A History of Spanish Painting: Volume VI–Part 2 A History of Spanish Painting, Volume VI: The Valencian School in the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance, Part 2 [Reprint 2014 ed.] 9780674600348, 9780674600331

Citation preview

HARVARD-RADCLIFFE FINE ARTS SERIES

A HISTORY OF SPANISH PAINTING VOLUME VI —PART II

LONDON : H U M P H R E Y MILFORD OXFORD U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

A HISTORY OF SPANISH PAINTING BY

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

VOLUME VI —PART II THE VALENCIAN SCHOOL IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGES AND EARLY RENAISSANCE

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS *935

COPYRIGHT,

193$

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

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

P A R T II T H E VALENC1AN SCHOOL IN T H E LATE M I D D L E AGES AND EARLY RENAISSANCE (CONTINUED)

CHAPTER LXXII THE JÄTIVA

MASTER

IN THE entourage of the Perea and Artes Masters it is possible to distinguish another artistic personality whom, in order not to coin a cumbersome name describing his qualities, I will call simply the Jativa Master because a number of his principal achievements are found in this town, although several other painters of the period might for the same reason claim the title. The church of S. Francisco harbors over an altar at the right of the entrance almost a whole retable by his hand, bearing on the guardapolvos an escutcheon that the Baron de San Petrillo 1 and Sarthou Carreres 2 have identified with that of Bartolome Marti who, born in Jativa, was chosen by Rodrigo Borgia, while he was yet cardinal, as his major-domo, advanced to the bishopric of Segorbe in 1473 or 1479 3 by Sixtus IV, and eventually himself obtained the red hat from Rodrigo when he became pope. The date of the retable would therefore probably but not certainly fall before Marti's death, which occurred at Rome in 1500 or 1501. The central portion has disappeared, and in its place has been set a later Ecce Homo; but the four lateral compartments are preserved, depicting the Meeting at the Golden Gate and Visitation and over them, on somewhat smaller panels, the Annunciation (Fig. 141) and Nativity. The Crucifixion remains above the empty central space. The four sections of the predella that have been spared, probably the work of an assistant, enshrine the Resurrection and the Dormition and then two scenes telling the story of the founding of S. Maria Maggiore at Rome and of the cult of Our Lady of the Snows, so popular in Spain, the Virgin appearing to the sleeping Roman patrician 1

In the Valencian newspaper, Las provincias, last quarter of 1925. Historia de Jativa, 186, n. 3. Following the practice that I have observed for the Perea and Artes Masters, I might have called the painter the Marti Master, but I have feared confusion with the Martinez Master, for whom I can think of no other suitable name. 3 Gams and Eubel differ in regard to the date of the beginning of his episcopate. 2

346

THE JÄTIVA

MASTER

Johannes and directing him to erect a church on the spot where he should find snow fallen on August ζ and the discovery of the snow by Johannes and the Pope Liberius. The guardapolvos comprise at the top the blessing Eternal Father and at the sides the Baptist balanced by St. Michael, St. Onuphrius paired with St. Anthony Abbot (these two merely busts), St. Honoratus of Lerins as a fitting pendant to St. Giles since the attribute of each is a deer,1 and the Magdalene opposite St. Ursula. The author is somewhat closer than the Artes Master to the Perea Master in his types and in a nearer approximation to true Flemish chiaroscuro; his peculiarity is a greater delicacy than either of them, an almost excessive delicacy, which manifests itself especially in a characteristic by which his hand may be most easily distinguished, a transformation of the oval faces of the Perea Master and the Artes Master into circles the lower curve of which is narrowed almost to a point, with the features labored to an aristocratic and almost saccharine exquisiteness. The tendency to a circular countenance is found in the Perea Master but is carried further by the Jativa Master. In places his types, particularly in their Jewish cast —· for instance, the Child held by the Madonna in Johannes's dream — reflect also the influence of the Artes Master, with whom we have found him collaborating in S. Felix, if the predella of the high altar belonged to the original ensemble. The compositions are the stock-in-trade of the triad of painters to which he belonged: the Meeting at the Golden Gate is like that of the St. Anne retable in the Colegiata, and the Nativity and Crucifixion conform closely to the cartoons for these themes in the Agullent altarpiece. More than his two colleagues, he clings to the old tradition of gold-brocaded draperies. The church of S. Pedro in Jativa, at the lower right end of the nave, is adorned with another retable by the Master, which has likewise lost the panel of the central compartment, now occupied by a statue of St. Vincent Ferrer. The two principal lateral themes are, at the right, St. George overcoming the dragon in the presence of the princess, and, at the left, St. Michael. Of the somewhat smaller spaces above at the sides, the one at the right displays St. Bernard's vision of the Virgin (Fig. 142), and 1

See above, p. 61.

FIG. I 4 I . THE JÄTIVA MASTER. SECTION OF RETABLE. S. FRANCISCO, JÄTIVA (Photo. Arxiu Mas )

348

THE JÄTIVA

MASTER

the one at the left a haloed cleric in his cell or study dispensing alms to a representative of the class of the needy. T h e inscription on his halo appears to me to read S A N T G E R A U R ( = Guerau) L ' A L M O N E R ( = Almoiner), St. Gerard, the Almoner; and when we take into account that the Sts. George and Michael constitute an iconographic pair according to an orderly principle often observed in mediaeval retables, it is hard to doubt that such a juxtaposition was intended also in the two upper panels and that the personage is therefore the Blessed Gerard, 2 the brother and eventually monastic companion of St. Bernard, who as the cellarer or steward of Clairvaux would have had charge likewise of its charities. Since there is no apparent reason for the introduction of St. Bernard into the assemblage, the startingpoint may have been the Blessed Gerard as possibly the patron of the donor, and St. Bernard may have been called into service merely in the guise of his iconographic pendant. T h e garb of the almoner does not look to be exactly the Cistercian habit; but I can find no other St. Gerard or Gerald satisfying the conditions, except a canonized priest of Monza in Lombardy, who would seem to be too remote and obscure to emerge in the art of Valencia. The pinnacle above the lost central panel contains, by exception, the Transfiguration; and the predella unfolds the theme so regular for this spot, the Passion, in the episodes of the Agony in the Garden, the Betrayal, the Ecce Homo, the Man of Sorrows (at the middle), the Flagellation, Via Dolorosa, and Deposition. T h e usual figure for the top of the guardapoh'os, the Father, with the Dove, here very suitably finds a place just above the Transfiguration as a participant in the wonder according to the accounts of the N e w Testament; but His effigy has been disfigured with repaint. T h e other subjects of the guardapolvos are: beside the remate, the Anna selbdritt (with all the figures represented as standing) and St. Helen; on the cross-pieces, Sts. Catherine of Siena and M a r y of E g y p t ; and on the large lateral uprights, Sts. Philip, Jerome, Paul (the Apostle), and Onuphrius. T h e initial letter looks more like an F or P , b u t I can find no S a n t F e r a u or P e r a u . Saralegui, a f t e r I had given him the inscription to puzzle o v e r , thought of the possibility of S t . B e r n a r d ' s brother, separately from me, b u t in a letter he tells me t h a t he has rejected this solution. 1

2

FIG. Ι42. THE JÄTIVA MASTER. VISION OF ST. BERNARD, SECTION OF RETABLF.. S. PEDRO, JÄTIVA (Photo.

Cardona )

35°

THE JÄTIVA

MASTER

1

Saralegui has rightly recognized the same hand in two panels now set into the top of Jacomart's Borgia altarpiece in the Colegiata at Jativa, a large compartment of the paired St. Michael and the Magdalene (Fig. 143) and a small capping Crucifixion (said by Tormo 2 to constitute in themselves a complete little retable). The Magdalene possesses one of his typical, over-winsome countenances, but the archangel appears to be an act of homage to the Perea Master. The Colegiata can show us also another set of panels by the Jativa Master, built about the Virgen del Populo 3 to form a small retable, two vertical pieces of the Trinity (Fig. 144) and Resurrection, a sadly repainted remate of the Crucifixion, and a predella of the Man of Sorrows flanked by the seated Virgin, St. John, St. Cosmas, St. Francis, St. Augustine (?), and St. Damian. I have already assigned to the Jativa Master the predella of the Artes Master's retable over the high altar of S. Felix. 4 The scenes are identical with those in the predella of his retable in S. Pedro, the Agony in the Garden, the Betrayal, Christ before Pilate, the Flagellation, Via Dolorosa (Fig. 145), and Deposition; and in the first two, as so often in Valencian art, Judas is disgraced by a black halo. If the predella was an original part of the retable and not subsequently added from another source, the implication would be that the Jativa Master was once an assistant of the Artes Master, and the closer approximation to the latter's types in the predella, as compared with the J a t i v a Master's other works, would tend to confirm this theory, however much he was directly influenced also by the Perea Master, and to allocate the panels among his earliest productions. Y e t the characteristic modifications of the Artes Master's types into personages with more delicate contours and also with more circular faces demonstrate that the author is indeed the J a t i v a Master and not the Artes Master in a less heroic phase. The lowering clouds in the Betrayal and Via Dolorosa and the tall building in the background of the latter compartment incor1

Archivo de arte valenciano, X V I - X V I I (1930-1931), 142, and Boletin de la Sociedad Espanola de Excursiones, X X X I X (1931), 236. 2 Las tablas de las iglesias de 'Jativa, 124. 3 Vol. II, pp. 182-183. « See above, p. 320.

THE JÄTIVA MASTER

351

porate the lively interest in details of setting that we shall encounter in his paintings at Barcelona. The last work at Jätiva by him that I have to record is a large painted Crucifix now hanging on the west wall of S. Felix. He rises to the stature of an almost distinguished artist in a

FIG. 143. T H E JÄTIVA MASTER. ST. MICHAEL AND THE MAGDALENE. COLEGIATA, JÄTIVA (Photo. Arxiu Mas )

series of panels from a retable of Our L a d y in the Museum of Catalan Art at Barcelona: largest, the Dormition; then, equalling each other in size, the Annunciation (with the composition normal in his shop and in that of the Artes Master) and the Resurrection (Fig. 146); next, of somewhat smaller compass, the Nativity, Epiphany, Ascension, and (with the anomalous

FIG. 144. THE JÄTIVA MASTER. TRINITY, SECTION OF RETABLE. COLEGIATA, JÄTIVA (Photo. Arxiu

Mas )

FIG. 145. THE JÄTIVA MASTER. VIA DOLOROSA, SECTION OF PREDELLA OF RETABLE. S. FÜLIX, JÄTIVA (Photo. Arxiu Mas )

354 T H E JÄTIVA MASTER participation of the Magdalene, as in the Solsona Last Supper Pentecost; and finally, a predella of the Passion, comprising exactly the same six scenes that we have met in the altarpieces in S. Pedro and S. Felix at Jativa. Among the many strings of attachment to the Perea and Artes Masters, there may be singled out for mention the attainment of much of the former's style and grandeur in the Gabriel of the Annunciation and again the duplication of the latter's Hebrew babies in the Nativity. The Jativa Master emerges in the Barcelona panels as a landscapist of unexpected charm and power, usually preferring impressive rocky settings (sharply contrasted with his gentle personages) but interspersing among the cliffs pretty valleys and towns and, in the Ascension, letting our eyes wander out over a delightfully smiling and undulating plain. On one of the stern bluffs that encircle the Resurrection the city of Jerusalem rises in a group of towering buildings like those skyscrapers of New York which are conceived in the Gothic mode. The black clouds of the "darkness over all the e a r t h " are prematurely breaking upon Mount Calvary, to which the procession of the Via Dolorosa is climbing, and with sophisticated symbolism they obscure all but one of the sinisterly waiting crosses. His backgrounds indeed are full, in the Hispano-Flemish manner, of unusually piquant subordinate incidents executed in smaller scale. In the upper left corner of the Via Dolorosa, a group of the curious, including a mother holding her infant, peer over the edge of a crag at the tragic scene below. In the Deposition, Sts. Joseph of Arimathaea and John Evangelist, at the back of the sepulchre, are engaged in an animated discussion of the arrangements for the holy interment, and, still further behind, a soldier is breaking the legs of the two malefactors hanging upon their crosses, the good thief already honored with a halo. As often in the iconography of the two scenes in question, in the background of the Nativity the shepherds listen to the angelic proclamation, and in that of the Dormition St. Thomas receives the bequest of the girdle; but the Jativa Master is rather original in introducing pastoral episodes into the distance of the Epiphany, with one shepherd kneeling to watch from a precipice, and 1

See vol. II, p. 336.

FIG. 146. THE JÄTIVA MASTER.

RESURRECTION, SECTION OF R E T A B L E .

MUSEUM OF CATALAN ART, BARCELONA (Photo. Arxiu Mas J

356

THE JÄTIVA

MASTER

into the Resurrection a further group of sleeping soldiers on the slopes of the hill of Jerusalem. The only piece at Valencia itself that I should wish to attribute to the Jätiva Master — and even so without absolute conviction that it was not painted rather by some other artist of

FIG. 147. T H E JÄTIVA MASTER (?). ST. DOMINIC AND T H E MAGDALENE. PROVINCIAL MUSEUM, VALENCIA (Photo. Arxiu d'Arqueologia Catalana J

the Perea Master's circle — is a small panel in the Archivo of the Provincial Museum, depicting the Magdalene and St. Dominic holding the unusual emblem of the three angry darts with which in a vision he beheld Our Lord menacing the world (Fig. 147).' 1

See vol. V , pp. 55-56.

FIG. 148. THE JATIVÄ MASTER (?).

CRUCIFIXION

358

THE JÄTIVA

MASTER

Saralegui ascribes to the Artes Master a Crucifixion (Fig. 148) that he publishes without stating its present whereabouts, 1 but the types are closer to those of the Jätiva Master, although the similitude is not quite sufficiently precise to establish definitely the attribution. 1

Boletin de la Sociedad Espanola de Excursions, X L (1932), 52.

CHAPTER LXXIII T H E M A R T I N E Z MASTER AND H I S FOLLOWERS I.

THE

MARTINEZ

MASTER

THE personality of still another artist is clearly definable in the group of interrelated painters who have been indiscriminately classified together to constitute what would in that case have been the veritably Protean character of the Perea Master. Since his most characteristic extant work, a triptych of the Virgin, was presented to the Provincial Museum at Valencia by Don Juan Martinez Vallejo, the Martinez Master is as convenient a title as any with which to endow him; but we shall subsequently, as we broaden our survey of the paintings related to him, have to attack the problem of his identity with the author of the retable of the Puridad in the Provincial Museum, who — in all probability, wrongly — has been thought to have been Nicolas Falco. Although Tormo has himself separated the Artes Master from the Perea Master, he still considers the Martinez Master equal to the latter. 1 The only justification for this opinion would be the theory that the works that I shall connect with the Martinez Master incorporate a final phase of the Perea Master's production; but, although the styles of the two artists are very similar, the differences are too substantial to allow the possibility that the Perea Master could ever eventually have so altered his manner, and, besides, there are preserved some of his late pictures, such as the Visitation in the Prado, which must have been contemporary with the Martinez Master's activity and yet vary decidedly from the qualities exhibited in that painter's output. 2 In the centre of the triptych, the Virgin, sitting upon a cushion and nursing the Child, is set against the background of a stiff gold fabric on either side of which a low, Archivo espafiol de arte y arqueolog'ta, V I I I (1932), 35. J u s t before going to press with this volume, I find that Saralegui (Boletin de la Sociedad Espafiola de Excursiones, X L I I , 1934, p. 175) also considers the triptych a work, not of the Perea Master, but of one of his followers. 1 2

360

THE MARTINEZ

MASTER

Renaissance parapet projects beneath delightful bits of Flemish landscape (Fig. 149). Above her in the pinnacle, instead of the customary Crucifixion, there is introduced the Pieta presided over by the two other Persons of the Trinity. The compartments of the wings are consigned to the actors in the Annunciation, St. Anne holding the youthful Mary, the Baptist, St. Michael, and St. Jerome; their exteriors are decorated with large, standing effigies of Sts. Augustine and Onuphrius (Fig. 150). Beside the latter on the pavement are the unusual attributes of the crown and sceptre, referring to the legend of his royal Persian origin. 1 The middle of the predella displays the Agony in the Garden set in another entrancing landscape (amidst which Judas leads the soldiery to their Victim), and its lateral divisions contain a St. Christopher and the paired Sts. Cosmas and Damian. The immediate dependence of the author upon the Perea Master is apparent in the types, particularly in the St. Michael, the Baptist, and above all the feminine personages who even repeat the ear emerging from the smoothly parted hair. Y e t the somewhat sfumato effects of the Perea Master have to a certain extent given way to the hard outlines of the painting of the Italian Renaissance; his rather heavy Flemish shadows have largely evaporated from the countenances, although the draperies still largely retain the modes in which the Low Countries treated the folds of the garments; the types derived from him have been, under Italian influence, prettified, idealized, and freed from their Hebraic cast; and the general tonality of color is less sombre, tending rather to the brighter hues of the palette. Despite the fact that the painter is fairly well launched upon the seas of the Renaissance, he still clings to the old mediaeval practice of a prodigal resort to gold backgrounds and gold brocades in costumes. In the small compass of the triptych now under consideration and in one or two of the other works that we shall ascribe to him, he reveals rather pleasant gifts in the manner of a delicate illuminator. 1

This legend is summarized in the last paragraph of the first section in the Bollandists' account of St. Onuphrius under J u n e 1 1 . Like so many of these sacred tales of hermits, it includes, as in the case of St. Amator (see below, p. 428), an element of demonology and the constant factor of the nursing hind.

FIG. 149. THE MARTINEZ MASTER.

MADONNA, CENTRE OF TRIPTYCH.

PROVINCIAL MUSEUM, VALENCIA (Photo,

Arxiu

Mas )

362

THE MARTINEZ

MASTER

When an artist is so sparsely preserved as the Martinez Master, it is odd that one collection, that of the Muntadas family at Barcelona, should possess two works connected with him. T h e one 1 that in shape, disposition, and subjects most resembles the example in the Valencian Museum, the present writer would prefer to assign to an immediate but less gifted pupil, another triptych displaying in the centre the Anna selbdritt (Fig. 151) capped by the usual Crucifixion (in the presence of Sts. Francis and Clara) and decorated in the wings with figures of Sts. Onuphrius, Michael, John Baptist, and Jerome. T h e Virgin in the central group almost repeats not only Our L a d y Annunciate in the Martinez triptych but also the Magdalene in the Pieta; and the trade-mark of the Perea Master and his circle, the ear emerging from beneath the locks, is not treated in the Perea Master's fashion as a kind of excrescence upon the hair but appears, as in the Martinez Master's figures, in an interval between the general mass of the hair and a long, straight tress in front. Another link is found in the similarity of the two Baptists, although in the Muntadas example St. John is represented as standing. The St. Michael is varied in composition from the Martinez archangel; but the countenance is a weaker version of the same face, and the shield is nearly identical. Inasmuch as St. Jerome is depicted bearded and in penitence, there is no opportunity for an analogy to the Martinez rendering as a seated father of the Church. In the Crucifixion, the type of the Virgin and the gentle and rather childlike form of Christ are related to the corresponding elements in the Martinez Pieta. Subsidiary proof is afforded by the presence of one of the peculiarities encountered in several of the backgrounds of the Martinez triptych, the treatment of the strips of brocaded gold beside the tapestry behind St. Anne as if they were stiff pieces of gilded and embossed leather. T h e design in the brocade is likewise the same as in the wings of the Martinez altarpiece. Furthermore, the haloes are laid out, as for the St. Michael of the Martinez triptych, in a series of radiating billets. T h e Muntadas picture reveals some resemblances to the Perea Master's other follower, the Jätiva Master, without, however, suggesting identity of authorship. 1

N o . 131 o f the C a t a l o g u e of the Collection.

FIG. Ι 50. THE MARTINEZ MASTER.

STS. AUGUSTINE AND ONUPHRIUS,

EXTERIOR OF T R I P T Y C H (WITH PREDELLA). PROVINCIAL MUSEUM, VALENCIA (Photo. Arxiu

Mas )

364

THE MARTINEZ

MASTER

A retable of Santiago in the Muntadas Collection 1 is less analogous in shape and more analogous in style to the Martinez triptych. The central panel contains the celestial patron of Spain in the frequent iconographic phase of his supernatural appearance at the battle of Clavijo, mounted and overcoming the Moors. The Pieta is used above instead of the Crucifixion, as in the Martinez triptych, and there is a further pinnacle of the Coronation of the Virgin. The lateral compartments contain paired, standing saints, Philip (or Andrew) and Vincent Ferrer, Vincent the Martyr and Bernard, Ursula and Elizabeth of Hungary, Catherine of Siena and Christina 2 (Fig. 152). The Man of Sorrows in the middle of the predella is flanked by St. Martin (dividing his coat with the beggar), the Baptist, St. Onuphrius, and (as in the Martinez triptych) Sts. Cosmas and Damian. The Sts. Ursula and Christina completely accord with the Martinez Master's feminine type (the latter exhibiting even his distinctive treatment of the ear); the Christ (though here rigid) and the Holy Mother in the Pieta have like affiliations; the effigy of the Baptist in the predella is more intimately connected with the Precursor in the Martinez triptych than is the corresponding figure in the Muntadas triptych of St. Anne; and the central Santiago falls within the same general class of gentle manhood. The backgrounds, however, are uniformly, not of leather-like brocades, but of gold patterned at the borders. Among several personages in the output of the Martinez Master and his shop that arouse memories of the J a t i v a Master, the Magdalene in the Pieta of the Santiago retable is particularly suggestive; but the reason is the general unity of manner in the entire and extensive circle of the Perea Master. On the whole, in the case of this retable, I should not argue for more than execution by a follower (perhaps the St. Lazarus Master 3) who had a better understanding and sympathy for the Martinez Master's methods than the author of the St. Anne triptych in the Muntadas Collection. The discretion of an allocation in his school is better than the valor of a claim for the Martinez Master himself also in the case of a triptych in the Soler y March Collection at Barcelona that 1 No. 197. 3 See below, p. 387.

2

With the attribute of the knife: see above, p. n o .

