A History of Spanish Painting. Volume X A History of Spanish Painting, Volume X: The Early Renaissance in Andalusia [Reprint 2014 ed.] 9780674600317, 9780674599697

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HARVARD-RADCLIFFE FINE ARTS SERIES

A H I S T O R Y OF SPANISH P A I N T I N G VOLUME X

A BOOK OF THE FRIENDS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

A HISTORY OF SPANISH PAINTING BY

CHANDLER RATHFON POST HARVARD UNIVERSITY

VOLUME X THE EARLY RENAISSANCE IN ANDALUSIA

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1950

COPYRIGHT

1950

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

L O N D O N - G E O F F R E Y C U M B E R L E G E - O X F O R D U N I V E R S I T Y PRESS

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF VOLUME X 1 A n g u l o Iniguez, Diego, Ale jo Fernandez, arqueologia, V I ( 1 9 3 0 ) , 241—250.

Archivo

esfanol

de arte y

Alejo Fernandez, los retablos de D. Sancho de Matienzo, de Villasana de Mena, Archivo esfanol de arte, X V I ( 1 9 4 3 ) , 1 2 5 — 1 4 1 . Alejo

Fernandez,

a short monograph, published by the Laboratorio

de A r t e de la Universidad de Sevilla, 1946. Cofia de un primitive sevillano, Archivo esfanol de arte y arqueologia}

HI (1927), 375· Lucas Cranach y el "Santiago" de Anton Becerra, Archivo esfanol de arte, X I X ( 1 9 4 6 ) , 6 3 - 6 4 . Miniaturistas y fintores granadinos del Renacimiento, Madrid, 1945· El fintor Juan de Zamora, X I I (1936), 201-207.

Archivo

esfanol

de arte y

Archivo

esfanol de arte, X V I I

Pintores cordobeses del Renacimiento, (1944), 226-244. Pintura sevillana de frincifios arte, I V ( 1 9 3 5 ) , 2 3 4 - 2 4 0 . Varias obras de Alejo versidad Hisfalense,

del siglo XVI,

Revista

arqueologia,

esfanola

Fernandez y de su escuela, Anales de la I I , 2 ( 1 9 3 9 ) , 41—63.

de Uni-

Cazabän L a g u n a , A l f r e d o , Una visita ά Lofera de los Calatravos, in the periodical of Jaen, Don Lofe de Sosa, X V ( 1 9 2 7 ) , 370—377. Ceän Bermudez, Juan Agustin, Descrifcion Sevilla, Seville, 1 8 5 7 .

artistica de la Catedral

de

Documentos fara la historia del arte en Andalucia, 1946.

I—X, Seville, 1927—

Gestoso y Perez, Jose, Cristobal de Morales, archives, I V ( 1 9 0 0 ) , 3 8 5 - 3 9 0 .

sevillano, Revista

fintor

de

G i m e n e z Fernandez, Manuel, Alejo Fernandez} su vida, su obra, su arte, series of articles in the Revista esfanola, published at M o r o n de la Frontera, beginning in the number for February 2, 1922. G o m e z - M o r e n o , Manuel, En la Cafilla Real de Granada, Archivo esfanol de arte y arqueologia, I ( 1 9 2 5 ) , 245—288, and I I ( 1 9 2 6 ) , 99— 128. 1 In addition to the w o r k s on A n d a l u s i a n painting· listed in the bibliographies o f the f o r m e r volumes.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

VI

de Santa Clara de Ubeda, in the periodical of

Τablas del Convento

Jaen, Don Lofe de Sosa, I X ( 1 9 2 1 ) , 67—71. Gonzalez Santos, Manuel, La Virgen de la Rosa (by Alejo Fernandez),

Boletin

de Bellas Artes (Seville), III (1936), 73-74.

Hazafias y La Rua, Joaquin, Maese

Rodrigo

Fernandez,

Se-

de Santaella,

ville, 1900.

Maese

Rodrigo,

Seville, 1909.

Hernandez Diaz, Jose, and Sancho Corbacho, Antonio, Los Reyes

Cato-

en Alcalä del Rio, Seville, 1939.

licos y la Cafilla de San Gregorio

Hernandez Diaz, Jose, and Sancho Corbacho, Antonio, and Collantes de

Terän, Francisco, Catalogo

arqueologico

y artistico

de la

frovincia

de Sevilla, I—II, Seville, 1939—1943 (completed through towns beginning with the letters A—C).

