville, cathedral, retable for chapel of Santi-

INDEX OF PLACES

278

ago ascribed to Antón Pérez of Seville, 263—264. Santa Inés, retable by Master of Santa Inés, 258, 259. Sigiienza, cathedral, male saints by Olivares Master, 122—123*. Sijena, convent, frescoes in Franco-Gothic style, 233-234. Simancas, El Salvador, retable for Breton family by Antonio Vázquez, 73—74· retable of the Resurrection by Antonio Vázquez, 71-73*, 74, 76, 79) 85, 102. Soria, Nativity by Juan de Pereda, 132. Tarazona, Diocesan from Peralta style, 231.

Museum, frescoes in Franco-Gothic

Toledo, arch of St. Leocadia, paintings and figures (lost), by Luis de Velasco and Bias del Prado, 204. cathedral, choir-stalls by Alonso Berruguete, 10. frescoes by Juan de Borgoña, 204. frescoes by Luis de Velasco, 197. frieze of archbishops, 204. paintings for the chapel of S. Bias by Bias del Prado, 206-207, 213*, 216, 217, 219. portrait of Bartolomé de Carranza, archbishop of Toledo, by Luis de C a r v a j a l , 194. cathedral cloister, fresco (destroyed), formerly in, by Gaspar Becerra, 155, 1 6 5 - / 6 7 , !75> 179· Nuestra Señora de Gracia and saints by Luis de Velasco, 217, 219. church of the Mínimos de S. Francisco de Paula, paintings (lost), formerly in, by Bias del Prado and Luis de C a r v a j a l , 181, 205. Ermita de S. Eugenio, retable by Hernando de A v i l a , 222—22 6*. Museo de Sta. Cruz, retable from Sta. Ursula by Alonso Berruguete, 29.

two portraits from arch of St. Leocadia by Bias del Prado, 204, 206, 2

10—2II*.

Museo del Thorns

Greco, Crowning with by Fernando Gallego,

S. Juan de los Reyes, retable by Francisco de Comontes, 127. Semenario M a y o r , Epiphany by Hernando de A v i l a , 222. Seminario Menor, St. John Baptist by Hernando de A v i l a , 222-223*. Tordehumos, parish church, retable by Antonio Vázquez, 8¡86*, 87, 96, 100. retable by Cisneros Master, 94, 9 6 99*, 100. retable by Cristóbal de Herrera, 96 retable by Luis Vêlez, 96, 104—107*. Santa María la Sagrada, paintings in high altar by Cristóbal de Herrera, Juan de Villoldo, and Francisco de Amberes, 32—57*, 39, 4 1 , 42. Tordesillas, S. Antolin, retable by Antón Pérez, 124—126*, 127. Toro, retable by Fernando Gallego, 253. S. Tómas Cantuariense, retable of high altar by T o r o Master, 4 3 46*, S i , 53· Torregalindo, parish church, remains of retable by Ventosilla Master, 13 2— 134, 136. T r u j i l l o , retable by Fernando Gallego, 246, 249, 253. T u b i l l a del L a g o , parish church, Crucifixion by Ventosilla Master, 134, 136, 137. Tucson, Arizona, gallery, retable of high altar from Ciudad Rodrigo by Fernando Gallego, 244-245. Ubeda,

S. Salvador, wood carving of Transfiguration by Alonso Berruguete, 15, 148.

Valbuena de Duero, parish church, two panels by Antón Pérez, 127128*.

INDEX OF PLACES Valdearcos, church, fragments of Purification by Ventosilla Master, 134, 136. Valdenebro de los Valles, parish church, six panels from a retable by A n tonio Vázquez, 85—87. Valencia, cathedral, Deposition from S. Pedro ascribed to Bias del Prado, 216, zzo. Valladolid, church of Santiago, retable by Alonso Berruguete, 10. Colegiata, retable (destroyed), formerly in, by Gaspar de Palencia, 64. Las Huelgas, retable of the Virgin by Antonio Vázquez, 74—76*, 79, 85, 87, 98. Museo Nacional de Escultura, Assumption by Cisneros Master, 79, n. 42. Assumption by Antonio 79) 84*, 85, 100.

Vázquez,

carvings from Nuestra Señora de la Merced by Isaac de Juni, Benito Celma, and Pedro de la Cuadra, 156. carvings from S. Antonio Abad by Leonardo de Carrión and Diego Rodriguez, 93. crucifixion by Antonio Vázquez, 7 9 crucifixion from monastery of S. Benito attributed to Alonso Berruguete, 28. Pietà by Antonio Vázquez, 7 6 - 7 9 * , 85, 98. Purification

by

Antonio

Vázquez,

79retable by follower of Gaspar Becerra, 1 7 2 - 7 7 5 * . retable from L a Mejorada at Olmedo by Alonso Berruguete, 3, η.

2.

retable from S. Benito el Real by Alonso Berruguete, 8, 10, 19, 20-27*, 28 > 3!> 58> 76> " 4 , 1 1 5 · retable ascribed to Gaspar Becerra, 156. St. Bernard by Antonio Vázquez, J6-80*.

279

St. Jerome in Penitence by Antonio Vázquez, 79, 8 i * , 98. St. Ursula and her maidens by A n tonio Vázquez, 79—85, 87, 89. Stigmatization of St. Francis and Baptism of Christ by Antonio Vázquez, 79, 85, 98. two panels of miracles of St. A n thony of Padua by T o r o Master, 48-53*· Nuestra Señora de la Merced, four Evangelists painted on tabernacle (lost), formerly in, 2 5 5 - / 5 6 . S. Andres, frescoes by Benito Rabuyate, 90. S. Lorenzo, retable of St. Luke (lost), formerly in, by Antonio V á z quez, 7 1 . Sta. Catalina, St. John Evangelist on Patmos ascribed to Becerril Master, 87-89. Sta. Clara, retable by Antonio V á z quez, 7 6 - 7 7 * , 87. Santuario Nacional, three paintings from retable from S. Antonio Abad by Jerónimo Vázquez, 63, 93-94Trinidad Calzada, paintings for a retable (lost), formerly in, by Gaspar de Palencia, 64. Ventosilla, church, retable of high altar by St. Nicholas Master, 130. retable of St. John the Precursor by Ventosilla Master, 130—13 2, 134. retable of the Virgin by Ventosilla Master, 130-13 2*, 134, 136. Vich, Museum, board canopy from A r a gon in Franco-Gothic style, 231. Vienna, Academy, triptych by Meister der v. Grooteschen Anbetung, 137. Albertina, drawing of the return of Saul and David, 195. Harrach Gallery, Madonna, Child, St. Anne, and St. Cajetan of Thienna by Fabrizio Santafede, 216. Villamuriel de Cerrato, Ermita of S. Sebastián, retable of St. Catherine

of

Alex-

28ο

INDEX OF PLACES andria, formerly in, by Cristóbal de Herrera, 41—42. retable of St. Peter, formerly in, by Cristóbal de Herrera, 42.

Vitoria, Museum, triptych from Salinas de Anana by Master of the Saint Godelieve Legend, 255, n. 1.

Zamora, cathedral, Noli me tangere and Pentecost from Arcenillas by Fernando

Gallego,

253, η. 20. Pietà 3'*·

by

Alonso

Berruguete,

29-