FIG. i j i . THE MARTINEZ MASTER OR A FOLLOWER. ST. ANNE, VIRGIN, AND CHILD, CENTRE OF TRIPTYCH. MUNTADAS COLLECTION, BARCELONA (Courtesy of the Heirs of Don Maltas

Muntadas,

Conde de Santa Maria de Satis )

366

THE MARTINEZ

MASTER

in its diminutive dimensions illustrates the favor in which his shop was held for small and intimate ob jets de piete probably designed for domestic use. Its provenience is reported as on the periphery of the Valencian school, a convent at Albarracin near Teruel. The theme of the central panel is a half-length of the Virgen de la Leche behind whom two fluttering angels spread a textile of gold embroidery and underneath whom stretches the crescent moon as a symbol of the Immaculate Conception. The Child in this principal compartment represents the Second Person of the Trinity, completed in the remate, as so frequently, by a bust of the Father and by the Holy Dove, who are flanked in this instance by two other recurrent figures of Valencian iconography, half-lengths of St. Michael and of the guardian angel. Each of the inner surfaces of the two wings contains a kneeling angel playing upon a stringed instrument and overhead, in smaller proportions, a flying angel with a scroll the inscription of which emphasizes the idea of the central panel with the words, "Sancta Maria de puritate concepcionis (sic)." The outer surfaces of the wings, when folded together, display a continuous composition of the Annunciation (Fig. 153). The various actors once more present to us the types of the Martinez triptych; the gold backgrounds are incised with a foliate motif to give, in an identical fashion, the effect of work in leather; the haloes of the scroll-bearing angels are adorned, as in the Muntadas triptych, with a design of radiating billets; and it is only a certain looseness in the draughtsmanship that suggests as author a subordinate member of the atelier rather than the Martinez-Master himself. On the other hand, one^can put up a very good case for assigning to the Martinez Master himself a panel published by Saralegui 1 as in a private collection at Valencia (Fig. 154), the subject of which is the Madonna and Child enthroned between Sts. Joachim and Anne, including, in the right background, the approaching St. Joseph. Every one of the types, except the two old men, are actually duplicated in the Martinez triptych, and even the Sts. Joachim and Joseph may be found many times in the other works that we are connecting with the Master and his atelier. 1

Bolet'm de la Sociedad Espanola de Excursions, X X X I X (1931), 232.

FIG. i j 2 . THE MARTINEZ MASTER OR A FOLLOWER.

STS. CATHERINE OF SIENA

AND CHRISTINA, SECTION OF RETABLE.

MUNTADAS

COLLECTION, BARCELONA (Courtesy of the Heirs of Don Matias Muntadas,

Conde de Santa Maria de Sans )

FIG. Ι S3- T H E MARTINEZ MASTER OR A FOLLOWER. E X T E R I O R OF T R I P T Y C H . SOLER Y MARCH COLLECTION, BARCELONA (Photo. Arx'tu

Mas)

THE MARTINEZ MASTER

369

It would be unscientific to state as anything more than a possibility the attribution to the Martinez Master of a panel of the Visitation known to me only in a photograph as (at least once) in a private collection at Madrid (Fig. 155). 1 If not derived in composition from the version by the Perea Master in

Fic. 154. THE MARTINEZ MASTER. MADONNA WITH STS. JOACHIM AND ANNE. P R I V A T E COLLECTION, VALENCIA (Courtesy oj Don Leandro de Saralegui )

the Prado, it is in any case based upon the same general Valencian cartoon. The types also declare their genesis in the ample milieu of the Perea Master, but it needs only a moment's comparison with the Prado panel to realize that his types have been taken and adapted by another artist. The painter in the circle to whom they seem closest is the Martinez Master, and this is 1

Assigned by Saralegui to a follower of the Perea Master (Bolettn de la Sociedad Espanola de Excursiones, X L I I , 1934, p. 175).

37° T H E M A R T I N E Z MASTER true not only of the feminine personages but also of the St. Joseph, who is the counterpart of such figures as the St. Jerome in the Muntadas triptych and the St. Onuphrius in the retable of the same Collection. A lone panel of the Epiphany is hung so high at the right of the capilla mayor in the great monastic church of El Puig, north of Valencia, as not to be clearly visible even to opera-glasses, but it appears to be an authentic work of the Martinez Master's youth when he was still strongly dominated by the Perea Master (Fig. 155A). I t was evidently he also who painted three small panels in the Collection of Don Miguel Marti at Valencia, representing Sts. Agatha, Lucy (Fig. 156), and Raphael (accompanied by Tobias). Finally we may catalogue, as definitely by a moderately gifted follower rather than by the Master himself, a small retable of Our Lady in the Collection of Don Jose Benlliure at Valencia. The central panel of the Madonna and angels is surrounded by narrative compartments enshrining her Seven Joys; and the Pieta at the middle of the predella is flanked by the seated figures of Sts. Lucy, Barbara, Quiteria, and Sebastian. 1.

THE

PROBLEM

OF N I C O L A S

FALCO

The arresting stylistic similarity to the achievements of the Martinez Master forces upon us a thorough discussion of the complicated questions of whether he is identical with the author of the retable of the Immaculate Conception from the demolished Franciscan convent of the Puridad (or Purisima Concepcion) 1 at Valencia, now in the Provincial Museum, and whether we have any real documentary justification for the hitherto general practice of naming the author of at least some of the paintings in the retable (and therefore perhaps the Martinez Master) Nicolas Falco. The centre of the structure is occupied by a sculptured tabernacle containing an aperture in 1 First called, at the time of its foundation in the thirteenth century, the convent of Sta. Isabel (Elizabeth of Hungary), then of Sta. Clara, and from the early fifteenth century until 1534 (when it took the title of the Puridad) by the joint name of Sta. Clara and of Sta. Isabel: see A. Ivars, El monasterio de la Puridad de Valencia, Archivo ibero-americano, X X X V (1932), 435-464.

Fig. 155. THE MARTINEZ MASTER (?). VISITATION. PRIVATE COLLECTION, MADRID (Photo. Ruiz

Vernacct)

372

THE MARTINEZ

MASTER

the shape of a mandorla in which was probably enshrined originally some ancient image of the immaculately conceived Virgin or in which the Blessed Sacrament was exposed. Its carving

FIG. 155A. THE MARTINEZ MASTER (?). EPIPHANY. MONASTIC CHURCH, EL PUIG (Photo. Arxiu

d'Arqueologia

Catalana )

consists of three tiers of angels and, in the spandrels, the signs of the Evangelists. T h e rest of the sculpture, so far as it is preserved, comprises the slanting forms of two Prophets imagined as supporting the guardapolvos, the four fathers of the Western Church about the tabernacle, and on the outer uprights a quar-

A N D HIS FOLLOWERS

373

tette of Franciscan saints. The great painted panels that surround the tabernacle are naturally brought into connection with the principal theme of Our Lady — large, standing effigies of

Fic. 156. THE MARTINEZ MASTER. STS. AGATHA AND LUCY. COLLECTION OF DON MIGUEL MARTI, VALENCIA (Photo. Arxia d'Arqueologia

Catalana )

her mother and father, Sts. Anne and Joachim, above them her Nativity and Presentation (Fig. 157), and over the tabernacle the Dormition. In the Presentation there occurs the curious iconographical detail of the rays encircling the young Virgin's body, as in the version in the St. Anne retable at J ä t i v a prob-

374 T H E M A R T I N E Z MASTER ably executed by the founder of this whole phase of Valencian painting, the Perea Master. The predella is devoted to six of Our Lady's Joys, the Annunciation (Fig. 158), Nativity of Christ, Epiphany, Resurrection, Ascension, and Pentecost. The compositions of the last two episodes are a departure from the norm, the Ascension abandoning the central axis and the Pentecost violating the symmetrical arrangement of the Apostles. The guardapolvos disclose at the top the Coronation and in the other sections Prophets encompassed by scrolls from their writings foretelling, for the most part, Our Lady's glory. Since the choice and application of these texts to the plan of the Redemption illustrate the character of the mediaeval mind and the theological thought of the period, it is not a work of supererogation to quote them. 1 Reading from the summit downward and at each level from left to right, we encounter first Jeremiah saying, "Creavit Dominus novum super terram: Femina circumdabit virum (XXXI, 22)." Next comes Zephaniah proclaiming (possibly with reference to the Sacrament rather than to the Incarnation): " R e x Israel Dominus in medio tui, non timebis malum ultra (III, 15)." There then follow Micah and Joel, the former with, " D e domo servientium liberavi te (VI, 4)," and the latter with, "Zelatus est Dominus terram suam (II, 18)." Next below are paired the two major Prophets Ezekiel and Isaiah. The former unfolds the second verse of his fortyfourth chapter, " P o r t a haec clausa erit: non aperietur, et vir non transibit per earn; quoniam Dominus Deus Israel ingressus est per earn, eritque clausa." Isaiah utters his well known prediction (XI, 1), " E t egredietur virga de radice Jesse, et flos de radice eius ascendet." David and Solomon constitute a final and natural couple. A part of the twentieth verse of the eighteenth Psalm is chosen for David's prophecy, "Secundum puritatem manuum mearum retribuet mihi"; and Solomon gives expression to the sentiment from the Song of Songs (IV, 7) commonly taken as referring to the Immaculate Conception, " T o t a pulchra es, arnica mea, et macula non est in te." T h a t this retable comes from the convent of the Puridad, where by documents of 1502 Nicolas Falco is recorded to have labored, there can be no reasonable doubt, for the unanimous 1

For some of the scrolls, cf. J. Braun, Der christliche Altar, I, 521-522.

FIG. Ι 57. T H E MARTINEZ MASTER OR A FOLLOWER. SECTION OF RETABLE OF T H E PURIDAD.

PROVINCIAL MUSEUM, VALENCIA (Photo. Arxiu Mas )

376

THE MARTINEZ MASTER

tradition of the Museum to this effect is supported by the conjunction of themes glorifying not only the Franciscan Order but also the Immaculate Conception, which enjoyed a cult at this time in the convent; but several very serious obstacles stand in the way of identifying the paintings of the retable with the work that Falco did. In the first place, there were two retables in the church of the convent which were the objects of artistic decoration at this time and upon only one of which are we informed that Falco's talents were called into service, and it is by no means certain which of the twain is the specimen now in the Museum. The confusion found its source in Tramoyeres Blasco, who, when publishing the documents and the first fundamental article on Falco in the Archivo de arte valenciano of 1918, 1 loosely misinterpreted the documents as referring to a single retable, that of the altar mayor. Two receipts of June 27 and September 18, 1502, do indeed register payments to Falco for tasks upon the retable of the capilla mayor, but a receipt of February 20, 1503, for payments to the sculptors Pablo Forment and his sons, Onofre and the celebrated Damian, mentions only as the final item their carvings on the retablo mayor and specifies as the first item their works on a retable in the chapel of the Immaculate Conception in the church, a foundation that was the special interest of their patroness, the abbess Damiata de Mompaläu. With this second retable, in the chapel of the Immaculate Conception, there is no record that Falco had anything to do.2 It has generally been taken for granted that the retable in the Museum is the one from the high altar of the church, and even Ivars, who first pointed out Tramoyeres's confusion of two monuments, concurred in this assumption in his important article 3 on the history of the convent; but there is nothing at all to show that the retable in the Museum does not hail rather from the chapel, and Saralegui writes me that Ivars has orally agreed with him in this other possibility. The exact analogy of the style of the sculptured sections to the early man1

Pp. 3-22. I am glad to find, just before going to press, that Saralegui also has perceived Tramoyeres's error (Boletin de la Sociedad Espanola de Excursiones, X L I I ,

1934, P· 176, n. 3)·

2 Tramoyeres's quotations of Falco's two receipts are full of obvious misreadings; for the correct readings, see Sanchis y Sivera, Pintores medievales en Valencia, 120. 3 Op.cit.

FIG. Ι 58. THE MARTINEZ MASTER OR A FOLLOWER. ANNUNCIATION, SECTION OF RETABLE OF THE PURIDAD. PROVINCIAL MUSEUM, VALENCIA (Photo. Arxiu Mas )

378

T H E M A R T I N E Z MASTER

ner of Damian Forment as we know it in other authenticated examples is no aid in the solution of the dilemma, since the Forment family is recorded to have been employed upon both altarpieces; but the circumstantial evidence of the comparatively small size of the retable in the Museum and of the prominence of the Immaculate Conception in the iconography would create the strong presumption that it decorated rather the chapel. A final and almost determinative argument against the identification of the extant altarpiece with the retable of the capilla mayor is the absence of the two sculptured angels which we shall find that the records state to have been on the guardapolvos·, nor can one contend that these angels have been lost, inasmuch as the extant altarpiece appears to be complete and there is no spot where the angels would have fitted. If, then, the extant altarpiece was that of the chapel, we have no documentary right whatsoever to use the paintings as a mode of discovering what Nicolas Falco's style was. But even if for the sake of argument we should grant that the retable of the Museum comes from the capilla mayor and was therefore the structure upon which Falco worked, the language of his two receipts does not make it absolutely clear whether he executed the original paintings or merely freshened the paintings already done by some other artist, gilding or regilding them and other parts of the structure. The extent of his participation is put down in the first receipt as follows: "Gilding and painting the predella, the guardapolvos, and the tabernacle, gilding, painting, and installing two sculptured angels at the top of the guardapolvos, and illuminating and renewing all the stories of the said retable and their canopies." In the second receipt his task is described as "whatever paintings were done by me in the retable of the high altar of the church of the said convent, the gilding of canopies in the same retable, and whatever other things were done by me in the same retable." These statements have usually been taken to mean that he did the actual paintings of the predella andguardapolvos and restored the five panels of the body of the altarpiece which have therefore been supposed to have been produced by some other master or masters; but the nature of his work upon the two sculptured angels at once arouses at least the suspicion that his whole connection

A N D HIS FOLLOWERS

379

with the altarpiece may have been merely that of a restorer, a gilder, and an applier of polychromy to the parts not covered by the painted figures. T h e language of the receipt of the Forment family, however, would indicate that at least their contribution to the altar mayor was not renovation but actual new sculpture and that therefore a retable for the high altar was being executed (and not merely restored) at the same time as the retable of the chapel. In the Forment receipt is included a reference to the two sculptured angels of the retablo mayor, which are mentioned also in the first Falco receipt and the lack of which in the extant altarpiece is a cogent reason for considering it rather to have come from the chapel. A further complication is created by the fact that, although in the first document Falco is declared to have executed only the predella and guardapohos, I am about convinced that all the painted sections of the retable are by the same hand. Inasmuch as this unity of style throughout the altarpiece has hitherto, because of the document, been denied, it is necessary to stop and attempt to demonstrate it by pointing out a few of the most striking parallelisms between the parts. It is hard to see how anyone can doubt that the St. Anne, the St. Joachim, and the three scenes from the life of the Virgin were done by the painter of the guardapohos. T o arrive at conviction, the reader should make especially the following comparisons: the large standing effigy of St. Joachim and again the St. Joachim of the Presentation with the David and Isaiah; the Apostle bearing the cross in the Dormition with God the Father in the Coronation on the guardapohos immediately above him; and the Apostle next to this crucifer with the Ezekiel. If the retable be that of the high altar and if Falco was the author and not merely the restorer and decorator of the guardapohos, it would appear to follow that, because the document declares him to have done the same kind of work in the predella as on the guardapohos, he executed also the scenes of the predella and so was responsible for all the paintings of the altarpiece; but, unfortunately, it is in the predella, if anywhere, that the captious critic might wish to discern a very slightly different and superior craft. Such an assumption would force us into the difficult belief that the predella was not carried out according to the specifications of the receipt, if this

38ο

THE MARTINEZ MASTER

receipt means that Falco painted both the predella and the guardapolvos and his task was not confined to the renovation of one or conceivably two other painters' achievements; but it can, I think, after all be safely maintained on stylistic grounds that the infinitesimal diversities in the predella are deceptive and that it also was executed by the master of the rest of the pictures. Here again, among many examples, the student should make the following confrontations: the Saviour in the Resurrection of the predella with the Christ of the Coronation; the St. Joseph of the Nativity of Our Lord and the first Magus of the Epiphany with the Prophets in general; and the Virgin of the Annunciation, Nativity of Christ, and particularly of the Epiphany with Our Lady in the Presentation and with the second attendant woman behind St. Anne's bed. The consequent assignment of all the paintings to a single artist would not definitively exclude Falco as the author, for the comprehensive language of the second receipt might refer to the entire assemblage, and the phrases of the first receipt might signify that, in addition to executing the predella and guardapolvos, he touched up his own previously painted compartments in the main body of the altarpiece. But no sooner have we partially disengaged ourselves of these entanglements in our futile struggle to relate the monument to Falco than we encounter a far more serious barrier in a work that has also been regarded as a documented achievement of his but exhibits a rather different style, the panel of the Virgen de la Sapiencia built into the later baroque retable of the chapel of the University at Valencia (Fig. 159). The Madonna and Child are enthroned between two triads of angels (whom Tramoyeres Blasco arbitrarily guesses to signify the six classes of studies established by Alexander VI) and worshipped by the patrons of the University, Sts. Luke and Nicholas, ensconced below. The various members of the assemblage spread forth scrolls with Biblical inscriptions exhorting to godly wisdom. The specimen held by the Virgin and Child is echoed from the Book of Wisdom itself (VI, 27): "Accipite disciplinam per sermones meos, et proderit vobis." The thought expressed by the three angels at the left well suits the chapel of a University, the celebrated verse from the beginning of the ninth chapter of Proverbs:

FIG. 159. NICOLAS FALC0 I OR II (?). VIRGEN DE LA SAPIENCIA. CHAPEL OF UNIVERSITY, VALENCIA (From Tramoyeres's article on Falco )

382

THE MARTINEZ

MASTER

"Sapientia aedificavit sibi domum." Their companions at the right praise this virtue again in the terms of the Book of Wisdom (VIII, 4): "Doctrix est disciplinae Dei, et electrix operum illius." Finally St. Luke resorts to a sentiment from his own Gospel ( X I , 28): " B e a t i qui audiunt verbum Dei, et custodiunt illud." The evidence for the attribution to Falco is found in both his contract and receipt of 1 5 1 6 for a retable in the chapel of the University; 1 and, although the subjects of the panels of the retable are not named in the two documents, it is easy to believe, since the style corresponds to the date and since the content is adapted to an academic institution, that the Virgen de la Sapiencia is one of the sections, probably the central compartment, of the altarpiece ordered from him. Immediately, however, one balks at accepting the same man as responsible for both the retable of the Puridad and the Virgen de la Sapiencia. The aesthetic ability shown by the picture in the University chapel, particularly in the charming angelic forms, is quite equal, if not superior, to that revealed in the retable of the Provincial Museum, but the style is much further advanced in the ways of the Italian Renaissance; the brighter hues and gold of the Middle Ages, so conspicuous still in the retable of the Puridad, have disappeared in favor of a more sombre tonality; and the personal types are not those of the Puridad master. I do not deem it utterly impossible that, if we take into account the rapid developments of the Renaissance at Valencia, the producer of the Puridad paintings should have changed so decidedly within a period of some fifteen years and should have even modified his types of human beings in so pronounced a degree; but by far the greater likelihood is that the two works were executed by separate artists. Since, therefore, Nicolas Falco was in all probability the creator of the panel in the University chapel, it would seem to be necessary to reject his authorship of the paintings in the Puridad altarpiece on this ground as well as for the other reasons that I have accumulated; but there is, as a matter of fact, one other channel of escape from the dilemma, largely, to be sure, a forlorn hope, i.e., the possibility that the Virgen de la Sapiencia is the work of a younger Nicolas Falco. That such a Nicolas 1

Tramoyeres Blasco, op. cit., 21.

A N D HIS FOLLOWERS

383

Falco the second really existed, there is good reason to believe. From the date of the convent retable, 1502, until 1527, a Nicolas Falco is recorded as pretty continuously active at Valencia, laboring, among other enterprises, as we have seen, upon the retable of the University. 1 Then occurs a long gap until the second half of the century, when a Nicolas Falco again emerges in the records. He was succeeded in 1560, as official painter of Valencia, by his son Onofre; he exercised his profession in the cathedral in 1565; and he provided for the baptism of four other children, one of them also called Onofre but with a second name, Dionisio, in 1562, 1564, 1565, and 1576. This series of mentions throughout the greater part of the Cinquecento have often been taken as having to do with one man; but since the Nicolas Falco who in 1502 was working upon the retable of the convent could hardly have been born later than c. 1475, he surely cannot be identical with the artist whose child is christened in 1576 a century later, and the most logical solution of the absurdity is to follow Mayer (in the Thieme-Becker Lexikon) in postulating two painters of the same name, one belonging to the first half and the other to the second half of the century. Nicolas I may have lived on (although there is no record of his employment after 1527) until 1560, when he resigned his position as official painter of Valencia to his son Onofre; or perhaps a more natural explanation would be that the allusions from 1560 to 1576 are all to Nicolas I I who, already of mature age in 1560, would then have withdrawn in favor of a son, Onofre, but, possibly in a second marriage, subsequently became, as himself now an old man, the father of another generation of children. It may be that the Onofre of 1560 died soon after and that Nicolas I I therefore christened one of this second generation with the same name.2 It has doubtless become apparent to the reader that we might conceivably ascribe the Virgen de la Sapiencia of 1516 to Nicolas I I , who, if he received the commission at the age of twenty-five, would not have had to be born earlier than 1490, 1 Sanchis y Si vera, Pintores medievales en Valencia, 220-221; and Tramoyeres Blasco, op. cit., 6-7. 1 But the great Catalan painter, Jaime Huguet, had a brother of the same Christian name as he himself, and both of them were living at the same time. Miss King, however, suggests to me that one may have been called after St. James Major and the other after St. James Minor.