Lopez Martinez, Celestino, Desde Montanes, Seville, 1929.

•

Desde Martinez

Montanes

Mayer, August L., Ein Frühwerk

Dresdener

Galerie,

Jeronimo

Hernandez

hasta

hasta Pedro Roldan, Seville, 1932. des Α lex 0 Fernandez

Kunstchronik

und Kunstmarkt,

Alemän

( 1 9 2 1 - 1 9 2 2 ) , 250.

Una tabla andaluza Museo

de Bellas

Martinez

de los comienzos Artes de Cadiz,

del siglo XVI, Boletin Boletin).

Santona, 1925.

y sus fueblos,

Puente y Olea, Manuel de la, La Casa de C ontratacion, retratos, Seville, 1900. Ramirez de Arellano, Rafael, Ordenanzas

del

X V ( 1 9 3 3 ) , 31—32 (followed

by an important note by the editors of the Nuno Garcia, Angel, El Valle de Mena

in der

XXXIII, I

de fintores

El Retablo

y sus

(Cordova),

Boletin

(Madrid),

de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando I X ( 1 9 1 5 ) , 29-46.

Romero de Torres, Enrique, Catälogo de Cadiz, Madrid, 1934.

monumental

Sanchez Canton, Francisco Javier, Los grandes

Esfana, I, Nacimiento

de Cordoba,

240-249.

temas del arte cristiano

murales

Archivo esfanol

de la casa

del

en

Museo

de arte, X X (1947),

Sentenach y Cabafias, Narciso, La Virgen del Amfaro

de los

6 del Buen Aire, Tabla al oleo for Alejo Fernandez,

VII (1924), 4-10.

Provincia

e infancia de Cristo, Madrid, 1948.

Santos Jener, Samuel de los, Pinturas

Arqueologico

de Espana,

Arte

Navegantes

esfanol,

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Vll

Torre Revello, Jose, La Virgen del Buen Aire, Facultad de Filosojia y LetraSy Buenos Aires, Publicaciones del Instituto de Investigaciones Histöricasy LVII, 1931 (for the retable of the Casa de Contratacion at Seville by Alejo Fernandez).

CONTENTS CHAPTER

I

INTRODUCTION

3

CHAPTER ALEJO

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

II

FERNANDEZ

His Life His Signed or Documented Works T h e Possibly Documented Miniature of the Annunciation His Works Authenticated by Style . Works about the Attribution of which to Alejo Fernandez There Remains Some Doubt C H A P T E R

FERNANDEZ

T h e Ecija Master T h e Moguer Master Juan de Zamora

94 101 in

CHAPTER

IV

GONZALO DIAZ AND NICOLAS CARLOS

CHAPTER

131

V

C R I S T O B A L DE M A Y O R G A A N D T H E M A S T E R OF T H E M E N D I C I D A D

CHAPTER THE

162

VII

C R I S T O B A L DE M O R A L E S A N D T H E S C H R E T L E N

Cristobal de Morales T h e Schretlen Master C H A P T E R

142

VI

R E T A B L E OF T H E M A R M O L E J O S

C H A P T E R

1. 2.

85

III

T H E S C H O O L A N D G E N E R A L C I R C L E OF A L E J O

1. 2. 3.

8 21 49 51

MASTER

173 179 VIII

A N D R E S DE N A D A L E S

183

CHAPTER P E D R O F E R N A N D E Z DE G U A D A L U P E

IX 188

X

C O N T E N T S C H A P T E R

Χ

T H E E A R L Y R E N A I S S A N C E AT CORDOVA

191 217 222

1. Pedro Romana and Luis Fernandez 2. T h e Fuenteovejuna Master 3. Anton Becerra C H A P T E R

X I

T H E E A R L Y RENAISSANCE AT G R A N A D A

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Introduction T h e First Retable in S. Jose at Granada Juan Ramirez Alonso de Villanueva T h e Retable of the Martyrdoms and Affiliated Works T h e Pulgar Master Pedro Machuca and Jacopo T o r n i CHAPTER

.

.

229 229 234 238 243 250 259

XII

A N D A L U S I A N P A I N T I N G S B E L O N G I N G TO T H E E A R L Y B U T OF U N C E R T A I N A T T R I B U T I O N

RENAISSANCE 277

APPENDIX A D D I T I O N S TO V O L U M E S I — I X

T h e Franco-Gothic Style Galician Frescoes Jaime and Pedro Serra T h e Master of the Cardona Pentecost T h e Rubio Master T h e Master of Albatarrech T h e School of Borrassä Jaime Cirera Juan Mates Jaime Cabrera Bernardo Martorell Pedro Nicoläu Bernardo Serra Pedro Zuera Juan de Levi T h e Langa Master Nicolas Solana Italo-Gothic Painting in Castile T h e Villalobos Master T h e Villamediana Master Pedro Bello

295 295 297 298 300 300 302 3°4 306 307 310 310 311 313 3J5 323 326 326 330 331

CONTENTS T h e Mila Master T h e Palanquinos Master T h e Budapest Master Alonso de Sedano T h e Olmos Albos Master T h e Avila Master Bermejo Jacomart and Rexach Rodrigo de Osona the Younger The St. Narcissus Master The Perea Master The San Francisco Master Luis Dalmäu T h e Vallmoll Master (the "Pedralbes Master") Jaime Huguet Juan Figuera Francisco Solibes Rafael Vergos The Girard Master Mateo Montoliu Miguel del Rey Martin Bernat and Miguel Jimenez T h e Alfajarin Master Juan de la Abadia Bernardo de Aras (the Pompien Master) Juan de Borgona and his School Fernando del Rincon Antonio de Comontes Juan Correa de Vivar The Transito Master Pedro Delgado B. del Castro T h e Becerril Master The Sirga Master, the Calzada Master, and the Paredes Master Master Benito Juan Rodriguez de Solis T h e Astorga Master Leon Picardo Andres Lopez and Antonio de Vega

xi 331 335 338 342 346 346 349 357 359 362 362 370 372 372 372 379 380 380 384 387 387 389 394 394 399 402 403 406 410 419 419 424 428 434 442 442 447 452 456

A D D I T I O N A L B I B L I O G R A P H Y FOR V O L U M E S I - I X

463

I N D E X OF N A M E S OF A R T I S T S

469

I N D E X OF P L A C E S

472

T H E EARLY RENAISSANCE IN ANDALUSIA

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION THE general character and historical background of the period in the evolution of Spanish painting that comprises the phase in the Andalusian school treated in the subsequent pages formed the theme of the opening chapter in the preceding volume of the series, which investigated the beginning of the Renaissance in the northwestern part of the peninsula 5 and little need be added here with special reference to the south. Stretching, roughly speaking, through the same first third of the sixteenth century, the aspect of painting in Andalusia that now concerns us constitutes likewise a transition between the modes of the M i d d l e Ages and the Renaissance, prior to the Spanish adoption of the full-blown fashions of the Cinquecento. T h e foundation of the transitional style in Castile, L e o n , Aragon, and Andalusia was still the Hispano-Flemish manner established in these sections of the peninsula during the second half of the fifteenth century, and the Renaissance did no more than to relax the angularity of the manner in favor of a somewhat less primitive and more accurate conception of the human form, to stimulate a slight advance in such technical matters as perspective and foreshortening, and to substitute for the old Gothic settings backgrounds and accessories belonging to the new architectural repertoire, based on antiquity, that had been evolved in Italy and imported into Spain. T h e changes were occasioned not only by Italian influence but also both by the general European Zeitgeist, which was spontaneously moving towards a more proficient, as well as more idealistic, kind of art, and by the natural reaction that even in the last decades of the fifteenth century had commenced to alleviate the cramped HispanoFlemish modes. W e must not, of course, minimize the debt to the Italian Renaissance. It is true that the very limited immigration of Italian painters into southern Spain at this time could have meant little to the native school, for Jacopo Torni and the thoroughly Italianate Spaniard Pedro Machuca settled in Granada too late, c. 1 5 2 0 , to have had much effect on the formation of the Andalusian artists in the transitional period,