384

T H E M A R T I N E Z MASTER

but it is unlikely, though not incredible, that as an octogenarian he should have had a son in 1576. Was there a third Nicolas Falco and did he beget this child? But we are wandering in the realm of pure conjecture, and the perplexities that with our present knowledge surround the problem are, to really sober criticism, insoluble. The result of the preceding, dreary, analytical paragraphs has merely demonstrated that the lacunae in the history of the altarpiece, the wording of the documents, the stylistic disparity between the retable of the Puridad and the Virgen de la Sapiencia, and the genealogical involutions of the Falco family decidedly — nay, almost conclusively — militate against an attribution of the Puridad retable to Nicolas I. If we admit that all the paintings of the retable — even of the predella —• are productions of a single artist, there would remain the final question of whether he is identical with the Martinez Master, and it does not appear to me possible conscientiously to answer this question with a definite affirmative. No one would refuse to see a close similarity of manner, but the ties do not quite bridge the gap. The feminine types are much the same, especially the Virgin of the Puridad Presentation, the attendant of St. Anne in this episode, and the above-mentioned second woman caring for St. Anne at her parturition; the St. John Evangelist of the Ascension resembles the Gabriel of the Martinez Annunciation; the Christ of the Resurrection is even in appearance a near relative of the St. John Baptist in the Martinez triptych; and the Coronation almost duplicates the version of the theme in the Muntadas altarpiece of Santiago. These and other analogies, nevertheless, are not sufficiently exact to render the equation with the Martinez Master more than a mere possibility. The general style of the Puridad retable adds little to the placid Valencian manner of the early Cinquecento exemplified by the Martinez Master, except in so far as the extensive introduction of narrative scenes gives an opportunity for the exhibition of somewhat larger powers. The architecture of the Renaissance assumes greater proportions, especially in the episodes of the predella, and the figures themselves have become somewhat more Italianate, perhaps influenced by the creations of Paolo da San Leocadio.

A N D HIS FOLLOWERS

385

Tormo has suggested, with a question-mark, that we ought to ascribe to the author of the Puridad altarpiece (whether or not he be Nicolas Falco) the later sections of the retable in the Ermita de S. Sebastian at Puebla de Vallbona of which the 1

FIG. 160. THE MARTINEZ MASTER OR A FOLLOWER. SECTION OF RETABLE. ERMITA DE S. SEBASTIAN, PUEBLA DE VALLBONA (Photo. Arxiu Mas )

earlier parts were produced by the shop of Pedro Nicolau and Andres Marzal de Sas; 2 and I should like definitely to remove the point of interrogation. In the body of the retable the only certainly later section is the remate of the Madonna and Child 1

Levants, 179.

2

See my vol. IV, p. 580.

386

THE MARTINEZ

MASTER

enthroned between the kneeling Sts. Joachim and A n n e 1 (Fig. 160). T h e predella is wholly of the stratum of c. 1500, consisting, at the centre, of one of the versions of the dead Christ so characteristic of the circle of the Perea Master and, at the sides, of four scenes from the life of St. Sebastian, his rebuke (while he already carries the arrow as attribute!) of the relatives and friends of SS. Marcus and Marcellianus who had come to them in prison to pervert them from the Christian faith, his arraignment for trial before the provost, the ordeal of the arrows, and (as a common kind of Spanish theme) the resort of the afflicted to his shrine. T h e guardapolvos were also entirely painted by the later artist, displaying at the top a half-mandorla of the First and Third Persons of the Trinity (Our Lord being seated with His mother in the panel just below) and, at the sides, Sts. Paul, Joseph, two canonized bishops, Sts. Stephen, Lawrence, Vincent the Martyr, and (as a natural pendant) Vincent Ferrer. Amidst the general identity of types, visible even beneath the extensive repaint, the St. Joachim, the St. Joseph, and the Eternal Father constitute the most telling proof of the Puridad painter's authorship; the enthroned Madonna is here the figure that supports the guess of an identity of the painter with the Martinez Master, but a comparison of this whole remate with the panel of exactly similar subject in a Valencian private collection that I have claimed for the Martinez Master himself 2 supplies perhaps even more cogent and concrete evidence for separating the two personalities. In any case, if there is a fence between them, we probably ought to place on the Puridad side of the fence a panel in a private collection at Valencia published by Saralegui 3 and depicting a theme that, so far as I know, is not represented elsewhere in Spanish art, the translation of St. Martin's body, which occurred long after his death (Fig. 161). A cripple and a poor minstrel (or is it a musically inclined donor?) stand for the class of the afflicted who are said in the Golden Legend to have found aid in their sufferings by approaching the sacred body; 1 The standing St. Anne in the body of the retable is so repainted as to defy categorical classification. 2 See above, p. 366. 3 Boletin de la Sociedad Espanola de Excuniones, X X X I X (1931), 231.

A N D HIS F O L L O W E R S

387

but the detail that definitely identifies the scene as St. Martin's translation is the appearance, in the background, of the two further mendicants, one lame and the other blind, who, the Golden Legend relates, fled from the body lest they should be

FIG. 161. THE MARTINEZ MASTER OR A FOLLOWER. TRANSLATION OF ST. MARTIN. PRIVATE COLLECTION, VALENCIA (Courtesy

of Don Leandro

de

Saralegui)

healed and thus deprived of their source of income in their infirmities. 3.

THE

ST. LAZARUS

MASTER

Among the followers of the Martinez Master we may discern two definite personalities. One of them, the Cabanyes Master, eventually travelled rather far from his preceptor's paths, and, since he was an artist of broader intellectual and aesthetic horizon and has bequeathed to us an extraordinarily large number

388

T H E ST. L A Z A R U S

MASTER

of works, he will subsequently deserve a long discussion in this volume. T h e other is so scrupulous an imitator of the Martinez Master as sometimes to be almost indistinguishable from him, and it is indeed not at all unlikely that he is, after all, the Martinez Master himself in one of that Master's phases: because only a few of his productions can be recognized, we may dismiss him at once with brief consideration. In the search for a name to give him I have decided upon the St. Lazarus Master, since the predella of his principal work depicts scenes from the life of this rarely represented saint and since this work was in all probability a commission from the Order of St. Lazarus of Jerusalem. It is a retable in the Diocesan Museum (No. 33), coming from a little chapel in the parish church of S. Pedro, a part of the cathedral of Valencia, and at the bottom of its principal compartment an inscription 1 states that it was a donation of the priests of the church in the year 1520. T h e subject of this compartment (Fig. 162) is an unsolved enigma. It seems to have nothing to do with St. Lazarus, 2 whose history is unfolded in the predella, but to embody a legend (a local, Valencian legend?) of the interment of some member of the Lazarist Order at which Our Lord appeared and St. Peter said the office of the dead. A similar story is told in El Greco's painting of the burial of the Count of Orgaz. If the retable was in the primitive church of S. Pedro in the cathedral and was transferred to the present site of the church in the cathedral when the parish was moved to this site at the beginning of the eighteenth century, then the existence of a Lazarist chapel in the church of S. Pedro would account for the choice of a legend in which the Apostle participates as the main theme of the altarpiece; but the retable might possibly have been left over from the chapel of St. Louis 1 The inscription reads: "Spontaneis Divi Petri parroecorum largitionibus factum ann. M D X X . " The word after Petri is written parroecum, but with the c large and encircling the u, and I take this to be an abbreviation for parroecorum. The spelling parroecorum, instead of the common corruption parrocorum, is an attempt to preserve the diphthong ot in the Greek noun from which the Latin is derived, but the double rr is a frequent mistake in Vulgar Latin, perhaps due in this instance to the influence of the languages of the Spanish peninsula. 2 Tormo impossibly connects it with the tale of the Magdalene and the Count of Provence who went to Rome to find whether her preaching agreed with that of St. Peter and lost and recovered his wife and child in the process: see Tormo's Guide to the Museums of Valencia, 128, and again in Arte espanol, V I (1922-1923), 356.

Fic. 162. THE ST. LAZARUS MASTER. OF R E T A B L E .

BURIAL OF A LAZARIST (?), C E N T R E

DIOCESAN MUSEUM, VALENCIA (Photo. Arxiu Mas )

THE ST. LAZARUS MASTER of Toulouse, which (at the time the retable was painted) occupied the spot taken for the present parish church of S. Pedro at the end of the seventeenth and in the first years of the eighteenth century. 1 Except for the Crucifixion at the top, the whole body of the altarpiece is taken up with this mysterious theme. The middle of the predella shows the dead Christ supported by an angel; at the left, St. Lazarus (who, as so often, is identified with the beggar of the parable 2 ) stands at the door of the rich man's feast while the dogs lick his sores, and he is then seen in felicity accompanied by Abraham and beholding Dives in the fires of hell; and the whole corresponding space at the right displays an extended representation of his resurrection by Our Lord in the presence of all the Apostles and a group of Jews, with the Magdalene prostrate at the Saviour's feet, but with the anomaly of three haloed women kneeling at the right, one of whom may be guessed to be Martha. At the top of the guardapokos, as so often in Valencia, is the Eternal Father with the dove of the Holy Spirit, and the saints ranged along the sides are Michael, Lazarus (?),3 Mary of Egypt, Lucy, Mary Magdalene, Catherine of Alexandria, and the two Vincents. The direct allegiance to the Martinez Master is incorporated in all the types, particularly in the feminine saints on the guardapolvos and in the round-faced young acolytes at the funeral; but, at this presumably later date, the freshness of the Martinez Master has partially dried up in the process of translation. Or if, instead, we wish to adopt the alternative theory 1

For the history of the parish of S. Pedro, see Sanchis y Sivera, La catedral

Valencia, 264 ff. and 277 ff. 2

de

See my vol. II, p. 1 4 1 . > If the animal accompanying the episcopal saint is a dog, the saint ought to be Lazarus, the subject of the predella, although I know of no other instance in which he is distinguished by this appropriate emblem. The only other canonized bishop who is said to have a dog as attribute and would be a possibility here is St. Donatus of Fiesole; but I find it difficult to believe that so distant and obscure a worthy would have been introduced into a Valencian retable, and, moreover, I suspect that what has been called the dog of St. Donatus of Fiesole is in reality the wolf of one of his miracles (see the Bollandists under October 22). That an episcopal St. Donatus enjoyed a cult on the east coast, is proved by a contract of 1456 with the Catalan painter Guillermo Mart! for a retable dedicated to him (see Sanpere, Los cuatrocentistas, II, pp. xxii-xxiv), but this would probably be the most celebrated saint of the name, the bishop of Arezzo. There was even a canonized bishop of Valencia at the end of the sixth century named Donatus, but he has nothing to do with a dog. If the animal in the picture of the Diocesan Museum is a deer, then the saint is the bishop so generally worshipped at Valencia, Honoratus: see above, p. 61.

T H E ST. LAZARUS M A S T E R

391

which I have proposed — that the personality whom we have called the St. Lazarus Master merely equals the Martinez Master in a slightly less attractive aspect of this Master •— then we could advance as cogent proof the very striking similarity of the clerics at the right of the burial, especially of the priest at the extreme right, to the St. Augustine on the exterior of the wings of the Martinez triptych, a figure which has not usually been taken into account by critics in describing the style of the triptych or in assembling the author's imitators. Here and there, as in the representation of Our Lord at the interment and as in the man at the left end of the Lazarist's tomb, it is apparent that the painter, while never failing to manifest his affinity with the Martinez Master, is cognizant also of the dark and dour personages of the artist who founded this whole phase of the Valencian school, the Perea Master. The scenes are often set in plain but massive architecture of the Renaissance, like that in the retable of the Puridad in the Provincial Museum. The St. Lazarus Master must have painted also four small pieces, perhaps from the guardapolvos of a retable, now joined together in a horizontal frame in the Provincial Museum, Valencia, depicting, from left to right, St. Francis, St. Raphael with Tobias, the guardian angel, and St. Clara (Fig. 163). Tormo, 1 with a point of interrogation, guesses that they may have come from the guardapolvos of the Last Judgment, in the same Museum, that we have assigned to a flaccid follower of the Artes Master, 2 but a confrontation of the much better drawn types with the figures of this Last Judgment conclusively rescues the panels from the disgrace of such a classification. They incorporate, not the Artes Master's, but the Martinez and St. Lazarus Masters' interpretation of the Perea heritage. The factors that especially argue for the St. Lazarus Master are the parallelism of the St. Raphael to the angel of the Pieta in the retable of the Diocesan Museum, the analogy of the St. Francis to the clerics at the funeral, and the general aridity of draughtsmanship. Whereas the gold background of the Last Judgment is 1 Valencia: Los museos, p. 11 (Nos. 46-49 of his Catalogue). Evidently through an oversight, the St. Clara is described as a Pieta. * See above, p. 342.

392

T H E ST. L A Z A R U S

MASTER

plain, it is here patterned with a large diamond molif, and the haloes, in this perhaps earlier work of the St. Lazarus Master, still display the Martinez Master's favorite device of radiating billets. T h e exact parallelism of the St. Anthony of Padua 1 to the St. Francis of these guardapolvos would imply as author the same rather desiccated member of the Master's shop in the case of a panel in an unnamed private collection of which the photograph has been courteously sent me by Dr. August L. Mayer (Fig. 164). St. Anthony is introduced in the lower right corner of the panel adoring the mystery of the favorite Valencian theme, Our Lord presenting to His mother the redeemed of the old dispensation, and he is balanced, in the lower left corner, by St. Gabriel bearing a scroll with an ejaculatory inscription proclaiming the honor of the queen of heaven. T h e figure of Christ virtually duplicates His representation in the Agony in the Garden in the predella of the Martinez triptych itself; the Virgin is the counterpart of the same sacred personage in the remate of the triptych; the Gabriel and the one feminine face visible in the throng of the redeemed have the Martinez Master's distinctive roundness of countenance; the vase of lilies is practically an exact repetition of this object as it appears at the right of St. Anne in the triptych of the Muntadas Collection; and the haloes are the billeted circles of the atelier. B u t the technical dryness again obliges us to turn to the St. Lazarus Master in the atelier; and we then perceive, for instance, in addition to the Franciscan parallelism noted at the beginning of the paragraph, that the first of the patriarchs is the exact image of the Abraham and of the old man kneeling at the left of Our Lord's mandorla in the Lazarist retable and that the architecture of the background entirely agrees with the Master's norm. His types and hard draughtsmanship are unmistakable also in two panels of a predella in the Alvarez Collection at Villafranca del Panades in Catalonia, representing the Agony in the Garden (Fig. 165) and the Mourning over the Dead Christ. B y a queer iconographic convention that adapted itself to the restricted space, the Apostles not directly present with Christ in His Agony are reduced to the scope of a miniature group in the background looking like a nest of fledgelings. 1

W i t h the attribute of the grape vine in the chalice.

FIG. 164. THE ST. LAZARUS MASTER. CHRIST PRESENTING THE REDEEMED OF THE OLD DISPENSATION TO HIS MOTHER (Courtesy of Dr. August L.

Mayer)

THE CABANYES MASTER .4.

THE

CABANYES

MASTER

(ANTONIO

CABANYES?)

The painter whom, from the family of the heraldic escutcheons on his most significant extant work, I will call the Cabanyes Master is in many essential respects to be regarded as a pupil of the Martinez Master; but since he was decisively influ-

Fic. 16;. THE ST. LAZARUS MASTER. AGONY IN THE GARDEN. ALVAREZ COLLECTION, VILLAFRANCA DEL PANADES (Photo. Arxiu d'Arqueologia

Catalana)

enced also by Paolo da San Leocadio and to a less degree by the Leonardesque Ferrando Yafiez de la Almedina and Ferrando de Llanos and since he was pretty thoroughly Italianized, we might well have postponed our examination of his achievement to the volume that will treat these artists and the aspects of the full

396

THE CABANYES

MASTER

Renaissance at Valencia related to them. It is quite as logical, however, to consider him here because he is so closely linked with the Martinez Master as to indicate that he was at some time in his life a member of this Master's atelier, because he retains more of the mediaeval than Paolo da San Leocadio and Leonardo's imitators, and because, from the surprisingly ample number of his productions that have happened to be preserved, many have been wrongly connected by critics with the Osona shop, which has so largely concerned us in this volume. The retable of Sts. Dionysius and Margaret from the church of S. Juan del Hospital at Valencia and now in the Diocesan Museum is his most significant work, inasmuch as it provides cogent but not absolutely conclusive circumstantial evidence for denominating him Antonio Cabanyes. The evidence in a nutshell is the following. 1 The artist Antonio Cabanyes (or Cavanyes) contracted on February ίο, 1507, to fresco with now destroyed paintings the chapel of the Confraternity of Santiago in the cathedral, and on July 26 of the same year he is mentioned as himself a member of the Confraternity; 2 since the chapel in S. Juan del Hospital that contained the altarpiece of Sts. Dionysius and Margaret was under the patronage of the Confraternity at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the moment to which the style assigns the altarpiece, and since Antonio Cabanyes was at that time a brother in the organization, it might be guessed that he would have been commissioned to do the retable in S. Juan as well as the mural paintings in the chapel of the cathedral; this guess is partially confirmed by the presence of the heraldic escutcheons of the Cabanyes family upon the guardapohos on the hypothesis that Antonio's execution of the retable would have been accepted in place of his monetary contribution to the expenses of the undertaking and that, because his artistic contribution so much outweighed in value the sums paid by the other members, he would have been allowed in recompense to set his arms upon the monument. Since, however, the evidence creates no more than a presumption in favor of an attribution to Antonio, it is preferable, until 1

See the Baron de San Petrillo in Archivo espanol de arte y arqueologia, I X (1933),

8 94"9 · 2 Sanchis y Sivera, Pintores medievales en Valencia,

224.

THE CABANYES MASTER

397

further documentary records are forthcoming, to use the title Cabanyes Master (on the analogy of the titles from the shields on the Perea and Artes altars) to describe the author of this retable and of the many other works that must be assigned to him on stylistic grounds. The two above-mentioned references in the year 1507 (the contract very elaborate in its specifications) constitute the only documentary allusions to Antonio Cabanyes as yet brought to light. In the retable, the frames of which, as customarily in Valencia at the beginning of the sixteenth century, are still Gothic in their carvings, the principal compartment (Fig. 166) displays Sts. Dionysius and Margaret standing side by side, the former with a book on one page of which are written in Latin the opening sentences of the Gospel according to St. John, 1 the latter with her ordinary emblems of the dragon and the cross. Their names are written in Valencian on slips of paper on the pavement, and their haloes contain petitions for their prayers. The cope of St. Dionysius is drawn together by a piece of embroidery representing the Salvator Mundi, and into the orphreys are woven effigies of St. Peter, St. Paul, and a series of virgin martyrs. The frequent Valencian theme of Christ presenting to His mother the redeemed of the Old Testament is inserted between this compartment and the remate of the Crucifixion, and includes the figure of the good thief, St. Dysmas, with his cross. The four lateral panels depict the Epiphany (Fig 167), Ascension, Pentecost, and Dormition. The Entombment or Pieta at the middle of the predella is flanked by four other episodes from the Passion, the Agony in the Garden (the approaching Judas with a halo half gold and half black 2 ), the Flagellation, the Via Dolorosa, and the Deposition. At the apex of the guardapolvos are the Eternal Father 3 and Dove; next come half-lengths of St. Michael and the guardian angel; the busts of Sts. Cosmas 1 The writing is upside down, i.e., arranged so as to be read by St. Dionysius and not, according to the usual practice, directed to the eyes of the spectator. The sentences on the two foremost, open pages I cannot make out, and it is on a third page, only half seen, that some of the words of the beginning of St. John's Gospel may be deciphered. In two other representations of St. Dionysius we have what purport to be his own words written in his book: see above, pp. 208 and 209. 1 See above, pp. 86 and 297. 3 U p o n H i s book is inscribed (now right side u p ) , " E g o sum v i a Veritas et v i t a ; e t alpha et o m e g a , principium et finis."