4

INTRODUCTION

except perhaps a few indigenous masters at Granada itself, and the frescoists whose names were transliterated into Spanish as Julio de Aquiles and Alejandro Mayner were still tardier arrivals. T h e region, moreover, does not reveal the importation of Italian sculpture to any extent at an early enough moment to have stirred the imagination of the painters who at present demand our attention. We shall find it, however, highly probable that some of the painters of southern Spain were attracted by the magnetism of the Italian Renaissance into sojourns and study in the sister peninsula, and in the case of Alejo Fernandez the probability amounts to virtual certainty. If we exclude from the reckoning Pedro Machuca, who really is a premature Spanish exponent of the High Renaissance, no one of these painters can be shown to have enjoyed an Italian experience by such documentary or otherwise incontrovertible proof as we possess for their contemporaries in the north, Pedro Berruguete and Juan de Borgona, but the internal evidence of their productions in a number of instances argues for the likelihood. The later works still within the stage in the development of the Andalusian school covered in the present volume exhibit a more fruitful acquaintance with one of the forms that the early Renaissance assumed in Flanders, Antwerp mannerism, than do the Castilian and Leonese achievements of the time. Pictures by the Antwerp mannerists, almost as soon as they were executed, must have been bought for the churches of southern Spain, and the artists themselves would have been lured by the ready market there to exercise their profession. Indeed the retable in Sta. Ines at Seville 1 is the creation of some painter of the L o w Countries upon whom mannerism had already left its mark. The outstanding example of the spell exerted by the Antwerp fashions is afforded by the style at which Alejo Fernandez eventually arrived, even if he did not make a trip to the Low Countries as a mature master. We have noted in volume V 2 that the records fail to register the importation of Flemish or Dutch paintings into Andalusia before about 1500 and even then, prior to the rise of Antwerp mannerism, only in the scantiest numbers. Both Gerard David and Quentin Matsys, as transitional between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, were admired by the south-Spanish painters who were producing in the very first years of the sixteenth century or at least 1 2

See my vol. I V , p. 3 2 . P . 4.

INTRODUCTION

5

then executing their maiden efforts, and it is therefore symptomatic that a Madonna by David's hand actually exists in the church of the Sacro Monte at Granada and that an Entombment ascribed,3 in my opinion rightly, to his follower, Ambrosius Benson, graces the Provincial Museum at Seville, 4 among the works long in the institution's possession and thus presumably deriving from one of the edifices of the city or its environs. In 1505 there was presented to the Royal Chapel, attached to the Cathedral at Granada, half of Queen Isabella's private collection, consisting in the main of Flemish paintings of the fifteenth century, but it is difficult to trace a specific effect of these pictures, even at Granada, upon native production. W e might have expected the masters of all Andalusia to have taken ideas particularly from the fine works of Memling in the collection, since, as one of the latest artists of the Middle Ages, he incorporated, like David, a manner gentler than that of his Flemish predecessors and thus congenial to the exponents of the early southern Renaissance, but his influence is nowhere very tangible. A painter, Pedro de Cristo, described in one of the records as a Fleming and employed at Granada from 1507 to 1 5 3 2 , has sometimes been thought identical with Petrus Christus I I , who, a grandson of the great artist of this name, followed the same profession but cannot be connected with any picture done in his native country. W e shall eventually 5 analyze two works painted at Granada which have been merely guessed to be his productions but which most certainly were not the creations of a single artist. If he actually did the Madonna with angels now in the Mateu Collection at Barcelona, he remained thoroughly Flemish in his style; if, on the other hand, he was the author of a retable in the church of S. Jose at Granada, he had accommodated his Flemish beginnings to Spanish taste. Of the three centres of Andalusian painting in the early Renaissance, Seville, Cordova, and Granada, the first definitely acquired the artistic preeminence towards which she had been moving in the Middle Ages and which she was to maintain until the end of the seventeenth century, the so-called Golden Age of Spanish civilization. Sevillian masters indeed y e t 6 commanded patronage even in the adjoining 3

See an article by the Marques de Lozoya, Boletin de la Soctedad Esfaüola Excursiones, X X X V I ( 1 9 2 8 ) , 253. 4 No. 2 1 9 of Gestoso's Catalogue of the Museum. * P. 233. 6 See vol. V, p. 46.

de

INTRODUCTION

6

northerly province of Badajoz. The vital and conscious aesthetic atmosphere of the city had been manifested in the reforms in the guild of painters that took place in 148ο, 7 and the guild now still exercised its preponderant role. In contrast to the bluffer and more forceful tone of contemporary painting in Castile and Leon and even partly in comparison to the character of the production at Cordova and Granada, Seville continued to endow her pictorial output, particularly in the case of Alejo Fernandez, with the gentler and more dulcet notes that so often sounded in her art from the beginning until the fulfilment in Murillo. The first place, however, where we can definitely fix Alejo's activity, before his establishment at Seville, is Cordova, which, as has been demonstrated especially by recent discoveries, did not lose at the commencement of the sixteenth century the artistic importance that she had enjoyed in the Gothic age. The subjection of Granada to the Moors until 1492 had forestalled any Christian production prior to the scant Hispano-Flemish works preserved from the last years of the century, but now the city began to rise to a long-enduring position as a prominent focus of art in the peninsula. It is probably more accurate, with our present knowledge, to speak of Seville, Cordova, and Granada as centres of painting at this period rather than as seats of schools clearly distinguishable from one another. We shall find it impossible in the ensuing pages to define just how much the production of Granada owed to Cordova. The self-sufficiency of Cordova and at least partial independence from Seville are more apparent, especially in the rather individual style of Pedro Romana, and yet the stylistic affiliations with Seville were close enough to render it difficult to decide to which centre we ought to assign the Schretlen Master and Anton Becerra. Alejo Fernandez and his brother, the sculptor Jorge, after practising their professions at Cordova, became outstanding figures in the Sevillian milieu, and we shall have occasion to record other concrete instances of artistic contacts between the two capitals. The remains of Andalusian painting become more numerous at the dawn of the Renaissance than the scant relics of the preceding, mediaeval styles in southern Spain, but nevertheless exiguous in comparison with the abundance of contemporary material that the northwestern section of the peninsula has bequeathed to posterity. Although the records show that a very much larger amount of painting was done at 7

Ibid., p. 3.

INTRODUCTION

η

the time in Andalusia than the destruction of the centuries has spared, the south was probably not yet so prolific as Castile and Leon; but in compensation, as in the Middle Ages, the artists signed their pictures more frequently than in the north, thus supplementing the evidence of the documents and enabling us in a relatively greater degree to give definite names to the personalities instead of coining for them sobriquets as Masters of This or That. In addition to the general effects of the history of the period upon the art noted in the first chapter of volume I X , such as the substantiation of the Flemish influence through the increasing political ties with the L o w Countries, a few particular conditions and events assumed significance for the painting of Andalusia. One of the causes of Seville's primacy in the artistic life of southern Spain was the importance and prosperity to which she now attained as the principal port for the flourishing commerce with the newly acquired colonies in America. A celebrated work of Alejo Fernandez, the panel of the Virgin of the Navigators, displaying Our Lady as patroness of the traders, explorers, and their ships, was executed for the Audience Chamber of the Casa de Contratacion, the organization at Seville that controlled commerce with America, and the picture has now finally and fittingly been housed in the Archives of the Indies in the city. Indeed, one of Alejo's principal admirers was the treasurer of the Casa de Contratacion, Sancho Ortiz de Matienzo. Alejo, Cristobal de Morales, and other leading artists were employed on the transitory decorations to honor the presence of Charles V at Seville in 1526 for his wedding, and Juan Ramirez was one of the painters selected for a like task at the sovereign's visit to Granada in the same year. The archbishop of Seville from 1505 to 1523 was Diego de Deza, who played a distinguished but lesser part in the patronage of the Fine Arts than his contemporary, the great Castilian prelate, Cisneros.

CHAPTER II ALEJO ι.

FERNANDEZ His

LIFE

THE first emergence of A l e j o Fernandez to our sure knowledge occurs in the nineties of the fifteenth century when he married at Cordova his first wife, Maria Fernandez, the daughter of a painter Pedro Fernandez, but unfortunately the evidence in regard to the actual date in the nineties is conflicting. Until recently it has been given as August 3, 1498, on the basis of a passage where A l e j o refers to the nuptial contract in making the last of his three wills in 1542 as published by the Sevillian scholar, Gestoso y Perez. 1 A m o n g a large series of new documents on Cordovan art, however, that D o n Jose de la Torre y del Cerro has discovered and intends eventually to publish, there is one which places the marriage earlier and which, together with some of the others, D o n Diego Angulo has epitomized in a letter to me with his usual generosity, having been allowed by Sefior de la Torre to consult his manuscript. T h e document in question is a will of Maria Fernandez dated in August, 1497, when evidently but wrongly she thought that she was about to die, and it describes her as already Alejo's wife and as naming a son, Francisco, to be her heir. Angulo logically conjectures that, if Francisco was Alejo's son and not the issue from a former union (of which we are entirely uninformed), her marriage with A l e j o must have taken place at least no later than 1496. T h e explanation of the chronological contradiction would be that either Gestoso or D e la Torre misread the year in the records or that A l e j o himself, when after so long an interval he drew up his testament in 1542, had forgotten the exact time of his wedding. Inasmuch as no less than six painters named Pedro Fernandez were active in Cordova at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century, 2 there are no means of determining whether the father-in-law was the one thus entitled and from this city who signed 1 Ensayo de tin diccionario de los artifices que florecieron en Sevilla, Seville, 1899— 1909, I I I , 3 1 5 . 2 See an article b y Samuel de los Santos Jener in Archivo esfanol de arte, X X