FIG. I66. THE CABANYES MASTER. STS. DIONYSIUS AND MARGARET, CENTRE OF RETABLE. DIOCESAN MUSEUM, VALENCIA (Photo. Arxiu

Mas )

FIG. 167. THE CABANYES MASTER. EPIPHANY, SECTION OF RETABLE. DIOCESAN MUSEUM, VALENCIA (Photo. Arxiu

Mas J

4oo

T H E CABANYES MASTER

and Damian; and finally, in full length, Sts. Elizabeth of Hungary, Peter Martyr, Christopher, and Sebastian. Except for the gold-brocaded background behind the two central effigies, landscapes or passages of architecture are used as settings in the body of the retable. The style is quite visibly a more Italianized and somewhat neutralized aspect of the Martinez Master's unmistakable manner, manipulated by an artist of very respectable, charming, but not preeminent talents. The countenances are often only removed by a shade of difference from the Martinez Master's fullfaced and winsome women and young men, especially in the central St. Margaret, the St. Sebastian, the guardian angel, and the angel at the left in the Entombment; and what slight change has taken place is, under Italian influence, in the direction of an endeavor towards further prettiness, though with a corresponding loss in trenchant characterization. The mature masculine personages not infrequently embody a like partial dilution of the Martinez Master's precedents. Often the types, as of the angels in the episode of Christ, the Virgin, and the patriarchs and as of the actors in all the small panels of the predella, continue very faithfully the Martinez Master's childlike and gentle conceptions of the human form in shortened proportions. The haloes are very commonly (though not always) an adaptation of his billeted sort of nimbus into a series of scallops. When the modifications of the Martinez Master's lessons become more pronounced, the Cabanyes Master is plainly affected, in his alterations, by Paolo da San Leocadio as we know Paolo in his works at Gandia. The union of the strains from the Martinez Master and from Paolo da San Leocadio produces a very distinctive feminine face, as in the Virgin of the Epiphany, and young masculine visage, as in the St. John of the Pentecost, by which the hand of the Cabanyes Master may be recognized in many other monuments. His types for older men, as in the majority of the Apostles, also reveal his fruitful admiration for the San Leocadio shop. Some of his youths, however, as in the second Magus of the Epiphany and the group in the background and as in the St. Damian, imply a more direct familiarity with the early creations of Raphael than he could have gleaned from the San Leocadio pictures, and it is indeed hard to account for

THE CABANYES MASTER

401

his thorough familiarity with Italianism, especially in his architectural settings, except on the theory that he had enjoyed the privilege of a sojourn in the sister peninsula. In his forms, draperies, and especially color, he suggests (though, of course, with pronounced inferiority) the Umbro-Florentine combination that we meet in the young Raphael. Paolo da San Leocadio's manner is therefore similar but is somewhat differentiated by the obvious indebtedness to Francia. N o w and again the Cabanyes Master adapts a face to the Leonardesque types that Ferrando Y a n e z de la Almedina and Ferrando de Llanos were popularizing at Valencia, preferring particularly the former's peculiar visages: good instances are the central St. Dionysius and the Christ of the scene with the patriarchs. Among the Spanish contributions to the amalgamation must be reckoned not only the Gothic frames and the central gold background but also the retention of some gold brocades, as on the St. Dionysius and on the Virgin and her bier in the Dormition. In this retable the Master gives less free rein to one of his greatest claims to distinction than in certain other works •— his interest in landscape; but it is nevertheless fairly well realized in the Crucifixion. With a premature impressionistic touch —• like the Borboto Master but with a sense of prettiness rather than of grandeur —• he sketches for us the Valencian shores of the Mediterranean nearly always accenting them with the humbler dwellings that we may still see in the huerta of the city at the present day — the typical barracas and the houses with framework of wood. In the background of the Agony of the Garden he is concerned rather with the Gothic city that stands for Jerusalem, its approaches filled with agitated soldiery. The Roman hall of the Flagellation opens, with sinister contrast, to a pretty hedge, and at the right of the actual scourging the painter has introduced two subordinate episodes, in an aperture at the rear St. Peter making double denial to damsel and to guard, on the pavement in the foreground two henchmen seated and plaiting the crown of thorns. In the really little less than astoundingly copious legacy of works bequeathed to us by the Cabanyes Master, we had best clarify the atmosphere by considering next an important series of panels in the Provincial Museum, Valencia, since Tormo has

4

o2

THE CABANYES

MASTER

assigned them to a very different milieu, i.e., to an anonymous follower of Rodrigo de Osona the elder, and has set them some score of years too early in the decade from 1480-1490. T h e series consists of: a predella representing at the centre the Man of Sorrows supported by two angels and at the sides, seated on stone benches set against landscapes, Sts. L u c y , Martha, M a r y Magdalene (Fig. 168), and Ursula; and, identical in shape, composition, and Gothic carving of the frames and therefore probably once parts of the same long predella, though now dissociated from it in the Museum, two panels of St. Margaret and St. Anne, with the Virgin and Child at her feet (Fig. 168). T h e Magdalene, as usual at Valencia, carries the crown of thorns as well as the box of ointment, and there are no iconographic peculiarities, except perhaps the inclusion of two feminine saints both of whom have the dragon as an emblem, St. Martha here distinguished by the additional attribute of the pot of holy water and St. Margaret by the small cross which rises behind her. It is difficult to see how a careful and unprejudiced review of the stylistic evidence can arrive at any other conclusion than that the series was painted by the Cabanyes Master. T h e types embody exactly the fusion of the strains from the Martinez Master and from the San Leocadio shop that we have enjoyed in the retable of Sts. Dionysius and Margaret, now with one strain more tangible and now with another. Instances in which the leaning towards the Martinez Master is dominant are the St. Ursula, almost a reproduction of the guardian angel in the Cabanyes retable, and the angels of the Pieta, repeated from the Entombment of the retable. Indeed the Man of Sorrows in the Pieta looks as if he had been lifted right out of the Entombment or the Deposition. In the very youthful Virgin grouped with St. Anne the Cabanyes Master once again reverts to the Martinez Master's utterly captivating conception of sacred personages as children, endowing her with the same gentle naivete that we have discerned in passages of the retable in the Diocesan Museum. T h e St. L u c y and the Magdalene reiterate even more literally the type of the Virgin in the Epiphany, who belongs to the other, more Leocadiesque phase of the Cabanyes Master, characterized by a desire for a more ideal, Italianized kind of feminine beauty. The results of his concern with Valen-

ζ ο Ρ υ w cn

ej υ hjζ ω < ^> s Q Ζ < ω ι/ϊ ω3 Ζ S ω < $J υ οζ ο < > S * οί Ρ w< Η < h >J J Sω in W W Χ α* Ζ b < υ w

§

χ h

4o4

THE CABANYES MASTER

cian landscape appear now in their fullest and most delightful aspects. O n l y behind the M a g d a l e n e do the numerous little personages that enliven these settings enact recognizable episodes, the angel's proclamation of the Resurrection to the holy women and the Noli me tangere\ to the right of her head the city, its walls, and the swarming representatives of the a r m y once again unfold to our eyes the v e r y same scene that we h a v e perceived behind the A g o n y in the Garden in the Sts. Dionysius and M a r g a r e t retable. In his assignment of this predella in the Provincial M u s e u m to the school of the Osonas T o r m o has doubtless been affected b y such external elements as the angels' costumes (which, however, are like those in the retable of Sts. Dionysius and M a r garet) and the benches of motifs of the Renaissance upon which the saints sit, inasmuch as parapets of this nature are found in the productions of both Rodrigo the elder and his son and the younger Rodrigo's angels are vested in this w a y with puffs a t the shoulders and with sleeves of a different color from the rest of the garb. B u t the C a b a n y e s M a s t e r might easily h a v e taken over these superficial details from the Osona shop and could in so far be said to have been influenced by it, without in any real sense belonging to it; the benches, at least, might constitute a spontaneous borrowing of his from I t a l y . T o r m o is probably correct in giving to the same hand and perhaps to the same original retable the capping section from some guarda-polvos, representing two angels bearing the crown of thorns, which now also has found a home in the Provincial M u s e u m and which the Baron de San Petrillo has claimed as a part of the Perea altarpiece. 1 T h e types quite correspond w i t h those of the predella, and the more classical effect of the draperies is perhaps to be explained b y repaint. I should not be surprised if we ought to include as another fragment b y the C a b a n y e s M a s t e r in the same M u s e u m a panel depicting the Annunciation of St. Joachim (Fig. 169). A single small piece like this perhaps provides too little evidence for a categorical statement, but no one could fail to perceive that a t least the panel belongs to j u s t the phase of Valencian painting that now occupies our attention. T h e r e are, moreover, m a n y 1

See above, p. 272.

FIG. 169. THE CABANYES MASTER (?). ANNUNCIATION OF ST. JOACHIM. PROVINCIAL MUSEUM, VALENCIA (Photo. Arxiu Mas)

4o6

THE CABANYES

MASTER

close links with the Cabanyes Master's achievements. T h e little prostrate shepherd boy at the right repeats exactly the adaptation of the Martinez Master's round-faced type that we have observed in the St. Ursula of the predella; the standing shepherd with the bagpipe at the left wears his favorite costume of a light tunic from which issue sleeves of a darker hue; and the landscape, with the Valencian barraca behind the young shepherd, might serve just as well for a setting to any of the feminine saints in the predella. T o the atelier rather than to the Master himself we may attach two other bits of a retable in the Provincial Museum, busts of the two St. Johns, Nos. 73 and 233 of Tormo's Guide. T h e Diocesan Museum at Valencia houses two other assemblages of panels by the Cabanyes Master, in addition to the retable of Sts. Dionysius and Margaret. T h e better of the pair is a triptych, No. 27, coming from the convent of the Servite nuns at Sagunto. In the central panel is depicted the Cabanyes Master's favorite theme, the Man of Sorrows, here emerging from an ancient sarcophagus and upheld by Sts. John Evangelist and Nicodemus (or Joseph of Arimathaea). T h e haloes of a light ring are inscribed in Latin after the same fashion as in the principal panel of the Sts. Dionysius and Margaret retable: that of Our Lord with the celebrated verse upon His sorrows from Lamentations, I, 12; that of St. John, with the opening of his Gospel; and that of Nicodemus with the first lines of the Miserere. T h e subjects of the interiors of the wings are the Flagellation (Fig. 170) and Deposition; on the two halves of the exterior are represented the actors in the Annunciation. T h e sense of the Roman letters incised in the lower arch of the setting to the Scourging defies m y powers of interpretation; in the tympanum of the upper arch a male and a female Centaur display the escutcheon of the double-headed eagle, which appears also in the banners of the Via Dolorosa in the predella of the Sts. Dionysius and Margaret retable, which I am less and less inclined to elucidate as a token of Spain's new connection with the German empire, and which is probably conceived merely as a symbol of the ancient Roman empire under which the Saviour suffered. 1 T h e most patent proofs of the Cabanyes Master's 1

See below, p. 546.

FIG. 170. T H E C A B A N Y E S MASTER. TRIPTYCH.

F L A G E L L A T I O N , W I N G OF

DIOCESAN MUSEUM, V A L E N C I A (Photo. Arxiu Mas)

4o8

THE CABANYES

MASTER

handicraft are: the Virgin and Gabriel in the Annunciation embodying his characteristic fusion of elements from the Martinez Master and Paolo da San Leocadio; his regular type for the Christ of the Passion; the intimate fraternal relation between the St. John Evangelist and the feminine saints of the predella in the Provincial Museum; the parallelism between the St. Nicodemus and many of the Leocadiesque Apostles in the altarpiece of Sts. Dionysius and Margaret; the almost exact reduplication, in the Flagellation, of the postures of the two scourgers in this altarpiece; the retention of one soldier in the lower right corner to prepare the crown of thorns; and the appealing, childlike quality, inherited from the Martinez Master, that he lends to this soldier and to his dormant companion at the left. The general outlines of the compositions for the Flagellation and Deposition, nevertheless, are pleasantly varied from the renderings in the predella of the larger altarpiece, especially in the Scourging where a balcony to ensconce Our Lord's judges is introduced into the Roman architecture of the background. The multiplication of small figures in these two episodes creates a deceptive analogy to the St. Narcissus Master, whose Osonesque types, however, are rather different. The other group of panels in the Diocesan Museum by the Cabanyes Master (Nos. 18, 19, and 20) are the fragments of a retable the provenience of which has not been traced beyond their presence in the archiepiscopal palace before they were donated to the Museum. They consist of two lateral compartments from the body of an altarpiece, depicting the Nativity (Fig. 1 7 1 ) and Resurrection, and a part of the predella, with the Master's usual composition for the suffering Christ between two angels at the centre and Pentecost and the Dormition at the sides. The authorship is obvious; and it is necessary only to point out that the compositions of the Pentecost and Dormition are merely adaptations of the arrangements of these scenes in the Sts. Dionysius and Margaret retable to the smaller and diversely shaped spaces, that the St. Joseph in the Nativity is one of the painter's occasional Leonardesque departures, that the proclamation to the shepherd in the offing is managed exactly like the Annunciation to St. Joachim in the Provincial Museum, and that the Roman soldiers in the Resurrection are

FIG. 171. THE CABANYES MASTER. NATIVITY, SECTION OF RETABLE. DIOCESAN MUSEUM, VALENCIA (Photo. Arxiu

Mas )

4

io

THE CABANYES

MASTER

the Cabanyes Master's ordinary overgrown children. Ought we to see in the F and the Y on the shield of the soldier asleep at the right the initials of Ferdinand and Isabella (Ysabel), and are the panels therefore to be dated before the queen's demise in 1504? The hand of the Cabanyes Master is recognizable also in a somewhat repainted panel of quite anomalous iconography in the Tortosa Collection at Onteniente (Fig. 172), depicting Our Lord with His cross and upon His sarcophagus pouring the blood from His wounded side upon a heart presented by St. Catherine of Siena and thence into the Grail, while at the left the Magdalene kisses and wipes His feet and at the right St. Mary of Egypt and the good thief, St. Dysmas, kneel in adoration.1 In the right background are the three vacant crosses (of the Tau form), and at the upper left the Madonna and Child appear in the clouds. Saralegui 2 suggests that the main episode is a telescoping of various visions of St. Catherine in which Our Lord vouchsafed her the sight of His riven side and exchanged hearts with her; he adduces some approximate parallels in Italian art; and he relates the picture to the Valencian cult of the Precious Blood, which was emphasized at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Around this episode are grouped the other saints in a melancholy kind of sacra conversazione, as not infrequently by the Italians of the period, but the panel as a whole reflects also the fervid Valencian interest in the eschatology of the Saviour that we have already found incorporated in so many paintings of the period. In the midst of the general intimate affiliation with the types and methods of the Cabanyes Master, one should register especially the exact parallelism of the Magdalene and the St. Mary of Egypt to the feminine saints of the predella in the Provincial Museum, of the Saviour 1

Saralegui {Archivo de arte valenciano, X V I - X V I I , 1930-1931, p. 151) mistakes this twain for Adam and Eve; but the dress of her own hair, the three loaves of bread (see above, p. 61) upon the outspread fold of her scarf, and the rustic cross that she carries clearly identify the woman as St. Mary of Egypt, a proper pendant to the Magdalene. Moreover, the circular halo that the figure wears is almost never bestowed upon Eve (see, however, below, p. 450). For the masculine saint, the nudity, except for the loincloth, the wounds on the legs, and the three crosses in the distance plainly suggest St. Dysmas, who is so prominent in the Cabanyes Master's representations of Christ bringing the redeemed of the old dispensation to His mother. 2 Ibid.

FIG. 172. THE CABANYES MASTER.

MYSTICAL SCENE FROM LIFE OF ST. CATHERINE

OF SIENA. TORTOSA COLLECTION, ONTENIENTE (Photo. Cardona )

412

THE CABANYES MASTER

to the author's conceptions of Our Lord, and of the St. Dysmas to the lay personage with St. Anthony in the retable that we shall later assign to the Master in the Cluny Museum. The nature of the aged masculine countenance, the eyes, and the general technical method argue for an attribution to the Cabanyes Master rather than to the Martinez Master in a panel of St. Anthony Abbot in the Collection of Don Tomas Montesinos at Valencia (Fig. 173). This kind of halo, with an elaborate foliate design in the middle, is sometimes used by him in other works, instead of the type inherited from the Martinez Master. The latest extant achievement of the Cabanyes Master at Valencia is perhaps the retable of St. Peter in a chapel at the right of the nave in the church of S. Esteban (Fig. 174). The structure, the framework of which, at this tardier date, has changed from Gothic carvings to motifs of the Renaissance, consists only of a large principal panel of the enthroned Apostle set over a predella and between figured guardapolvos. The throne is also built of architecture of the Renaissance, including medallions exactly like those in the setting of the Flagellation in the Sagunto triptych and winged putti at the end of its arms. St. Peter's book displays an inscription adapting to the first person a conflation of the Evangelical statement 1 about him with the Apocalyptic language 2 that the Church applied to him: "Date ( = datae) sunt michi ( = mihi) claves regni celorum ( = caelorum) et habeo potestatem claudere celum ( = caelum) et aperire portas eius." The subject of the middle of the predella is Christ's appearance to His mother with the patriarchs, virtually a repetition of the version in the altarpiece of Sts. Dionysius and Margaret; and in each of the two lateral compartments are paired saints ensconced in landscapes, the Baptist and the penitent Jerome at the left, the Magdalene and St. Mary of Egypt at the right (the latter, in addition to her emblem of the loaves, having at her feet the lion that assisted in her interment to match St. Jerome's beast on the other side). The four saints of the guardapolvos are Sebastian, Roch, Onuphrius, and Francis (the last with an aquatic bird at his feet, 1 3

Matthew, X V I , 19. For instance, Revelation, I I I , 7.

FIG. 173. THE CABANYES MASTER (?). ST. ANTHONY ABBOT. COLLECTION OF DON TOMAS MONTESINOS, VALENCIA (Photo. Arxtu d'Arqueologia

Catalana)

i4 THE CABANYES MASTER perhaps here not merely the motif so often employed for filling in the spaces of Valencian pictures but, as in some other instances, 1 meant to symbolize the sermon to the birds). The most unescapable proofs of the Cabanyes Master's authorship are the Magdalene and the St. Mary of Egypt and the impressionistic landscape with its barracas that surrounds them, but all other details quite conform to his methods. The head of St. Peter is one of his adaptations of the masculine types of Ferrando Yanez de la Almedina, and the throne is set against a gold background incised with precisely the pattern used so extensively in the Cluny retable. The principal evidence for the tardy dating is found in the architecture of the frame, in the rhetorical posture of the St. Sebastian as compared with the rendering in the altarpiece of Sts. Dionysius and Margaret, and, despite the preservation of the childlike feeling in many of the figures, in the relative loss of freshness of draughtsmanship in the Magdalene and St. Mary of Egypt. The tenacity of Valencian aesthetic tradition is illustrated by the direct descent of the monumental and idol-like conception of St. Peter from the precedents of Jacomart's shop. 4

One stops just short of absolute conviction in ascribing to the Cabanyes Master a similar large sacred effigy in a chapel at the left of the nave in the church of Sta. Catalina at Valencia— a panel, evidently once the centre of a retable, representing St. Blaise standing and worshipped by a somewhat smaller Dominican donor (Fig. 175). The countenance of the saint exhibits exactly the same interpretation of borrowings from Ferrando Yanez de la Almedina that we have observed in the St. Dionysius and St. Peter, and the donor's well characterized head is only a more corpulent version of the type employed for the St. Cosmas of the Sts. Dionysius and Margaret retable. The gold background is treated in a way that is new for me in Spanish art — the main body incised with a motif of plain vertical stripes against which, directly behind the saint, is set an auric textile of diapered stripes. The Cabanyes Master's pleasing attainments in their latest aspect, or those of a very faithful follower, are exemplified, outside of Spain and in a monumental form, by another entire, 1

See above, p. 228, and below, p. 442.

FIG. 174. THE CABANYES MASTER. RETABLE OF ST. PETER. S. ESTEBAN, VALENCIA CPhoto. Arxiu

Mas )

4

ι6

THE CABANYES

MASTER

large retable that has reached the Musee de Cluny at Paris through the bequest of M . Jules Audeoud (Fig. 176). T h e central theme is St. Martin and the beggar, capped, in the remate, by the Crucifixion. Of the four lateral panels, the one at the lower left shows St. Anthony Abbot accompanied by a kneeling layman who may be the donor but seems too simply clad for such a plutocratic function and is perhaps merely a peasant introduced to symbolize the devotees of the great hermit and banisher of skin diseases (Fig. 177); the companion piece at the right displays St. Stephen; and the themes of the two upper panels at the sides are St. Vincent Ferrer and the dream of St. Joseph, both explained by scrolls with appropriate inscriptions. As in the predella of the Provincial Museum at Valencia, the middle piece of this part of the Paris retable contains the Master's habitual composition of the Man of Sorrows upheld by angels; in the lateral compartments are the penitent St. Jerome and seated effigies of Sts. Francis, Barnabas (with the emblem of the rope about his neck '), and Onuphrius (with the attribute of the crown upon the ground 2 as well as the lion). T h e Eternal Father with the D o v e is at the top of the guardapolvos·, Sts. James Major and Bartholomew are beside the Crucifixion; Sts. Cosmas and Damian on the cross-pieces; and on the sides, Sts. Margaret, Catherine of Siena (with the Dominican rosary round her neck), Roch, and Giles. For his gold backgrounds the painter reverts to the diaper of a bold, diamond motif like that of the Artes Master. T h e retable exhibits the Cabanyes Master's customary expansion of the Martinez Master's precedents and his characteristic desire for physical and spiritual beauty. The proofs for the attribution lie in such figures as St. Joseph's celestial messenger, who repeats the Master's angelic types and their costume; the St. Martin, who is a but slightly more masculine version of the St. Margaret in the Valencian predella and belongs to the painter's series of Raphaelesque youths; the St. Damian, who incorporates just that retention of the Martinez Master's simple loveliness that has delighted us in the Virgin and Child with St. Anne in the predella and who is therefore a weaker creation 1 2

See above, p. 308, n. 1. See above, p. 360.

FIG. 17;. THE CABANYES MASTER (?). ST. BLAISE. STA. CATALINA, VALENCIA (Photo. Arxiu

Mas )

FIG. 177. THE CABANYES MASTER (?). ST. ANTHONY ABBOT, SECTION OF RETABLE.

CLUNY MUSEUM, PARIS

{Photo. Archives Photographiques

d'Art et

d'Histoire)

4 2O

THE CABANYES MASTER

than the rendering of the same saint in the Dionysius and Margaret retable; and the kneeling layman, who, in the rather incisive characterization, recalls the St. Joseph of the Epiphany in the same retable. T h e capping Crucifixion, except for a variation in the placing of the Magdalene, is almost the duplicate of the specimen in the Valencian retable. T h e inscriptions on the books held by the sacred personages are directed, as so often with the Cabanyes Master, towards these personages rather than towards the spectator, 1 and the haloes belong to the billeted class customary in the whole circle of the Martinez Master. T h e factors that suggest a late moment in the Cabanyes Master's career or execution by an intimately related pupil are the further advance in the ways of the Raphaelesque Renaissance and a greater dryness, particularly in the predella and above all in the full, classical canons employed for the Man of Sorrows and the accompanying angels. T h e figure of Christ in the Crucifixion, on the other hand, is a very characteristic and more primitive-looking creation in the manner of the Cabanyes Master himself. Other works about the ascription of which to the Cabanyes Master himself I retain mild doubts are two vertical panels 2 of Sts. John Baptist and Onuphrius at the top of an altar at the right of the nave in the church of Museros, just north of Valencia (with the gold backgrounds tooled at the borders), and (possibly from the painter's early period) two smaller panels in the Collection of Don Miguel Marti at Valencia, depicting again the Baptist and, kneeling before the Man of Sorrows, St. Jerome. T w o other panels in the same Valencian Collection, representing the Anna selbdritt and St. Joachim, seem to me more certainly to embody his own workmanship (Fig. 178). I have reserved for the end of our registration of the Cabanyes Master's canon three altarpieces that at first sight do not seem to fall quite so obviously within the category of his authentic productions — three very similar and complicated treatments of the Last Judgment, each so large as itself to constitute the whole body of a retable. The most accessible example, sadly See above, p. 397, n. 1. Not, of course, the more celebrated retable dedicated to St. Macarius and belonging to the Order of Santiago, which is on the other side of the church and will concern us in a future volume: see above, p. 306, n. 1. 1

2

422

THE CABANYES

MASTER

injured by the ravages of time, has been moved from the Museo Provincial (de Santa Agueda), together with all other paintings in this collection except Huguet's great altarpiece, to the new Museum of Catalan Art at Barcelona; 1 the second and most complete specimen decorates a lateral altar in the church of Cuart de Poblet, a suburb of Valencia and an appanage of the great Catalan monastery the name of which it bears; and the third example (Fig. 179) may be seen above an altar at the left of the nave in the parish church of Cortes de Arenoso (on the edge of the province of Castellon de la Plana, about halfway to Teruel). T h e y belong to a numerous series of iconographically interrelated versions of the subject, which were done in the early years of the Cinquecento and are distributed through Valencian territory and especially the Maestrazgo, including an instance at San Mateo attributable to the school of Valentin Montoliu, which will concern us in the next volume. A rendering at Canet lo Roig (near San Mateo) almost repeats the composition of the Cabanyes Master, but is executed by a painter so thoroughly imbued with the style of the full Roman Renaissance that its discussion will also find a place in a future volume. Still another example in the Ermita de S. Francisco Javier (the former parroquia) at Torreblanca, just north of Castellon, also belongs to the late Renaissance, but it is such a peasant's daub that it deserves treatment in no volume. Since almost all the members of the series combine with the theme of the Last Judgment the release of souls from purgatory, they are somewhat differentiated from the more ordinary treatments of the theme by the Artes Master and one of his pupils, 2 and are called by the Spaniards retablos de las almas. T h e general outlines of the Cabanyes Master's composition consist of the following elements: in the remate, Christ the Judge listening to the supplications of the Virgin and St. John Baptist; in the body of the retable, just beneath Him, the assembly of the saints kneeling on clouds before the walls of the heavenly 1 F r o m the M u s e o Provincial there has entered the M u s e u m of C a t a l a n A r t also another Valencian retable o f the L a s t J u d g m e n t which was executed at too late a period in the Renaissance to be included in this volume. 2 See a b o v e , pp. 297 and 342. T h e example at T o r r e de C a n a l s by the A r t i s and B o r b o t o M a s t e r s corresponds rather with the instances b y the C a b a n y e s M a s t e r and his shop.

FIG. 179. THE CABANYES MASTER. LAST JUDGMENT. PARISH CHURCH, CORTES DE ARENOSO (Photo. Arxiu Mas )

424 THE CABANYES MASTER Jerusalem; further below, at the centre, angels with the cross (of the Tau form), with the instruments of the Passion, and with trumpets; at the lower left, instead of the customary resurrection of the dead on the Last Day, further angels rescuing the souls in purgatory from a rectangular pit of flames and from the mouth of a cave, while the unbaptized infants gaze wistfully out of the cells of limbo; still other celestial spirits guiding the elect upward to St. Peter at the gate of Paradise; at the right, the punishments of the damned; and in the lower centre—as a peculiarity in this series of pictures of the theme — the Mass of St. Gregory taking place under a baldacchino of the Renaissance (Fig. 180). The introduction of the Mass of St. Gregory is an extension of the practice of depicting a requiem mass in retables of St. Michael as a mode of liberating souls from purgatory for the angels to transport to heaven. In the Barcelona example, two additional angels with further instruments of the Passion fill the upper spandrels of Our Lord's mandorla; and th& guardapolvos are also preserved, embellished at the top with the Visitation and, beneath, with figures of Sts. Anne, Joachim, Anthony Abbot, Dominic (or Vincent Ferrer), Mary Magdalene, Agnes, Sebastian, and Roch. There are also on the guardapolvos two escutcheons, each with a soul in the fires of purgatory. At the bottom of the altarpiece is inscribed from the book of Job, X I X , 21, evidently as a plea of those in purgatory for the suffrages of the faithful: "Miseremini mei, miseremini mei, saltern vos amici mei, quia manus Domini tetigit me." The Barcelona retable, as probably the earliest of the triad, continues the tradition of a gold background instead of the sky. The main division of the specimen at Cortes de Arenoso has been set in a frame of a later period, and the remate at the top is thus separated from it. Beside the remate have been placed two small effigies of Sts. John Baptist and Christopher, probably from the original guardapolvos. Furthermore, the sufferings of hell are more elaborately represented, including, among other punitive motifs, a basin with seven victims of the mortal sins, each of which is designated by a label, and, at the upper right, as in the Artes retable, the sinister figure of the hanging Judas. The iconography of the version at Cuart de Poblet demands

FIG. I8O. THE CABANYES MASTER. MASS OF ST. GREGORY, SECTION OF RETABLE. MUSEUM OF CATALAN ART, BARCELONA (Photo. Arxiu

Mas )

42.6

T H E CAB AN Y E S

MASTER

a longer discussion because of the saints chosen for the guardapolvos and because of the interesting themes in the predella. In the body of the retable, the pot of the deadly sins and the hanging Judas are depicted as at Cortes de Arenoso; a frequent motif of the Last Judgment is introduced among the blessed at the other side, the vesting of a redeemed person with the wedding-garment of heaven; the commencement of the Miserere is inscribed on the temple in which the Mass of St. Gregory occurs; and on the guardapolvos, amidst the saints, the representation of a soul in purgatory is included at each side, but not, as at Barcelona, framed in an escutcheon. These four saints are all pilgrims or hermits. Two are clearly recognizable, St. Roch and (of infrequent appearance in Spain ') St. Alexis, depicted in his most characteristic guise as asleep under the stairs. Of the second pair, one looks like St. Anthony Abbot, but he has, for me, the inexplicable emblem of a staff in a pool of water; 2 the other is quite as baffling, a pilgrim, like St. Roch, with a dog, who licks a sore on his leg, and with what seems to be a cup in his hand.3 Three of the scenes in the predella are perfectly usual, at the extreme left the Agony in the Garden, in the middle St. Michael weighing souls, and at the extreme right the Entombment (Fig. I 8 O A ) : it is the two intervening episodes at left and right that are extraordinary, and we should probably never have discovered the themes, unless they had chanced to be repeated in a retablo de las almas at Onda which we shall subsequently study as by a follower of the Cabanyes Master and which contains explanatory inscriptions.4 Both themes, as might have been foreseen, are eschatological, harmonizing with the content of the body of the altarpiece. In the compartment at the left, St. Amator (Amador in Castilian and Catalan) is saying one of his thirty-three masses for the release of his parents' souls from purgatory. The hermit Amator in question is probably apocryphal, and he has been, of course, confused with the several other more or less mist-en1

See vol. I I , p. 203, for his figure by Ferrer Bassa. T h e only generally known saint who has such an emblem is the eastern St. Gregory Thaumaturgus, but the figure in the retable of Cuart has none of his episcopal insignia. J St. Lazarus, as a separate figure, would surely be represented with the episcopal regalia: see above, p. 390, n. 3. * See below, p. 4 3 1 . 3

Fig. ι8ΟΛ. THE CABANYES MASTER. ENTOMBMENT, SECTION OF PREDELLA OF RETABLE. PARISH CHURCH, CUART DE POBLET (Photo. Arxiu d'Arqueologia

Catalana )

4α8

THE CABANYES MASTER

veloped saints of the name, for instance with the one after whom Rocamadour in southern France is called.1 His legend, upon which, as in the case of so many saints,2 a demonological element has been superimposed, assumes various forms, but the version followed by the Cabanyes Master is the same as that embodied in a Catalan life of the saint written in the fourteenth century and published in the Bulletin de la Societe des Etudes du Lot, III (1876-1877), 109-129. Born through the assistance of a demon to Roman parents, hitherto barren, the infant Amator was carried off by devils to Egypt and there rescued from them by St. Paul the Hermit. Nourished by a hind and reared by St. Paul, he eventually took orders. One day while serving God in the wilds, he beheld a legion of devils transporting a woman, amidst the most horrible torments, to perdition. Eventually by a kind of Euripidean avayvupiais based upon what the now deceased St. Paul had related to him of his parents, Amator recognized in the woman his mother, and was told by her that he might save her and his father from eternal damnation by saying for each thirty-three masses of carefully specified intentions of various ecclesiastical kinds. This he did, and the "thirty-three masses of St. Amator" became a regular institution in southern France, Spain, and Portugal which priests offered for the souls of the deceased until the time of the Tridentine reforms. In other versions 3 it is St. Amator who is the old hermit, saves the babe from devils, and educates him to say the masses; but the inscription at Onda reveals the celebrating cleric to be St. Amator, and therefore also at Cuart de Poblet. In the background is depicted his gruesome vision of his demoniacally afflicted mother, and her soul (or that of his father) is Analecta Bollandiana, X X V I I I (1909), 65-71. The tale of St. Amator is related to that of Robert the Devil, and the kind offices of my friend, Mr. C. M . S. Niver, have discovered for me even closer affiliations to the Robert the Devil material in the demoniacal legend that has been attached to St. Bartholomew in the early Gothic retable in the cathedral of Tarragona (vol. II, p. 219, and below, p. 508). In the same fashion as the devil-child in the apposite compartment of the retable, Sir Gowther in the English romance of the fifteenth century, which is likewise connected with the story of Robert the Devil, kills his wet nurses. In this detail and in other respects a still nearer approximation to the mysterious superimposition of the Satanic elements upon the legend of St. Bartholomew is provided by the Middle Dutch tale of Zeno: see K. Breul, Sir Gowther, Oppeln, 1886, p. 122. 1

2

' For instance, the Portuguese version in G . Cardoso, Agiologio lusitano, II (Lisbon, 1657), 320-321, under the saints of March 27.

THE CABANYES MASTER

429

materialized to him above the altar at which he is offering the Holy Sacrifice. 1 T h e corresponding scene at the right in the predella is included among the stories told in the Golden Legend for All Souls' D a y . It represents the souls issuing from their graves in a cemetery to rout, with the various instruments of their trades as weapons, 2 the enemies who once beset the pious gentleman who had observed the custom of reciting a psalm for the dead while he was passing through the burying ground. It is perhaps because in these three renderings of the Last Judgment the types and methods of the Cabanyes Master are translated into a multiplicity of small figures that the justness of the attribution is not at once self-evident, but a very striking parallelism is thus created to the similarly treated scenes of the Flagellation and Deposition in the wings of the Sagunto triptych. It does not indeed require very long examination of the examples at Cuart de Poblet and Cortes de Arenoso to be convinced that the men, the women, and the angels entirely agree with the Cabanyes Master's standards. Acknowledgment of his authorship comes a little more grudgingly in the case of the Barcelona altarpiece because it is probably an early work and hence closer to the naively appealing manner of the Martinez Master. A few minutes' inspection, however, reveals that all the angels are the same celestial spirits, though possibly somewhat more adolescent and fresher, as those who perform their varied offices in the Cabanyes Master's other, numerous productions; and the apparition of Christ, accompanied by two angels, in the Mass of St. Gregory, is only a less monumental version of his renderings of the Pietä at the centres of predellas. 1 Everything comes to him who waits; and the Onda predella has revealed to me the personality of the saintly anchorite who divides the honors with St. Anne and St. John in the retable at Cardona by the Master of the Cardona Pentecost (vol. II, p. 286) and whose identity has caused so many strained guesses, among them my own. It is, of course, this St. Amator; and the two lateral scenes from his life are his suckling by the hind, watched over by St. Paul the Hermit, and one of his thirty-three masses at an altar over which appear in conventionalized clouds the now redeemed forms of his father and mother. [While reading the galley proofs, I have received through the courtesy of Monsieur Guy de Tervarentof Brussels a reprint of his article in the Revue archSologique (October-December, 1934, pp. 165-172) in which he too points out the identity of St. Amator in the Cardona retable, with further details about the cult in Portugal.]

" " E t unusquisque instrumentum sui officii in manu habebat."

43ο

THE GABARDA

MASTER

T h e feminine saints in the aggregations of the blessed and on the guardapolvos find their exact counterparts in the predella of the Provincial Museum, Valencia, albeit not so thoroughly subjected as yet to the influence of Paolo da San Leocadio; the St. Sebastian is a twin of the defender from the plague in the retable of Sts. Dionysius and Margaret; and the other masculine personages are the same men who appear in the painter's later achievements more incisively characterized. I find it difficult to determine whether it was the Cabanyes Master or a pupil who executed in the church of Campanar, a suburb of Valencia, another of these retablos de las almas, from which there remains only the central panel of the Last Judgment and Mass of St. Gregory (Fig. I 8 O B ) . '

Ξ.

THE

GABARDA

MASTER

It is possible to segregate the productions of a very faithful but somewhat rustic follower of the Cabanyes Master and, according to our usual practice, designate him by the family of the heraldic shields upon his principal extant work, the Gabarda Master. T h e work in question is the retable from Villar del Arzobispo (west of Valencia), now in the Diocesan Museum of Valencia (No. 24), which the Baron de San Petrillo 2 has shown to have been ordered by a rich proprietor of Villar, Juan G a barda, for a benefice that he founded in 1527 in the parish church. T h e central panel exhibits to our veneration St. Michael as weigher of souls (Fig. 181); the Coronation is in the 1 I am glad t h a t , before this v o l u m e is printed, Saralegui has d i v u l g e d , in v o l u m e X X (1934) of the Archivo de arte valenciano, his ascription t o the C a b a n y e s M a s t e r o f the Anna selbdritt, N o . 279 in T o r m o ' s G u i d e to the Provincial M u s e u m . A l t h o u g h I m y s e l f had already discerned its relation to the C a b a n y e s M a s t e r ' s s t y l e , I refrained from discussing it in m y text because Saralegui had told me t h a t he intended to p u b lish the attribution. I am obliged to confess t h a t I am not absolutely convinced t h a t w e h a v e here to do with a production o f the M a s t e r himself: if it is b y his h a n d , i t m u s t be one of his latest creations. W e can, h o w e v e r , accept w h o l e h e a r t e d l y S a r a l e g u i ' s assignment to the C a b a n y e s M a s t e r of a small panel of the M a d o n n a and angels f r o m the R o m a n V i c e n t e Collection at Saragossa, shown as N o . 26 in Sala xi of the P a l a c i o de Bellas A r t e s i n the Seville Exposition of 1929-1930, and the Spanish scholar r i g h t l y indicates as an Italianate element in this picture the presence of the infant B a p t i s t . I t is a pleasure, f u r t h e r m o r e , to find t h a t Saralegui in this article has anticipated, independently of m e , a number of m y attributions to the C a b a n y e s M a s t e r and so h a s confirmed me in m y opinions. 2

Archivo espanol de arte y arqueologia,

I X (1933), 85-86.

FIG. I8ob. THE CABANYES MASTER OR A FOLLOWER. LAST JUDGMENT. PARISH CHURCH, CAMPANAR (Photo, Arxiu d'Arqueologia Catalana )

432

T H E GABARDA MASTER

remate; the four lateral compartments enshrine the Annunciation, Nativity, Epiphany, and Resurrection; the Pieta in the middle of the predella is flanked by the seated figures of the Virgin, St. John Evangelist, St. Francis, and the Baptist; and the motifs of the guardapohos are at the top God the Father with the dove of the Holy Spirit and at the sides Gabarda's escutcheons and Sts. Lucy, Catherine, Cosmas, Damian, the guardian angel of Valencia, Santiago, Sts. Sebastian and Onuphrius. The author still clings archaically to gold backgrounds for the central effigy (brocaded) and for the compartments of the predella (patterned only at the borders). The Gabarda Master lifts all of his types directly from the Cabanyes Master; but he tends to elongate, attenuate, and debilitate them, he draws them less expertly, he thus divests them of the still winsome charm that attaches to them as descendants of the Martinez Master's delightfully childlike personages, and he has perhaps succumbed further to the influence of Paolo da San Leocadio. He even purloins his compositions from the Cabanyes Master: the Annunciation literally repeats the version of the Sagunto triptych; the Nativity and Resurrection follow only a little less closely the renderings in the panels from the archiepiscopal palace at Valencia; and the Epiphany is merely a simplification of the treatment in the retable of Sts. Dionysius and Margaret. For the brocaded design in the gold behind St. Michael he almost reproduces the pattern in the principal compartment of this retable. It is difficult to share Tormo's enthusiasm for the aesthetic merits of the Gabarda altarpiece, and one can more readily agree with the Baron de San Petrillo who elucidates its quite secondary character on the ground that it was a commission from a bourgeois in a country town, Villar del Arzobispo. The feebler and stiffer hand of the author is betrayed by a comparison of the Pieta with the version in the predella by the Cabanyes Master in the Provincial Museum, from which it is manifestly derived. Like his teacher, he was also in demand for representations of the Last Judgment, and in a retable at the left of the nave in the Iglesia de la Sangre at Onda, just west of Castellon de la Plana, he virtually duplicated the composition of the Cabanyes Master's examples at Cuart de Poblet and Cortes de Arenoso.

Fic. i8I. THE GABARDA MASTER. ST. MICHAEL, CENTRE OF RETABLE.

DIOCESAN MUSEUM, VALENCIA (Photo. Arxiu Mai )

434 T H E GABARDA MASTER The Onda specimen enjoys, like that of Cuart, the advantage of never having suffered dismemberment, so that the guardapohos and predella are preserved. The Annunciation adorns the top of the guardapohos; next, beside theremaie of the judging Christ implored by the Virgin and the Baptist, come two saints whom the darkness of the church has prevented me from identifying; then, on the cross-pieces, busts of Sts. Cosmas and Damian; and finally at the sides, Sts. Anthony Abbot, Vincent Ferrer, Jerome, and Sebastian. The guardapohos display also the two shields, with souls in purgatory, that we have encountered in the Cuart and Barcelona altarpieces. The predella is confined to a triad of compartments, reproducing three of the themes at Cuart de Poblet. At the centre St. Michael balances the destinies of souls, and the other two panels reveal to us by Valencian inscriptions the unusual subjects found at Cuart. 1 The inscription at the left reads: "Com Sanct Amador dix les trenta tres mises" (How St. Amator said the thirty-three masses, Fig. 182). The words in the corresponding compartment at the right are: " E s t es lo cavale ( = cavaler) que pregaba per les animes et eles yxqueren en s ' a j u d a " (This is the gentleman who prayed for the souls, and they issued forth to his aid). In the Onda predella, as also at Cuart, St. Amator is plainly conceived, by confusion with other saints of the name, 2 as a bishop, with his mitre upon the altar. The authorship of the Gabarda Master is rather obvious; but we may refer the doubter especially to the virtual identity between the two St. Michaels in type and in every detail of costume, between the activities and postures of the angels and demons who assist in the weighing, between the St. Francis of the Villar predella and the participants in the two masses depicted in the Onda altarpiece, between the Christ and angels of the Villar Pieta and the like apparition over the altar to St. Gregory at Onda, or between the participants in the two Annunciations. 1

See above, pp. 426 ff. A bishop of Auxerre, whose feast is on M a y 1 , and a bishop of Autun, commemo. rated on November 26. 2

FIG. 182. THE GABARDA MASTER. MASS OF ST. AMATOR, SECTION OF PREDELLA OF RETABLE. IGLESIA DE LA SANGRE, ONDA (Photo. Arxiu

Mai)

436 6.

THE MARTINEZ

MASTER

A N O T H E R V E R S I O N OF T H E L A S T J U D G M E N T TO THIS P H A S E OF V A L E N C I A N

BELONGING

PAINTING

T h e retable of the Last J u d g m e n t in a chapel at the left of the nave in the church of Borboto (another suburb of Valencia), though similar in shape and content to the series t h a t we h a v e been analyzing, does not derive in style from the Cabanyes a n d G a b a r d a Masters b u t is the work of a somewhat countrified painter who apparently depended separately and directly u p o n the Martinez Master. If it ever possessed a predella andguardapolvos, it has now lost them; the main compositional variations, from the Cabanyes Master's cartoon are the absence of t h e Mass of St. Gregory and the substitution, at the lower centre, of St. Michael as weigher of souls.

CHAPTER LXXIV U N A T T A C H E D P A I N T I N G S OF T H E PEREA MASTER'S CIRCLE A C E R T A I N number of works obviously belong to the Perea Master's school and here and there reveal isolated analogies to the styles of the various painters in his following whose personalities I have attempted to segregate and define; but the bonds of attachment with these painters are in no case sufficiently concrete to admit an attribution to any one of them. I.

GROUP

A

Three of these works are so closely interrelated that I should like, but do not dare, to ascribe them to a single devoted imitator of the Perea Master. The first, a capably executed but battered retable, has now been moved from the Ermita de la Virgen de la Plaza at Ademuz, south of Teruel, into the parish church. The three principal panels are assigned to standing effigies of Sts. Michael (Fig. 183), John Baptist, and Sebastian; the remate shows the Madonna holding the Child and seated upon the pavement; in the predella, the dead Christ is flanked by compartments with half-lengths of the mourning Virgin and St. John Evangelist and of Sts. Cosmas and Damian; and the guardapolvos read, from the top downward, the Eternal Father bestowing His benediction, the actors in the Annunciation, Sts. Abdon and Sennen, and erect figures of Sts. Catherine, Barbara, Lucy, and Anthony Abbot. The backgrounds of the chief panels, as in the case of the other two monuments in the group, are gold brocades. Both the small size of the retable and the head of the seated Madonna in the remate constitute analogies to the Martinez Master, but the types in general are much more influenced than are those of this artist by the precedent of the Perea Master. It requires, however, only a comparison of the Baptist with the Perea Master's treatment of the Precursor

438

THE PEREA

MASTER'S

CIRCLE

in the panel of the rope-makers to realize that the Ademuz retable does not embody his handicraft, although the painting of the red mantle accords with his rather pronounced indebtedness to Flemish example. It was probably a different but no less gifted or less faithful 1

FIG. 183. SCHOOL OF THE PEREA MASTER. ST. MICHAEL, SECTION OF RETABLE. PARISH CHURCH, ADEMUZ (Photo. Arxiu Mas )

pupil of the Perea Master who executed another sadly injured retable now in the Jesuit College at Sarria, a suburb of Barcelona. T h e central panel joins together St. Sebastian (clothed as a young seigneur, not nude as at Ademuz), at his left his usual iconographic companion, the pope St. Fabian, and at his right 1

See above, p. 294.