(i947)> 248·

ALEJO FERNANDEZ

9

the Hispano-Flemish Nativity in the Pickman Collection, Seville 5 3 and the ties of Alejo's style with that of the signer 4 are not concrete enough to strengthen in any way such a hypothetical equation. W e know of lost works for which Alejo's father-in-law received the commissions,5 and some extant frescoes of the first half or middle of the fifteenth century at Cordova have been falsely attributed to him; 6 but the only one of the six artists called Pedro Fernandez whose manner can be identified by anything extant is the author of the Pickman panel. So far as the records of Alejo's first marriage go, they might mean only that, then living at Seville, he had fallen in love with a girl of Cordova and merely made an excursion thither to marry her, but we have other, absolutely convincing evidence to the contrary and to the effect that he was at this time dwelling in Cordova and continued so to do until 1508. Gestoso 7 avers that on one of the first days of January, 1508, the Chapter of the cathedral of Seville summoned Alejo from Cordova; but, since no document embodying such a fact has ever been published, it may never have existed, and probably he merely deduced the conclusion from the considerations that on January 3 1 of this year both Alejo and his brother, the sculptor Jorge Fernandez, were reimbursed by the Chapter for the expenses of a journey which they had made to Seville in order to draw up the contract for the carving and polychromy of the retable over the high altar of the cathedral 8 and that in the entry of this payment in the accounts of the church they are definitely denominated as citizens of Cordova. A sum was also given by the Chapter to a messenger on February 25, 1508, for two trips to Cordova, evidently in connection with the business of the retable,9 and as early as 1505 Jorge had already been called from some place (it may be guessed, Cordova) for consultation in the same matter. 10 Moreover, Pablo de Cespedes 1 1 declares that Alejo executed the principal retable (now lost) and other smaller works in 3

See my vol. V, p. 66. See below, p. 24. 5 S. de los Santos Jener, of. cit., 247. 6 See below, p. 192. 7 Of. cit., II, 33. 8 Documentos fara la historia del arte en Andalucia (a series of volumes published by the Laboratorio de Arte of the University of Seville, beginning· in 1 9 2 7 ) , I, 12 and 20. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 19. 11 Discurso de la comfaraciön de la antigua y moderna fintura y escultura, published by Ceän Bermudez in the appendix to vol. V of his Diccionario, p. 304. 4

10

ALEJO

FERNANDEZ

the monastery of S. Jeronimo at Cordova, which, whether done before or after his establishment at Seville, would imply that he was a well known figure in Cordovan circles. Writing no later than 1604, Pablo de Cespedes would in all probability have preserved a correct tradition of the authorship of the paintings in S. Jeronimo, and, as a matter of fact, Ceän Bermudez, 12 using language that would suggest that he had seen the principal retable, states it to have been signed. In a document that on the basis of the handwriting Gestoso 13 ascribes to the end of the fifteenth or very beginning of the sixteenth century, he points out that Alejo is listed as painting in the Alcazar at Seville and as therefore free from taxation, but such a criterion in the question of dating is too uncertain and precarious for the foundation of a theory that by c. 1500 he was already a resident of Seville and merely transferred his domicile to Cordova for a few years. I f , however, the theory could be substantiated, it would assist in explaining the fact that the authorities of the cathedral at Seville were already familiar with his ability. At least once in the records of the time the names of both Alejo and Jorge Fernandez 14 are followed by the adjective aleman (German), so that we are compelled to believe that they were either born in northern Europe or at least belonged to a family which had thence emigrated to Spain. We can by no means be certain that the place of derivation was Germany rather than the Low Countries, for we have several times perceived in these volumes that both the adjectives German and Flemish were sometimes loosely and indiscriminately applied by Spaniards to Belgium, Holland, or Germany. As a matter of fact, a sculptor designated in a Sevillian document of 1519 as Jorge flamenco (the Fleming) is probably identical with Jorge Fernandez, and indeed he is definitely stated so to be by Gestoso 15 and Mayer. 16 It would be strange for the adjective aleman to continue to be attached to the painter and to the sculptor if only their forbears rather than they themselves had come from northern Europe, and, on settling in Andalusia, they might have abandoned a German or Flemish surname for a 12