FIG. 184. SCHOOL OF THE PEREA MASTER. ST. AGATHA AND MARTYRDOM OF ST. SEBASTIAN, SECTION OF RETABLE. JESUIT COLLEGE, SARRIÄ, BARCELONA (Photo. Arxiu

Mas )

440

THE PEREA MASTER'S

CIRCLE

a feminine martyr whose attribute has disappeared beneath the deterioration. The extant pieces are now arranged in the shape of a triptych, and the left piece contains a standing effigy of St. Barbara capped by the small narrative scene of St. Sebastian's arraignment. St. Agatha is similarly ensconced in the right wing and surmounted by the representation of St. Sebastian's ordeal of the arrows (Fig. 184). The types, although derived from the Perea Master, are less Jewish than in the Ademuz altarpiece; such a countenance as that of St. Sebastian retains much of the Perea Master's dark, Spanish intensity of expression. The painter is quite as much addicted as the Perea Master to the Flemish puckering of draperies. One of his peculiarities is a predilection for a vibration of deep tones of red. The third work in the group (Fig. 185), consisting of two united panels of Sts. Lucy and Agatha coming from the ermita of these virgins at Villarreal and now hanging on the left wall of the nave in the church of the Hospital, is at once so similar to the retable of the Jesuit College as seriously to raise the question of a single painter and so near in types to the Perea Master himself that we cannot lightly set aside the possibility of his authorship. In the end, however, one refrains from a categorical affirmative in either case. To the general parallelisms between the Jesuits' retable and the Villarreal piece, particularly in exactly similar brocaded backgrounds and in the figuration of the haloes, should be added the striking agreement between the St. Lucy of Villarreal and the St. Barbara at Barcelona in the Flemish crumpling of the folds in the mantles. The connection with the Perea Master himself, which is the other angle of the problem, becomes very intimate indeed if we are willing to assign to him the altarpiece of St. Anne at Jätiva. 1 1.

GROUP

Β

The retable from the church of S. Juan del Hospital at Valencia, now in the Diocesan Museum catalogued under No. 32, takes its place in a humble niche as a work of an obedient but bungling follower of the Perea Master. The invaluable heraldic and historical researches of the Baron de San Petrillo 2 have 1

See above, p. 274.

* Archko espanol de arte y arqueologia, I X

(1933), 86-93.

FIG. 185. SCHOOL OF THE PEREA MASTER. STS. LUCY AND AGATHA. CHURCH OF THE HOSPITAL, VILLARREAL (Photo. Arxiu

Mas )

442

THE PEREA

MASTER'S

CIRCLE

proved it to have come from the chapel in the church which was under the patronage of the ancient noble Valencian family surnamed Juan and one of the dedications of which was to St. Francis of Assisi, who is honored in the principal panel of the altarpiece. The donor would probably be Francisco Juan, whose title was Senor de Vinalesa, 1 who was head of the family from 1502 to 1542, and whose wife, Dona Ana de Villarrasa, also has her saint, Anne, included in the ensemble; but it is not absolutely incredible that the retable was executed during the lifetime of Don Francisco's father, just before 1502. T h e main subject is the stigmatization of St. Francis; and above it a figure of St. Catherine of Alexandria in a landscape, the most tolerably rendered compartment of the altarpiece, takes the place of the usual Crucifixion. T h e stigmatization is flanked by panels of the standing Sts. John Baptist and Evangelist; the St. Catherine, by St. Vincent Ferrer and the Anna selbdritt. In the middle of the predella the author has lamely endeavored to reproduce the dead Christ of the Perea retable; at the left may be seen the Visitation (Fig. 186) and at the right the paired Sts. Cosmas and Damian; and the extremes of the predella are consigned to two anchorites, Sts. Jerome and Onuphrius. All these panels are framed in moldings of the Renaissance, and across the top of the structure the author has set a long, horizontal representation of the Last Supper. T h e personages in which he has most scrupulously copied the Perea types, so far as his technical shortcomings would permit, are the St. Catherine, the Virgin of the Anna selbdritt and of the Visitation, and the two St. Johns. Like the Artes Master, he tools the gold backgrounds of the four lateral sections of the retable with a geometrical design, and the partridge in the scene of the reception of the stigmata may have been suggested by the presence of such birds in this Master's treatment of the theme in the Agullent altarpiece. In the sky over St. Catherine he has sketched a lengthy flight of birds, and the landscape of this compartment is in general one of the best and most unified of his ambitious but lumbering attempts at natural settings, in which he has crowded together as many aspects as possible of geology, botany, and zoology of both the land and water. 1

Lord of the town of Vinalesa.

FIG. Ι 86. SCHOOL OF T H E PEREA MASTER. VISITATION, SECTION OF PREDELLA OF RETABLE. DIOCESAN MUSEUM, VALENCIA (Photo. Arxiu Mas )

444

THE PEREA MASTER'S

CIRCLE

T h e same rather stupidly faithful disciple of the Perea Master may very well have been responsible for three large panels from the life of St. Ives now transferred from an otherwise lost altarpiece into the conglomerate ensemble in the sacristy of the parish church at Castellnovo, close to Segorbe, that contains the extensive remains of a very early Yalencian retable of St. Agatha. 1 T h e first two scenes are crystallizations of the elaborate accounts, in the Golden Legend, of St. Ives's bounteous feeding of the hungry and the cripples and of his dispensation of justice during the period of his magistracy (Fig. 187). T h e third compartment enshrines the story of the shaft of light that descended upon his head when he had reached the canon of the mass after his elevation to the priesthood. T h e personal types —• the Hebraic men and the fulsome women —· so duplicate those of the Perea Master that, were it not for the inferior execution, one might easily think that it was the Master himself who was here at work. T h e links with the retable of Francisco Juan are forged by such factors as the similarity between the prominent woman in the group at the left beneath St. Ives's judgment seat and the Virgin of the Visitation or the analogy of the representation of St. Ives, before his reception of Holy Orders, to the Sts. Cosmas and Damian. T h e diamond pattern in the gold backgrounds of the Juan retable receives, in the gold panels of St. Ives's seat, the additional ornament of an inner floral motif. With the interest in the Renaissance that already distinguishes the Perea Master and his coterie, the Castellnovo painter has made a Herculean effort quite beyond what we should have anticipated from a man of his modest abilities, and he has set the miracle of St. Ives's mass in a grandiose and Bramantesque temple. It is a credible, though not absolutely demonstrable, hypothesis that this craftsman painted a retablo de las almas at the left of the nave in the church of El Toro, to the north of Segorbe, just off the road to Teruel (Fig. 188). In the central panel, the Mass of St. Gregory, which in the similar altarpieces by the Cabanyes Master and his school occupies only the lower middle section of the principal compartment, is enlarged to fill almost the whole space, and the details of heaven, hell, and purgatory 1

Vol. IV, pp. 566-568.

FIG. 187. SCHOOL OF THE PEREA MASTER. ST. IVES AS MAGISTRATE. PARISH CHURCH, CASTELLNOVO (Photo. Arxtu Mas )

446

THE PEREA

MASTER'S

CIRCLE

are merely crowded into the panel round about this theme. T h e gentleman and his wife who were the donors are introduced as present at the Mass, and their (unrecognized) escutcheons are on the guardapolvos. In the left lateral compartment stands St. John Baptist, and in the right St. Catherine of Alexandria. T h e predella unfolds the story of the Passion, and the saints on the guardapolvos are ten Apostles with verses of their Creed. In certain passages the painter edges closely upon the attainments of the Perea Master himself, particularly in the effigies of the Baptist and St. Catherine. 3.

OTHER

WORKS

IN THIS G E N E R A L

MANNER

I am likewise as yet unable to name with certainty the direct and capable pupil of the Perea Master who executed the Epiphany built into the very top of the modern retable of the high altar in the new parish church at Benisano, northwest of Valencia, the only work that remains from the series of primitive panels that Tormo in his Levante 1 registers in the old Gothic parroquia. T h e setting of landscape is one of the prettiest in the whole phase of Valencian painting to which the picture belongs. It is for little more than finding some Valencian niche in which to place it that I register at this point as perhaps of the Perea Master's school a lone panel in the Provincial Museum of the city depicting St. Anthony of Padua (with his regular Valencian attribute of the vessel containing a grape vine, as well as a book) in front of a golden fabric upheld by two angels (Fig. 189). Tormo 2 vaguely sets it (with a point of interrogation) in the following of Rexach; but I cannot see that it reveals any trace whatsoever of connection with his mannered and easily recognizable style, and its less primitive (though rather unskilled) execution implies a date towards the end of the fifteenth century. T h e type of the St. Anthony resembles somewhat the Perea Master's dark and rather sinister conception of men; the Sts. Cosmas and Damian of the predella in the retable of Francisco Juan are not far removed in general character; 3 1 P. 185. 3 See above, p. 442.

2

Valencia: Los museos, p. 25 (No. 153).

FIG. Ι 88. SCHOOL OF THE PEREA MASTER. RETABLE. PARISH CHURCH, EL TORO (Photo. Arxiu d'Arqueologia Catalana )

448

THE PEREA MASTER'S

CIRCLE

and the angels, with their luxuriant tresses, are possibly the celestial offspring of the Perea Master's ideations of such spirits. The technical performance is so feeble in the case of a canvas in the Provincial Museum, Valencia (Fig. 190), that it would

FIG. 189. SCHOOL OF THE P E R E A MASTER (?). ST. ANTHONY OF PADUA. PROVINCIAL MUSEUM, VALENCIA (Photo. Arxiu Mas)

not be worth while to labor the difficult question of a proper stylistic classification, were it not for the unique iconographical interest; but the picture may be here recorded because the most likely of several possible guesses in regard to its place in the evolution of Spanish painting seems to me a remote spot in the territory of the Perea Master's circle. The pages of this volume

FIG. 190. SCHOOL OF THE PEREA MASTER (?). TRANSLATION OF THE REDEEMED OF THE OLD DISPENSATION TO CALVARY. PROVINCIAL MUSEUM, VALENCIA (Photo. Ruiz

Vernacci)

45©

THE PEREA MASTER'S

CIRCLE

will have abundantly demonstrated the tremendous popularity at Valencia of peculiar scenes relating to Christ's death, descent into hell, and resurrection, but the canvas in question incorporates the sole representation in the Fine Arts, so far as my knowledge goes, of the episode, among these eschatological events, recounted in chapters C C I to C C V I of the Valencian nun Isabel de Villena's Vita Christi,1 Our Lord's transplantation, by visionary means, of the redeemed of the old dispensation, immediately after His harrowing of hell, to Mount Calvary and into the presence of His swooning mother, St. John, and the Magdalene, all still prostrate with sorrow at the foot of the cross.2 The canvas manifestly constituted a background for a sculptured Crucifix,3 but the gibbets of the two thieves, with their burdens, are comprised in the painting. A further oddity is the endowment of Eve with a circular halo, whereas Adam, another woman, and indeed all the worthies of the Old Testament, including even the good robber, Dysmas, are distinguished by their proper nimbuses of the polygonal shape. The date of the picture can scarcely be much earlier than c. 1500, and the St. John supporting the Virgin is almost Raphaelesque in character. The types and especially the draperies may perhaps be regarded as a dim reflection of the Perea Master's manner, but the interval between him and the author of the canvas is so wide that quite diverse theories of affiliations could be reasonably entertained, for instance the possibility that the picture was painted by one of the Altura Master's late followers. Or could the rather dour nature of the faces be witness to the effect of Bermejo's passage through Valencia or, since, irregularly for Valencia, the haloes are embossed, to the presence, in the city, of some member of his Aragonese school? See above, p. 75, n. 2. N o t , of course, identical with the theme so frequent in Valencian art, the subsequent and formal presentation of the same group from the Old Testament to the Virgin. 3 See above, p. 156. 1

3

CHAPTER LXXV TWO NEW N A M E S I N V A L E N C I A N P A I N T I N G OF T H E L A S T T H I R D OF T H E FIFTEENTH CENTURY I.

JUAN

PONS

THE history of Spanish art has provided us with many surprises and anomalies, such as the presence of the single recognized work of Juan de Burgos 1 in so comparatively restricted a collection as that of the Fogg Museum at Harvard or the revelation of the Burgos Master's name, Alonso de Sedano,2 in the alien surroundings of the cathedral at Palma; but surely it can show no stranger freak of chance than the discovery of the personality of a painter from the distant Valencian Quattrocento in the Berkshire Museum at Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The painter in question, Juan Pons, has hitherto been known to us only in a sparse number of references in the Valencian documents stretching from 1476 to 1492, and so has passed unnoticed by scholars; the signature on the picture at Pittsfield identifies his name with a definite style. The picture was once in the Collection of Asher Wertheimer at London,3 and has been transferred from wood to canvas. Measuring as large as 62 inches by 35 and thus originally the centre or at least one of the principal compartments of a retable, it depicts, like the main panel of Rexach's altarpiece at Rubielos de Mora, the Adoration of the Magi (Fig. 191). The signature, written after the Italian fashion 4 upon a scroll of paper lying on the ground in the lower left corner, reads, in Gothic script, "Johannes Pontis 1477." The Latin Pontis, according to the rules of Catalan and Valencian 1

Vol. I l l , p. 292. Vol. V, p. 326. 3 Von Loga, the only scholar who to my knowledge has even mentioned the picture, states, in his posthumous work of 1923, Die Malerei in Spanien (p. 62), that it was then in the Moers Collection, Paris, but he records, besides the date, merely the artist's surname (spelling it in the other possible way, Ponz) and does not assign him to the school of Valencia. « See above, p. 60. 3

452

J U A N PONS

phonology, would appear in the vulgar tongue of the east coast as Pons, and, evidently once meaning of the bridge, could be and was probably sometimes written del Pont. Since an earlier painter called Juan Pons is mentioned at Valencia in 1392/ our master presumably belonged to a family of artists long established in the city. In the Valencian documents he is thrice recorded: 2 in 1474 or 1476 3 as one of the committee of experts to pass upon the merits of the frescoes in the cathedral by Paolo da San Leocadio and Francesco Pagano; in 1478 as promising to finish a retable which he has already begun and for which he has been partly paid (conceivably the very retable to which the Pittsfield Epiphany, dated 1477, belonged); and in 1492 as remunerated for painting an image on a portal of the church of the Trinidad. It is more than likely, furthermore, that he is the same person as the Juan del Pont who in 1498 is commissioned, as an assistant of a painter named Berenguer Gurrea, to complete at Vich in Catalonia a partially executed retable of Sts. Eloy and Honoratus. 4 Sanpere believes Berenguer Gurrea to have been a Castilian or Aragonese master, and another Gurrea, whose given name was Gaspar, is cited at Barcelona as a painter in 1493; but since a painter called Simon Gurrea appears in the Valencian records from 15x2 to 1523 5 and an architect Sebastian Gurrea from 1582 to 1600, 6 the probability is that Berenguer Gurrea, whether or not of eventual Castilian extraction, was already affiliated with Valencia when he and Juan del Pont (who are described in the contract merely as "now living" at Vich) found, like Rexach, a further range for their art in Catalonia. The style is exactly what we should have expected at the date, 1477. While still doing homage to the models of Jacomart and Rexach, Juan Pons is thoroughly conscious of the more Flemish strain that Rodrigo de Osona the elder and probably 1

Sanchis y Si vera, Pintores medievales en Valencia, 26. Ibid., pp. 179-180. 3 Sanchis y Sivera varies, in stating the date, between 1474 and 1476: ibid., 171 and 179. See also his book on La catedral de Valencia, 152. * Sanpere y Miquel, Los cuatrocentistas, II, 187 and lii-lv. Since Gurrea is the dominant person in the contract, I conclude that Juan del Pont was an assistant rather than collaborator. s Sanchis y Sivera, Pintores medievales en Valencia, 227. 6 Sanchis y Sivera, La catedral de Valencia, 563. 2

FIG. 191. JUAN PONS. EPIPHANY. BERKSHIRE MUSEUM, PITTSFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS (Courtesy of the Museum )

454 JUAN PONS already the Perea Master had introduced into the Valencian amalgam. His manner indeed looks like a fusion of the characteristics of Rexach and the Perea Master. The composition continues to echo the old cartoon for the Epiphany used by Rexach at Rubielos de Mora; the types of St. Joseph, the first, kneeling Magus, and his comrade just above him are ennobled versions of Rexach's weaker precedents; and all the actors, except St. Joseph and the Child, are clad in the traditional gilded magnificence of the Valencian school, which the crowded arrangement makes almost into one great outburst of gold. The golden brocade of the younger King at the right is interwoven with subordinated passages of a deep maroon; the similarly and grudgingly admitted red in the robe of the oldest Magus is properly more brilliant as constituting the chromatic axis of the picture; the color combined with the gold in the mantle of Our Lady at the left is a dark blue; but the auric expanse of the second King is relieved by almost nothing else than the trimming of ermine. The vessels of the symbolic offerings and the young King's crown (which he holds in his hand) are solidly made of the same precious metal; the second King's hat is girt with a golden crown; and it is only in the headdress of the old, kneeling Magus, which sits on the ground above his gift and between him and the Virgin, that the author descends to the less conspicuous but no less precious ornamentation by jewels. But the indebtedness to the Low Countries has become far more vital than with Rexach. The medium (unless I am deceived by a modern varnish) is wholly oil. The heads of the oldest and youngest Magi in particular are rendered with some realization of Flemish modelling in chiaroscuro, of sculptural relief, and of incisive Flemish characterization. The painting of the old King's head is indeed of such a nature as to suggest that Juan Pons had cast at least a fleeting glance at the achievements of Rodrigo de Osona I. The detail of Flemish naturalistic genre so often encountered in Valencian art of the period, the representation of the plaster peeling off the wall, emerges in the background of the picture, where the building, in the mood of the art of the Low Countries, is depicted as hung with many instruments of St. Joseph's profession, actually represented as casting shadows. The master has carried Flemish realism even

J U A N PONS

455

to the point of giving St. Joseph the dirty fingernails consistent with his carpentry in contrast to the carefully manicured hands of the Kings. Instead of retaining the pretty but unreal and superficially delineated landscapes of Jacomart's and Rexach's "international" romanticism, he has, like the Osonas and like certain members of the Perea Master's circle, introduced into the upper right corner a landscape executed in the new mode of Flemish exactitude and of Flemish appreciation of nature. As so often in Valencian art of the period, it unfolds a view of an inlet of the sea, flanked on one side by a cliff and on the other by a high-perched castle. In the harbor a large ship lies at anchor, away from which a skiff is being rowed, while just beneath the rock of the castle numerous oarsmen are speeding onward a long barge. The ship in several places, especially at the top of the mainmast, is decorated with a flag of red stripes against a white background, which, if the field were gold, one would have liked to interpret as the escutcheon of Aragon. At the back of the ship there flies also a white pennant crossed with red. The castle likewise displays a shield two quarters of which consist of the same red bars here running vertically against the white and the other two sections of which are themselves quartered with a panel of horizontal red bars, with a white cross on a red field, and with a twice repeated device of what, so far as visible, look like white dots on a dark blue ground. The affiliations of the countenances of the Virgin and of the two standing Magi with the types of the Perea Master are such that they force us into the alternatives of postulating either that Juan Pons was influenced by the Perea Master, the beginning of whose activity would thus (with no violation of verisimilitude) have to be set in the seventies, or that, since, to say the least, he is quite as capable an artist, he was one of the sources of the Perea Master's peculiar style. The St. Joseph and the kneeling Magus reveal distant analogies to the personages of the Burgos painter, Alonso de Sedano, but the parallelism is surely fortuitous, since we have no right to assume for Juan Pons that possibility of contact with him to which we shall resort as a credible explanation of the style of the San Francisco Master at Palma. 1 1

See below, p. 482.

456

JUAN

BARCEL0

T h e sad confession which I have to make at the end is that, although we have found so many works to assign to the anonymous Masters of This or T h a t whose personalities we have constructed in these pages, the emergence of a nameable artist, Juan Pons, as the author of a definite style cannot be followed up by the attribution to him of any of the numerous still unattached Valencian paintings of the period. In vain I have searched high and low among these paintings for irrefutable traces of his execution. It is scarcely to be doubted that at least a few of them were done by him, for instance perhaps one or two of the pictures which in chapter L X V I I I I have vaguely set in the remote entourage of Jacomart and Rexach, such as the Santiago in the Parcent Collection at Madrid, or possibly some piece from the works that we have had to leave in the limbo of the Osonas' circle or even from the works marshalled in chapter L X X I V as produced in the Perea Master's orbit; but I have yet to discover an example that is absolutely convincing.

I.

JUAN

BARCELO

T h e situation in the case of the second master who naturally finds a place in this chapter, Juan Barcelo, is exactly the reverse of that of Juan Pons: known by his signature on a retable in the Museum of Cagliari in Sardinia, he had already on stylistic grounds been assigned to the Valencian school by one or two discerning critics, but there is no allusion to him in the Valencian records, at least in so far as they have been published. T h e surname, however, does crop forth at Valencia. Miss King 1 has ferreted out the information that a Daniel Barcelo, whether or not himself an artist, was the agent who in 1439 made the payments to Rexach for his retable in the castle at J ä t i v a ; 2 and Joaquin Garcia Barcelo of Valencia enjoyed a creditable reputation as a painter in the nineteenth century. These occurrences of the name in Valencian annals, taken in conjunction with the fact that the altarpiece at Cagliari was most certainly executed by a Valencian master of the Quattrocento, decide the question that has been raised about the last letter of the sig1 Sardinian Painting, 197 and 208. ' Tormo, in Cultura espanola, X I (1908), 785-788.

JUAN BARCELO

457

nature in favor of an 0 instead of an s (Barcels). Since the altarpiece at the earliest could not have been done before the late sixties or the seventies of the fifteenth century, there is no reason for doubting the possibility that our artist is identical with a Juan Barfalo, who is called a painter of the town of Sassari in Sardinia in a document of 1510. 1 The a in place of e is no bar to the theory of identity, for anyone who is at all familiar with the Catalan and Valencian documents of the fifteenth century will remember how often these letters were confused when unaccented, and the cedilla under the c reveals that this letter had the soft sound, as in Barcelo, instead of the hard. We must, however, reject, with a most categorical negative, Brunelli's vain endeavor 2 to make Juan Barcelo equivalent to the Barcelona painter, Juan Figuera, who collaborated with a Rafael Tomas in an extant retable of St. Bernardine now also in the Cagliari Museum. Bruneiii was betrayed into the error first by the old, traditional supposition that Barcelo is an adjective meaning, of Barcelona, and he therefore held that a Juan of Barcelona might be Juan Figuera of the same city; but I cannot find that Barcelo is a possible form instead of the regular local adjectives Barcelonas or Barceloni. Inasmuch as Johannes is abbreviated in Barcelo's Latin signature to Johaes, we might perhaps have interpreted the forms Barcelo or Barcels as abbreviations for the Latin adjective applied to the city, Barchinonensis, if the surname in the signature ended -chino or -chins. It is conceivable that Barcelo might be an abbreviation for Barcelona and that the signer's full name was Juan Barcelona ( = Juan de Barcelona), corresponding to that of the earlier master, Lorenzo Zaragoza ( = Lorenzo de Zaragoza), who is dubbed in a Latin document of 1400 Laurencius Saragoqa; but by far the greatest likelihood is that he belonged to the Valencian family of Barcelo, whose existence we have already established, and, besides, the manner of his painting is thoroughly Valencian and not at all Catalan. Brunelli's second and more egregious mistake was, indeed, to discern a parallelism of style between at least certain parts of Barcelo's altarpiece and those sections of the St. Bernardine retable which he guessed, with1 3

C. Aru, in Anuari de l'Institut d'Estudis Catalans, IV (1911-1912), 519. L'arte, X X I I I (1920), 284-288.

458

JUAN

BARCEL0

out any real evidence, to have been Figuera's contribution to the undertaking. B u t this parallelism does not exist at all, except in so far as all Gothic paintings from the east coast of Spain generally resemble one another: the St. Bernardine retable is a Catalan work of Huguet's circle and will thus be described in the next volume of the present series, whereas the Barcelo altarpiece is an out-and-out production of the Valencian school. T h e altarpiece (Fig. 192), like so many of the other mediaeval pictures in the Museum at Cagliari, comes from the church of S. Francesco in the suburb of Stampace. It has lost its predella and guardapohos but retains its principal components: the Visitation at the centre surmounted by the usual Crucifixion; St. Jerome at the left (lighting a miniature church with the rays from his hand, according to the iconography of the east coast for the Doctors) and, above, a pinnacle of the Annunciation; St. Apollonia at the right and over her a pinnacle of Pentecost. As in the painting by Juan Pons, the signature is written on a slip of paper lying on the ground in the scene of the Visitation (underneath the Virgin). Sts. Jerome and Apollonia stand against strips of tapestry set upon gold backgrounds patterned with the half-crosses so peculiarly characteristic of Valencian Gothic panels; the haloes and indeed all the details conform to the Valencian antipathy for Catalan and Aragonese embossing. T h e discussion of the altarpiece naturally finds a place in the present chapter because its author was formed under very much the same Valencian influences as Juan Pons, although the way and the degrees in which the ingredients are mixed result, for Juan Barcelo, in a rather different and, on the whole, superior artistic product. Like the picture at Pittsfield, the Cagliari retable belongs to the fleeting and sparsely represented moment in Valencian painting just between the manner of Jacomart and Rexach in the middle of the Quattrocento and the rise of Rodrigo de Osona II and the Perea shop to popularity and to interest in the Renaissance during the last quarter of the century. Juan Barcelo was thus a contemporary of Rodrigo I, but he was not, like Rodrigo, touched by the first rustlings of the Renaissance. Even more than Pons he illustrates the increased admiration for the art of the Low Countries that emerged at this moment in the Valencian school, although he

FIG. 192. JUAN BARCEL0. RETABLE. MUSEUM, CAGLIARI (Photo.

Alinari)

46o

JUAN B A R C E L 0

cannot reproduce the essence of Flemish attainment so well as the more skilful Rodrigo de Osona the elder. To Roger van der Weyden, he owes a very real debt. The types, especially in the Visitation and in the group of the Virgin, St. John, and the holy women at the left of the cross in the Crucifixion, are very directly conditioned by those of his great Flemish precursor, and the composition of the Visitation is one of the many HispanoFlemish renderings of the theme 1 suggested by Roger's versions, especially by the example in the Gallery at Turin. The group at the left of the cross also permits the surmise that Barcelo had looked with profit at the elder Rodrigo's Crucifixion in S. Nicolas, Valencia, which likewise reflects an examination of Roger van der Weyden's works. The composition of the Annunciation may be one of the numerous Spanish instances ultimately inspired by Jan van Eyck's conceptions of the subject. 2 It was doubtless Flemish precedent also that taught him, like Juan Pons and Rodrigo I, to abandon gold backgrounds for landscapes in the Visitation, the Crucifixion, and in the tiny vistas seen through the open windows of the chamber of the Annunciation, but he treats landscape in a somewhat more modern and impressionistic mode than the Flemings, Pons, or even Rodrigo, not defining so exactly all the details in the setting and exhibiting a sense of aerial perspective in the softened outlines and varying lights of the hills and objects in the Umbrian distances to which he stretches his views of country and sea. Transitional as he is between the fashions of the middle and end of the century, he retains a Jacomart-like town from the Gothic miniatures directly behind the Crucifixion, but he then carries us far beyond this to depths of gently ranged hills and a far-flung horizon overhung by a half-clouded sky illuminated with the mellow light of the sinking sun. On the road that winds off amidst the undulating terrain behind the Visitation are depicted, in properly diminished scale, a woman riding upon an ass and guided by her walking husband, probably meant to represent the journey of the Virgin to St. Elizabeth's house — " into the hill country, into a city of J u d a . " Although St. Joseph is not mentioned in the narrative of the 1 2

Cf., for instance, vol. IV, pp. 182 and 424. See above, p. 138.

JUAN BARCEL0

461

New Testament as her travelling companion, he is often thus conceived in hagiological literature and sacred art, and he appears in the Sardinian panel at her side also in the main episode of the foreground. Miss King understands the episode in the background to be the journey to Bethlehem just before the Nativity, but, as in the Visitation by the Perea Master in the Prado, 1 the similar trip to St. Elizabeth's home was presumably rather in the artist's mind. T h e analogy in composition between Barcelo's Visitation and the version in the Prado that I have attributed to the Perea Master is likewise discerned by Miss King, but, since the latter is one of the Perea Master's most mature creations, it obviously could not have inspired the Sardinian painting. Both artists were presumably resorting to a regular Valencian cartoon for the theme, which constitutes the basis also for the rendering by the Martinez Master. 2 The spinning woman 3 in the doorway at the right, for instance, appears in all three treatments. St. Joseph in Barcelo's panel carries the staff of elaborately curving and winding end that is his customary emblem in Valencian art of the period. Nevertheless, the types of the Virgin in the Visitation, of St. Apollonia, and of the men at the right of the cross in the Crucifixion and the heavy, brocaded costume of the first of these men arouse the suspicion that Barcelo, like Pons, had benefited by a study of the Perea Master's early productions and that his retable at Cagliari should therefore not be dated before the late seventies when Pons signed his picture now at Pittsfield. T h e reader, indeed, must already have observed that the retable is, in a way, a microcosm of the general conditions of Valencian painting in the second half of the fifteenth century, looking both forwards and backwards. Although Barcelo is a far more capable craftsman, he has links also with the manner of his virtual contemporary, the Altura Master. 4 T h e conception and face of the St. Apollonia, for example, 1 See above, p. 292. Saralegui (Bolet'm de la Sociedad Espanola de Excursions, X L I I , 1934, pp. 178-179) accumulates a number of references in pious literature to the belief that St. Joseph and the angels accompanied the Virgin on her journey to visit St. Elizabeth. 2 See above, p. 369. 3 Evidently the maidservant who is said by hagiographers to have announced the arrival of the Virgin and St. Joseph to St. Elizabeth (cf. Saralegui, op. cit., 179). * See above, p. 128.

462

JUAN

BARCEL0

vividly recall the St. Lucy in the altarpiece at Altura itself. In composition and types, the Pentecost harks directly back to Jacomart and Rexach. Barcelo even reveals analogies to the Majorcan Martin Tomer, whom he could easily have seen at Valencia. 1 The pleasure that we derive from setting him in his proper, rather distinguished niche in the Valencian school is dimmed by the unanswerable questions that his personality raises. Did he leave any works at Valencia, the seat of his training, before he emigrated to Sardinia? If so, my earnest endeavor to recognize them among the plentifully preserved anonymous examples of the Valencian school has been as fruitless as for Juan Pons. Since we have noted that he is in all probability the same person as the painter who in 1 5 1 0 is mentioned as a citizen of Sassari in Sardinia, it is not likely that he ever returned to Valencia, at least for an extended residence, after he had once betaken himself to the island which, as then a part of the Aragonese kingdom, offered lucrative employment to artists from the whole, long eastern littoral of Spain. 2 We have therefore no right to expect to find specimens of his latest manner on the mainland. But if he continued to live and exercise his profession in Sardinia until 1510, what has become of the other works for which so gifted an artist must there have been in demand? N o one, so far as I know, has wished to discern his handicraft in any of the numerous mediaeval panels preserved in the island, which for the most part are inferior to his accomplishments. I am unable, moreover, to follow certain scholars in the opinion that he had any significant influence upon the author of the so-called Carnicer retable which has also entered the Cagliari Museum from S. Francesco at Stampace but which should be assigned rather to the Catalan strain in Sardinian art. It is only the composition of the Crucifixion that may reflect a familiarity with his achievement. His example, however, may have been one of the constituents in forming the style of the very early Renaissance in the island, which resulted in the series of Madonnas that I have mentioned on a former page.3 The limits of 1 See below, pp. 464 ff. T h e surname Barcelo is found also in the annals of M a j o r can art. 3 See vol. I I , pp. 6 - 7 . J 84.

JUAN BARCEL0

463

our present knowledge thus compel us to classify Juan Barcelo, like Juan Pons, to whom he provides so many parallels, and like so many other Spanish artists of the Middle Ages, in the unhappy category of those masters who are still represented only by a single securely authenticated painting.

CHAPTER LXXVI A MAJORCAN ACTIVE AT VALENCIA: MARTl'N TORNER.

T H E VALENCIAN I N F L U E N C E IN MAJORCA I.

MARTIN

TORNER

OUR acquaintance with Martin Torner has hitherto been confined to a series of mentions in the records of Valencia and Morella and to an exiguous group of paintings at the latter town in the Maestrazgo assigned to him by document or stylistic evidence; but since I have now identified as his productions a number of works in Majorca, whence he had migrated to Valencia, and possibly a single panel in Valencia itself, he takes on an artistic stature of greater magnitude and deserves a more lengthy, careful, and sympathetic consideration than he has formerly received. His style presents us with a phase of the general Hispano-Flemish manner, but it does not exhibit sufficiently intimate affinities with any other regional school of that manner in the peninsula to substantiate a theory in regard to the place where he had obtained his training. In the second half of the fifteenth century Majorca does not appear to have possessed so vital a local school as in the immediately preceding period, but the artistic trade seems to have been in the hands of imitators of contemporary Catalan and Valencian achievements. The paintings of Martin Torner exhibit a few dim traits out of which might perhaps be wrung the interpretation that he became familiar with Valencian productions of the end of the fifteenth century when he transferred his residence to the mainland, but he provides no real evidence that he had ever been in Barcelona or that he had studied at Valencia in the great shop of the middle of the Quattrocento, that of Jacomart and Rexach. He certainly enjoyed an acquaintance with Flemish art or at least with its Spanish translations, and he was even somewhat more faithful to the example of the Low Countries

VALENCIAN INFLUENCE IN MAJORCA

465

than the majority of his Catalan and Valencian rivals; but again he manifests no peculiarities that would connect his early days with any of the schools in the peninsula, such as those of Salamanca, Burgos, or Aragon, where the Flemish influence was more dominant. Nor does his manner seem to have been essentially changed by his removal from Majorca to the artistic atmosphere of Valencia. He remains a thoroughly individual exponent of the Hispano-Flemish style, and his origins are an enigma. For what he lacks of the highest technical endowment he compensates by an insinuating gentleness of temperament and imagination that he owed to his Majorcan blood, wherever he learned the rudiments of his craft. T o judge by his extant works, he was particularly, though far from solely, in demand for paintings on canvas. His Majorcan birth is established by the first mention of him in history, his contract of 1480 for a painting of the Last Supper in the refectory of the convent of Sta. Clara at Valencia, where he is dubbed " the honorable Martin Torner, painter, native of the city 1 and kingdom of Majorca and now dwelling in the city of Valencia." Until Beti's divulgation, in 1915, of the Morella documents that permitted the attribution to him of two extant pictures in the town, Torner was an unknown quantity except for this contract of 1480 and for references to the following additional lost works: 2 1484-1485, the shutters of a new organ in the cathedral of Valencia; 3 1489, a retable of St. Christopher for the same church; 1492, a retable of the Baptist and Our Lady of the Angels for the Valencian town of Career; and 1495, the 1 I.e., Palma. The long contract is one of the most interesting examples of such documents because of its careful and elaborate specification of every single detail in the picture — of the figure of each Apostle and of his drapery, of their colors, and of all elements in the setting. Sts. Barnabas and Matthias are strangely introduced into the Last Supper, to the exclusion of Sts. Matthew and Simon, just as Sts. Paul and Barnabas intrude into the same theme in the Romanesque fresco from La Seo de Urgel (see below, p. 496). 2 Sanchis y Sivera, Pintores medievales en Valencia, 202-206; for the Career contract, see also by the same author Nomenciator geogräfico-eclesiästico de los pueblos de la diocesis de Valencia, 176. 3 The painted organ-shutters now in the Sala Capitular Antigua of the cathedral cannot be these works of Torner, since they are authenticated by document and style as productions of the San Leocadio workshop in 1 5 1 3 - 1 5 1 4 . For an earlier organ in the cathedral, Juan Rexach had painted doors in 1462-1466. Sanchis y Sivera, in the chapter on the organs in his Catedral de Valencia, does not mention the intervening organ that Torner decorated, but Beti (Almanaque de "Las Provincias," 1915, p. 127) suspects

466

V A L E N C I A N I N F L U E N C E IN

MAJORCA

gilding of the grill for the principal portal of the church of S. Martin at Valencia (in the document for which he is called merely Martin, the Majorcan). W e have already dismissed the possibility that he could be the Master Martin who finished the Rexach retable at Denia, unless the parts that he did have been lost and unless the preserved pieces embody only the sections done by Juan or Pedro Rexach. 1 Perhaps because of the admiration aroused by his shutters for the Valencian organ, he received at Morella in 1497 or slightly earlier a commission to do another pair, and it is here that B e t i 2 came upon the apposite documents and had the good fortune to discover also the works, still existing, to which the documents refer. T h e documents in question are two short notices of November 16, 1497, recording the final payment from the Confraternity of the Virgin M a r y at Morella for the doors of an organ to Master Martin Torner, now dubbed pintor de Valencia. Beti seems to me to carry conviction in his arguments for identifying with these doors two large canvases of the Nativity and Assumption that are at present employed to enclose the altar of the Hospital just across the little square from the principal church of Morella, Sta. Maria. In the first place, the fact that the notary in whose book the notices appear resided at Morella proves that the shutters were done for this town or a near-lying village. Second, no village of the vicinity was significant enough to have afforded so pretentious an organ, and the two other churches at Morella itself, S. Miguel and S. Juan, never have had an organ of any importance. Third, the subjects of the extant canvases indicate a church dedicated to Our L a d y and specifically the Confraternity of Sta. Maria mentioned in the receipt. A next and still more persuasive argument is the record that it was made by Martin Prats of Barcelona in 1483-1484, if the confused language of the document does not rather refer to an organ for the cathedral of Barcelona, Sanchis y Sivera (La catedral de Valencia, 569) includes the reference to Prats but does not discuss the organ in question. 1 See above, pp. 56 to 60. I cannot find much force in Beti's argument for identifying the Master Martin of Denia with Martin Torner, i.e., the fact that in the Torner documents and in the Denia document the name of the artist is preceded by the title Mestre. 1 Beti's important article, which establishes for us the artistic personality of Martin Torner, is hidden away in the yearly publication, inaccessible to most students, the Almanaque of the Valencian newspaper, Las Provincial, for 1915, pp. 113-128.

V A L E N C I A N I N F L U E N C E IN MAJORCA

467

that on September 5, 1497 (just two months before the final payment to Torner for his paintings) the treasurer of the town of Morella gave the sum of twenty pounds to a Lorenzo Jorba as the greatest part of the amount due to him for work on an organ. Since Torner was the painter of the shutters, Lorenzo Jorba must have been in charge of some other phase of the construction or decoration, and he is probably the same as an organ builder denominated merely as Lorenq, mestre organer, who was remunerated in 1506 for repair of the organ in the cathedral of Valencia. 1 T h e organ referred to in the notary's entry at Morella about Lorenzo Jorba must have been for the church of Sta. Maria because the treasurer of the town would not have been required by the magistrates to pay for an instrument in a village of the region and because, as we have seen, the other churches in the town have never owned a formal organ. Furthermore, the material on which the two preserved pictures are executed, canvas, demonstrates that they could not have been parts of a retable, which were normally painted on wood, and that they must have been made for some such purpose as organ shutters. Beti successfully disposes of the possibility that they could have served as shutters for a retable in Sta. Maria on the grounds that no retable was made for the church at this time (since it possessed an old one dating from before 1390) and that the two canvases are not big enough to have covered the retable over the high altar, which was the only one then existing in the edifice. Moreover, each of the two pieces in the Hospital originally was capped by a continuation in the form of a half-gable to screen the gable on the top of the organ. The loss of such half-gables may be deduced from the lacunas in the surrounding inscriptions, which are perhaps a slightly later addition since they are in Roman capitals different from the Gothic script of the angel's scroll in the Nativity. These legends are interrupted at the point where each half-gable would have begun and where the omissions in the inscriptions would have been carried along the borders of the half-gables. Lastly, the figures are elongated apparently for the purpose of making their effect from the height at which the organ was set. T h e supposition would be that the canvases were transferred across the square to the 1

Sanchis y Sivera, La catedral de Valencia, 568.

468

V A L E N C I A N I N F L U E N C E IN

MAJORCA

Hospital when the present organ of Sta. Maria was installed between 1717 and 1724. Beti's edifice of proof for making the two canvases the basic works in Tomer's canon is quite as solid as many others by which the personalities of artists of the Middle Ages and Renaissance have been established; but the final stone, to create absolute surety, is put in place by my discovery that exactly the same style is found in a series of pictures in Majorca, where he is known to have been active before he sought new fields for his brush on the mainland. T h e Nativity (Fig. 193) and Assumption present to us a master who imitates rather closely the achievements of Roger van der W e y den and perhaps those of Hugo van der Goes, who, however, somewhat softens and prettifies his models in accordance with Hispanic taste, and who was endowed with respectable artistic talent but no more. In these late works he appears to have forgotten whatever insignificant lessons that his earlier productions may show him to have learned from his adopted Valencian environment —• from the shops of the Perea Master and the Osonas. He eschews, for instance, the Valencian splurges of brocades and gilds only the narrow borders of the Virgin's mantle, edging the gold with pearls. His haloes are very simple and quite sui generis, patterned only on the circumference with two dark, unembossed, and closely adjacent rings. Each picture displays a single bit of unusual iconography. In the Nativity the Virgin is prominently accompanied by the haloed midwife Salome, who, however, is thus sanctified in several other Spanish treatments of the subject. 1 In the Assumption, the whole triune Deity awaits in heaven Our L a d y , but the celestial vision of the Godhead is strangely relegated from the top of the centre to the upper right corner. T h e inscriptions round the canvases (originally extending also along the lost half-gables) embody (though with a few mistakes in the Latin phraseology) antiphons still found in the Roman Breviary —• in the case of the Nativity from the Second Vespers for the feast of the Birth, not of Christ, but of the Virgin (thus again witnessing to the destination of a church dedicated to Our * Vol. V , p. 190, and L . de Saralegui, Museum, V I I , 204. Bet! wrongly sees in her St. Anne.

FIG. 193. MARTIN TORNER. NATIVITY. HOSPITAL, MORELLA

47O

VALENCIAN INFLUENCE IN

MAJORCA

Lady), in the case of the Assumption sentences from both Matins and Lauds of this solemnity. Every item unmistakably speaks for Tomer's authorship in a picture of the enthroned Madonna and Child, also painted on canvas, which was perhaps originally intended as a processional banner (of the guild of the Virgin ?) but now hangs in a chapel at the right of the nave in Sta. Maria at Morella. T h e inadequacy of the illustration (Fig. 194) hides somewhat the exact parallelism of the Virgin's face to her representation in the Nativity, but Tomer's curiously elongated treatment of the neck, with the marked line at the meeting with the bosom, is very evident. Her hair likewise falls in just the same flowing, separate strands. She wears the very mantle that clothes her in the Hospital paintings, trimmed with gold and pearls at the borders but now spreading to the triangular expanse of the Flemish renderings of the theme. Her countenance should be compared also with that of the lower angel at the right in the Assumption. T h e Child, even in posture of the legs and one arm, literally duplicates the Infant of the Nativity. N o tokens of a knowledge of the Renaissance are forthcoming in Tomer's output, despite the fact that he must have looked at the productions of the Osonas and of the Perea Master and his circle. The throne of Our Lady, for instance, is still Gothic, hung at the back with a simple red fabric. T h e works that we may now for the first time attribute to him in Majorca would probably have been done before he betook himself to Valencia, and, although in his new residence he might perfectly well have continued to supply orders in his old home, the internal evidence of the paintings preserved in the island would indicate a date prior to the somewhat broader and less cramped manner of the pictures at Morella. We may naturally begin with the work, now belonging to the Vilallonga Mir family at Palma, in which the links with the Morella productions are clearest, a very large painting executed on his favorite material of canvas and representing a theme that is rare but not unparalleled in Spanish art, 1 the domestic life of the Infant Saviour in the house at Nazareth in the presence of His mother, St. Joseph, and members of the angelic host (Fig. 195). T h e 1

Vol. I V , p. 626.

V A L E N C I A N I N F L U E N C E IN MAJORCA

471

convincing analogies to the pieces at Morella break through even the extensive restoration to which the picture has been subjected. Our Lady, as she sits weaving, is a more youthful and captivating version of the Madonna in the Nativity. Her countenance is exactly Tomer's modification of Roger van der

FIG. 194. MARTIN TORNER. MADONNA. STA. MARIA, MORELLA (Photo. Pascual

Royo )

Weyden's type; her hair spreads in the same, divided locks; she has the characteristic, elongated neck and slim, short waist; and her bodice opens above the bosom in the same lines. The three angels also find their mates in the Morella N a t i v i t y and Assumption, the one at the left, for instance, virtually equalling the angel who brings the proclamation to the shepherds. T h e Holy Child is now clad in a little shift, but He makes the same

472

V A L E N C I A N I N F L U E N C E IN MAJORCA

gesture with His left arm as with His right arm in the Nativity and in the canvas of the Madonna in Sta. Maria. The St. Joseph alone has no close counterpart at Morella, but we must allow a master at least some slight latitude in his masculine personages. The culminating proof of Tomer's authorship comes in the use of the same and unusual kind of halo as at Morella, and even the elaborate loom at which the Virgin is seated is capped by Gothic pinnacles identical with those of her throne in the painting in the church of Sta. Maria. The principal new light under which the Palma canvas presents Torner is as an artist who revelled in the interior genre of Flemish precedent and of Spanish naturalism to as great a degree as, or more than, even any of his contemporaries. He has conceived the Casa Santa as of such restricted and humble proportions that every inch of the space has to be occupied with the paraphernalia of the household: Our Lady's large and complicated loom; the carpenter's bench of St. Joseph and the tools that are littered over it as well as over a near-lying stand and the pavement; his spectacles and a lamp hanging from pegs; the Child playing with a club on a cord; a candle, a ewer, and other objects disposed here and there; a dog upon the floor, a bird on the sill, and a lizard on the wall. Behind the Virgin is seen a lectern with a book on which are inscribed some of the verses of the Magnificat, and the angels unfold a scroll with the words from the fourth strophe of the hymn, Ave, maris Stella, "Mo(n)stra te esse matrem, Sumat. . . ." The second Majorcan work that with great surety may be ascribed to Torner consists in two panels of the Virgin Annunciate and St. Gabriel in the cathedral of Palma (Fig. 196), which were found some years ago built as mere wood into the organ of the church and therefore perforated all over their lower sections for the better issuance of the sound. Don Rafael Y s a s i 1 believes that they were utilized in the organ at the time of its construction in 1497 and so must antedate that year, but I cannot think that in 1497 the authorities of the cathedral would have set so little value upon panels that had been painted so shortly before by a master whose style, as we shall see, was still dominant in the island among a circle of followers about 1500, 1

Bolleti de la Societal Arqueoligica Luliana, X X I (1926-1927), 161.

FIG. 195. MARTIN TORNER. THE CASA SANTA A T NAZARETH. VILALLONGA MIR COLLECTION, PALMA (Photo. Arxiu d'Arqueologia Catalana )

474 VALENCIAN I N F L U E N C E IN MAJORCA and they must have been degraded to their lowly and merely utilitarian purpose at the time of some much later repair of the instrument. T h e stylistic parallelism to the picture of the Vilallonga Mir Collection would imply t h a t they were done before Torner entered upon his Valencian experience. T h e propriety of the attribution is evident at a glance in the analogies of the Virgin and of the angel to the corresponding figures in the Vilallonga canvas. Even her hair is caught u p over the left ear in exactly the same fashion. T h e fur lining of her sleeves is identical with the trimmings of the same material in the Morella pictures. We m a y bring into the count now even the bit of landscape seen through the open window, similar not only generally b u t in actual detail to the pieces of Balearic country and sea, with the rocky excrescences of isolated hills, out upon which, in the canvas, the house at N a z a r e t h looks. For the first time in our survey of T o m e r ' s production we encounter the favorite Spanish gold brocades of the period, constituting the mantles of both Our L a d y and St. Gabriel, and they seem Valencian rather than Catalan in character. If we are unwilling to believe t h a t he could have developed the employment of such brocades on his own initiative, we are almost forced to choose one of two alternatives: either he studied in Valencia as a young man, returned to M a j o r c a to do his first works, and then ended his career with another period of residence in Valencian territory; or, in distinction from the Vilallonga canvas, the cathedral panels were not, after all, executed in his early period b u t were despatched to P a l m a during his final sojourn at Valencia. I n support of the latter hypothesis one might urge t h a t the countenances, though still according unmistakably with T o m e r ' s norm, have been somewhat affected by the types of the Perea Master or of Rodrigo de Osona the younger, whereas from a youthful tutelage at Valencia, let us say about 1460, he would have acquired rather an admiration for the models of J a c o m a r t and Rexach. T h e haloes in the Annunciation are not of the simple sort t h a t we have hitherto met in T o m e r ' s o u t p u t b u t of elaborate Valencian (not Catalan) figuration. T h e Museo Arqueologico at P a l m a contains two monumental b u t considerably repainted panels which internal evidence indisputably ranges in the body of T o m e r ' s authentic remains and

V A L E N C I A N I N F L U E N C E IN MAJORCA

475

which come from the church of Alaro, north of the capital — an Anna selbdritt, probably once the centre of a retable and (again) Gabriel of the Annunciation, presumably the left lateral panel of the altarpiece (Fig. 197). T o demonstrate the authorship, it is enough to observe how the Madonna in the Anna selbdritt

FIG. 196. MARTIN TORNER. ANNUNCIATION. CATHEDRAL, PALMA (Photo. Arxiu d'Arqueologia Catalana )

literally repeats the Virgin of the cathedral Annunciation (even in the turn of the hair over the ear); how the Gabriel is only a variant of the corresponding figure in the cathedral; how closely the St. Anne resembles the haloed midwife of the Morella Nativity and Our L a d y of the Assumption; and how even the Child finds His counterpart in the Morella canvases. T h e panels belong to the most Valencian phase of Tomer's output at Majorca, but, at least in their present condition, reveal no gold brocades.

476

VALENCIAN INFLUENCE IN

MAJORCA

A pinnacle of St. John Evangelist in the Museum of the cathedral, whether or not tradition is correct in assigning it to the same original retable, is just as surely a product of Tomer's brush (Fig. 198). In the ruins of a colossal panel of St. Christopher in this little Museum, said to have once decorated the church of Santa Fe at Palma (Fig. 199), one seems to discern the same kind of modelling as in the head of the Evangelist and as in that of the St. Joseph in the Morella Nativity, but the piece is too much of a wreck to permit dogmatism in the matter of attribution. It would indeed be surprising, if, when on one hand we have the basis of Tomer's early Majorcan style to work with and on the other hand his late manner at Morella, we could find at Valencia no extant paintings to ascribe to his intervening period during which the documents demonstrate that he enjoyed such popularity in the city; but Spanish art affords other examples of such tantalizing lacunae, for instance the exiguous remains of Tomer's Valencian and Catalan predecessor, Luis Dalmäu, or of his Cordovan contemporary at Barcelona, Master Alfonso. As a matter of fact, I have been able to ferret out only one panel at Valencia which I should be willing to assign to Torner·— and even that with serious reservations —· a representation of the Virgen de las Virtudes in a chapel at the right of the nave in the church of S. Esteban (Fig. 200). Our Lady, nursing the Child, is depicted in half length surrounded by four angels serenading her upon musical instruments. T h e two flying scrolls derive their sentiments from the Psalms: "Cantabimus et psallemus virtutes tuas ( X X I , 13)," and "Benedicite omnes virtutes 1 eius, ministri eius (CIII, 21)." T h e cult of the Virgin of Virtues is linked with the accounts of their allegorical personifications accompanying her throughout her life as related by Isabel de Villena in her synchronous Valencian Vita Christi, to which we have so often appealed in these pages in order to elucidate the iconography of the school. If my tentative attribution to Torner finds favor, the connections of the panel with 1 T h e person who suggested the inscriptions to the painter probably misinterpreted the virtutes as accusative, since he omits after Benedicite the Domino which gives the real meaning of the verse, " B l e s s ye the L o r d , all y e his hosts (virtutes), ye ministers of his."

FIG. 197. MARTIN TORNER. GABRIEL AND ANNA MUSEO ARQUEOL0GICO, PALMA (Photo. Arxiu Mas )

SELRDRITT.

478

V A L E N C I A N I N F L U E N C E IN

MAJORCA

his Majorcan manner are such that it would have to be placed in the years immediately subsequent to his arrival at Valencia, i.e., in the early eighties, rather than in his later career on the mainland, as incorporated in his achievements at Morella. T h e evidence for the defence of the attribution is certainly cogent.

FIG. 198. MARTIN TORNER. ST. JOHN EVANGELIST. CATHEDRAL, PALMA (Photo. Arxiu d'Arqueologia Catalana )

T h e angels, especially the second one from the left, practically reproduce the type of the Gabriel in the Museo Arqueologico at Palma; the character of the drawing and of the draperies is the same; the scrolls exhibit exactly the kind of Gothic lettering that appears in the works in Majorca; and the gold background is patterned with two foliate strips at the side just as in the

V A L E N C I A N I N F L U E N C E IN MAJORCA

479

painting of the Anna selbdritt. The discordant elements are the Madonna and Child, but the reason may be that the artist was attempting to reproduce one of the older Italo-Byzantine images of the holy pair, which had been copiously imported into Valencia.1 The head of the Child indeed can be perfectly well

FIG. 199. MARTIN TORNER (?). ST. CHRISTOPHER. CATHEDRAL, PALMA (Photo. Arxiu d'Arqueologia Catalana )

accommodated within Tomer's canon. I once thought, because of vague similarities in types, that the panel might embody an endeavor_of the Artes Master to modernize or imitate a Valencian work of the fourteenth or early fifteenth century, but I am now about persuaded that we have here in fact a lone relic of Tomer's activity in the city of Valencia. 1

Vol. II, pp. 182-183.

48o

V A L E N C I A N I N F L U E N C E IN 1.

THE

SAN

FRANCISCO

MAJORCA

MASTER

Martin Torner apparently made such an impression in his native island that he left behind him a school of imitators. There is much justification for classifying as one of his pupils a painter whom I will christen the San Francisco Master from the monastery at Palma housing his principal achievement, a capacious retable in a chapel adjoining the church of the institution; but a survey of this Master's production compels the belief that he had enjoyed also direct, personal submersion in the placid and golden streams of Valencian art. In the central compartment, Our Lord and at His right the Virgin are monumentally seated on an elaborate Gothic throne, and beneath, in somewhat smaller scale, a pair of angels present to them the patron of the monastery, St. Francis of Assisi. T h e two correspondingly large lateral compartments display the Anna selbdritt (behind which two miniature angels hold a textile, Fig. 201) and the Visitation. Words from the Magnificat are rudely inscribed upon the book that St. Anne holds in the former panel. T o the central pinnacle is consigned, as ordinarily, the Crucifixion, and to the lateral pinnacles the participants in the Annunciation. In the predella, a monogram of Our L a d y in the middle is flanked, under the Anna selbdritt, by representations of the Presentation and Marriage of the Virgin and, appropriately beneath St. Elizabeth's meeting with the Virgin, by compartments showing the birth of her son, St. John Baptist, and his indication to his disciples of Our Lord as the Lamb of God. Behind the St. Anne, in the Presentation of Our L a d y , there appears anomalously another haloed woman, who is probably intended as the prophetess Anna, the daughter of Phanuel, since, in the ninth chapter of Isabel de Villena's Vita Christi, it is she who is delegated to care for the young Virgin in the Temple. It was, indeed, almost inevitable that the prophetess Anna should be thus taken over from the story of Our Lord's Presentation into the corresponding event in the life of His mother. In the scene of the Baptist's nativity, the norm of Spanish iconography is followed in the introduction of the Virgin to receive the new-born infant. T h e upper sections of the guardapolvos are preserved, with effigies of the blessing

FIG. 200. MARTIN TORNER (?). VIRGEN DE LAS VIRTUDES. S. ESTEBAN, VALENCIA (Photo. Arxiu Mas )

482

V A L E N C I A N I N F L U E N C E IN

MAJORCA

Eternal Father and of Prophets; the uprights in the body of the altarpiece, so far as they are left to us, contain the forms of four angels. According to the precedent established at Majorca earlier in the century by the Montesion Master, 1 the whole retable still possesses something of the shape and disposition of Italian altarpieces. It is particularly the types of the women and angels that appear to be derived directly from Martin Torner. T h e Child in the Anna selbdritt likewise witnesses to such an affiliation. T h e critic, however, vaguely wonders whether these types but especially the masculine countenances and canon for the physique do not reflect also a fruitful acquaintance with the martyrdom of St. Sebastian (and perhaps other paintings) that the great Burgos artist, Alonso de Sedano, had left in the island 2 and whether this vision of the powerful Hispano-Flemish manner of Castile had not exercised a formative influence upon the San Francisco Master, joining with the example of Torner in inculcating in him a somewhat more faithful dependence upon the models of the Low Countries than was the fashion in the eastern kingdom. But all these forms and the whole retable are dressed out in a Valencian burst of gold so gorgeous and all-pervading that its like could hardly be found even amidst the general splendor of mediaeval Spanish art —• the auric brocades multiplied in each compartment and gold backgrounds of light Valencian tooling used everywhere except in the sections of the predella. T h e types, coiffures, and costumes, particularly of the angels, suggest that, in distinction from Torner, the author had basked in the gentle brightness of Jacomart's productions, and the mournful character of certain of his personages was perhaps derived from the later Valencian atelier of the Perea Master rather than, as we have proposed above, from Alonso de Sedano. The purely hypothetical deduction towards which this union of the Valencian strain, in the San Francisco Master, with a possible dependence upon Alonso de Sedano leads us is obvious — his identification with the popular Majorcan painter of the last quarter of the fifteenth century, Pedro Terrenchs, who was a native of Palma, then, like Torner, was lured to the more bril1 a

Vol. I l l , p. 156, and below, p. 590. Vol. V , pp. 326-331, and below, p. 636.

FIG. 2ΟΙ . THE SAN FRANCISCO MASTER. ST. ANNE, VIRGIN, AND CHILD, SECTION OF RETABLE. S. FRANCISCO, PALMA (Photo.

Arxiu

d'Arqueologia

Catalana)

484

V A L E N C I A N INFLUENCE IN

MAJORCA

liant artistic centre of Valencia, but returned about 1483 to his birthplace and there, at least in one instance, collaborated with Alonso de Sedano in the cathedral of P a l m a ; 1 but if this theorycould ever be substantiated, we should have to postulate that, either at Valencia or more probably in his Balearic home, Terrenchs had conceived an enthusiasm also for the achievements of Torner. Distinctly, however, a provincial in craft and inferior to Torner, especially in the narrative compartments, the San Francisco Master hardly justifies the acclaim that T e rrenchs receives in the documents. T h e altarpiece in the church of San Francisco provides exact parallels for every one of the types in a very curious panel (Fig. 202), now in the Museum recently made to harbor the works of art in the cathedral of Palma. T h e theme is a pictorial realization of Our Lord's words, inscribed on a scroll at the top of the painting, " Q u o d (in the Vulgate, quamdiü) fecistis uni ex minimis meis (in the Vulgate, ex his jratribus meis minimis) mihi fecistis." 2 T h e Saviour (an absolute replica of the Pantocrator in the San Francisco retable) sits at the centre of a long table, and He is flanked, at the table, by four representatives of the class of the needy, two men and two women. A t the right end of the table stands a canon of the cathedral with a moneybag, and he is balanced at the left end by a confrere speaking words of consolation. In front of each of the four indigent persons there lies upon the table a coin, as a symbol of the charity that he or she has received. It remains strange that only one of the indigent is represented as ragged and maimed, the man upon whose shoulder Christ lays His hand; nor can I interpret the six escutcheons that are painted over a brocade at the bottom of the panel. A third production of the San Francisco Master may be seen, on the island, in the parish church of Alcudia, a panel of St. Martin and the beggar, conceived, according to the frequent tradition, as a disguise for Our Lord (Fig. 203). T h e chief proofs of the authorship are: the face of Christ, almost a repe1 Vol. V , pp. 328-330. His birth at Palma and subsequent peregrinations are certified in the document of 1483 by which he was granted the rights of Majorcan citizenship after his repatriation from Valencia: see Ballett de la Societat Arqueol6gica Luliana, V I (1895-1896), 245. 2 Matthew, X X V , 40.

486

V A L E N C I A N I N F L U E N C E IN MAJORCA

tition of the effigies of the Saviour in the San Francisco altarpiece and in the panel of the Palma cathedral; the type of the young St. Martin, encountered again and again in the disappointed suitors at the Marriage of the Virgin and in the Baptist's audience in the San Francisco retable; the queer, lumpy

FIG. 203. THE SAN FRANCISCO MASTER. ST. MARTIN AND THE BEGGAR. PARISH CHURCH, ALCUDIA (Photo. Arxiu d'Arqueologia

Catalana )

modelling of the nude of Christ's body as in the Child's form of the Anna selbdritt·, the same haloes of lightly embossed filigree; and the identical foliate pattern in the edging of the gold background. So far as the types of personages are at all modified from the norm of the Master's other paintings, they would suggest more clearly a flaccid aping of Alonso de Sedano's grim

VALENCIAN INFLUENCE IN MAJORCA

487

Castilian visages. The meagre measure of the San Francisco Master's capabilities may be taken in the pitiable delineation of St. Martin's mount, which looks as if it were intended rather for a drawing of the wooden horse of Troy. On its harness the painter has naively inscribed in Latin the saint's name. Above the fourteenth-century panels of Sts. Peter and Anthony Abbot in the church of the Hospital (Iglesia de la Sangre) at Palma that I have catalogued in volume IV 1 is a retable of the Deposition flanked by standing figures of Sts. Bartholomew and Paul, which belongs to the school of the San Francisco Master and Martin Torner but betrays so rustic a craft that I will not bore the reader even with an illustration. 1

P. 614.

APPENDIX

APPENDIX A D D I T I O N S TO VOLUMES I - V C A T A L A N ROMANESQUE

FRESCOES

THE shrines of Spain have been so thoroughly ransacked for the easily marketable relics of Romanesque painting that the discovery of many more pieces is not to be prophesied, except perhaps in the as yet unexplored churches of the mountain fastnesses in Asturias. The Romanesque frescoes that have been added in the successive appendices of the present work have proved a constantly dwindling group, and now I can cite only the pitifully faded shreds of one more cycle, the decoration of the apse in the church of Sant Iscle de les Feixes, near Sardanyola just north of Barcelona. The most tolerably preserved section, the Adoration of the Wise Men from the zone beneath the semidome, has been placed in the Diocesan Museum, Barcelona (Fig. 204); in the church itself there may be dimly deciphered merely a part of the form of the Pantocrator ensconced in the semidome and bestowing His benediction upon a saint who would probably be the patron of the shrine, Acisclus (in Catalan, Iscle), or his sister, Victoria. 1 In much the same way at the near-lying Tarrasa Our Lord in the semidome blesses St. Thomas of Canterbury, but the vestiges of the Sant Iscle mural paintings are in such a ruinous condition that it is impossible to say whether they are stylistically related to any of the cycles in the region of Barcelona or to define them any more accurately than as works of the late and dry Romanesque manner of the early thirteenth century. Certainly the iconography of the Epiphany is very different from the representation of the theme at Barbara in the same general district. Perhaps the most significant fact about the frescoes is that they provide still another clear example of the frequent Catalan Romanesque phenomenon of banded backgrounds. 2 C A T A L A N ROMANESQUE P A N E L

PAINTINGS

Amidst the qualitative aridity of the general run of Catalan Romanesque panels, the appearance of so unusually beautiful a piece as the antependium of the Virgin recently added to the Soler y March Collection at Barcelona is a distinct event. Hailing from the region north of Lerida, whence we should rather have expected a specimen 1

For the legend of these saints and for their Catalan cult, see vol. IV, pp. 503-504. * For the first publication of the discovery of the frescoes, see the article by Miguel Braso listed in the bibliography at the end of this volume.

492

APPENDIX

with raised stucco backgrounds, but belonging, nevertheless, to the group of Catalan frontals that in the early thirteenth century witness to a transitory wave of increased Byzantine influence, 1 it is at once more faithful to east-Christian precedent than any of the others and, with the possible exception of the Valltarga example, 2 also superior to them in technical attainments. A modern restorer has skilfully followed as nearly as possible the original lines in order to make presentable the pitiable wreck that it was when it emerged from its ecclesiastical hiding-place. The thematic material provides us with nothing that we have not encountered before in the Catalan antependia: the Madonna and Child are enthroned in a mandorla which occupies the central compartment and the spandrels of which are prettily filled by the Evangelistic symbols (Fig. 205); and the narrative proceeds, in the usual four compartments, from the lower left upward and then to the right and downward, depicting the Annunciation, the N a t i v i t y (with St. Joseph pushed by the formal composition into the size of a dwarf in the lower left corner), the Flight into E g y p t , and the Dormition (with a beardless Christ, at least in the present condition of the panel, receiving His mother's soul). T h e elaborate polylobed arches capping each of the lateral scenes may be paralleled in the Romanesque architecture of Spain, as in the cloister of S. Pablo at Barcelona itself or in the portal of the church of the Magdalena at Zamora, and they need not be interpreted as of direct Moorish or Gothic derivation. T h e frontal, in the character of its interior borders, provides one of the clearest extant instances of the manner in which the painters of these panels endeavored to create the illusion of the jewelled moldings of the goldsmith's craft; the outer frame (wholly a restoration except in the lower right corner) displays the usual concave disks by which the authors sought to counterfeit in the medium of pigments the effect of inset enamels or crystals. Indeed the only surprise that the antependium affords, besides its relatively fine draughtsmanship, is the dark violet tone of its backgrounds, a hue that it would be hard to parallel in any of its preserved rivals. The Suntag Collection at Barcelona has yielded to our knowledge a piece of a board-canopy, as precious as it is fragmentary (Fig. 206), which, amidst the Byzantinizing Catalan Romanesque panels of the first half of the thirteenth century, enjoys the distinction of approximating very closely the types and transcendent craft of the Valltarga antependium itself. T h e figures preserved — from the traditional iconography for such a canopy above the altar — are the larger part of the Pantocrator in a nimbus of the less frequent, circular shape, the angel of St. Matthew in the upper left spandrel, and, at the lower left, a portion of the lion of St. Mark. Although the panel is said to have been found in the French Pyrenees, near to which Valltarga lies, and ' Vol. I, pp. 255 ff.

' Ibid., pp. 261-264.

w Q ω ij