Diccionario, II, 86, and also his Descrifcion artistica de la Catedral de Sevilla, edition of Seville, 1857, p. 28. 13 Op. cit., II, 33. 14 In the case of Alejo, it occurs in the document of 1 5 1 3 referring to the transfer of the pictures that he had painted for the viga of the cafilla mayor (see below, p. 1 3 ) ; and in the case of Jorge, in the document of 1505 relating to his first journey to Seville. Of. cit., I, 394. 16 In his article on Jorge Fernandez in the Thieme-Becker Lexikon.

ALEJO FERNANDEZ

n

Spanish one, Fernandez. On the other hand, from the nuptial contract of Alejo with his second wife, Catalina de Aviles, on January i , 1525, and also from her contract of the same day, we learn that his parents had perfectly good Spanish names, Leonisio Garrido and Juana Garrida, implying that the immigration of the family to the peninsula took place at least as early as the generation before that of the two artistic sons. Gimenez Fernandez 17 suspects, however, that "Garrido" may represent a Spanish corruption of a Teutonic surname and "Leonisio" a misreading of "Dionisio." W h y the appellation should have been changed by the sons from Garrido to Fernandez remains an unsolved problem. Possibly the latter was their mother's maiden name, and they resorted to the frequent Andalusian habit of using the maternal rather than the paternal cognomen. Or did Alejo, because bearing an uncouth foreign surname, assume that of his wife, and did his brother follow suit? There are indeed some Andalusian examples of painters of a single family with different surnames. 18 Mayer 19 gets round the difficulty by the supposition that the brothers may have been adopted children of Leonisio Garrido. Certainly there are no Flemish or German elements in the style of Alejo's beginnings that could not be explained by his continuation of the tradition of painting already established in the peninsula during the Hispano-Flemish period or that would force us to predicate a sojourn on his part in northern Europe; and we can perhaps elucidate his later adoption of Antwerp mannerism by his study of the pictures imported from the Low Countries rather than by the assumption that as an older man he enjoyed the privilege of a tour outside of Spain. In order to account for the Venetian elements that Mayer descries in Alejo's production, he devises the theory that the brothers, originating in the north, had stopped, on their way to Spain, in Italy. Although Alejo's debt to Venice is in any case much slighter that Mayer surmised, we shall subsequently discover a real likelihood that, before he did any of his extant works, he had benefited by an Italian and probably even a Venetian experience, but a delay in Italy as a natural stage in a journey to Spain from Germany or the L o w Countries, where we cannot prove that he had ever been, is a very dubious proposition. In a letter to me, Don Diego Angulo deduces that, because Alejo is 17

Revista esfaüola de Moron, number of February 2, 1922, p. 4. ography at the beginning of this book.) 18 See below, p. 1 8 8 . 19 Second Spanish edition of his Geschichte, Madrid, 1 9 4 2 , p. 202.

(See my bibli-

12

A L E JO FERNANDEZ

not included in a list of Cordovan masters who in 1493 arranged for drawing up the rules of the guild to which they belonged, he probably had not yet reached the city, whether from northern Europe, Italy, Seville, or even some other place in Spain. If the brothers arrived from outside the peninsula, their parents must have accompanied the sons' peregrinations and not until their establishment at Cordova have adopted the name of Garrido; if hitherto they had all been dwelling elsewhere in Spain, it is likely that the elders would earlier have changed their appellation. The records of the cathedral of Seville 20 show that Alejo's connection with the embellishment of the cafilla mayor consisted, first, in his collaboration in the polychromy of the carvings with which at this time the retable, begun by predecessors in the second half of the fifteenth century, was completed by Jorge Fernandez and other sculptors. In the enterprise, however, which was practically brought to its conclusion at the end of 1526 or first days of 1527, Alejo seems to have been also general overseer, bidden as early as May 15, 1508, to make a sketch (muestra), for the Chapter's approval, of the plans for finishing the retable, and actually paid for more than one such sketch on June 2 1 , 1520. There are, furthermore, many references in the documents of the cathedral and in his last will to his employment, together with other painters and sculptors, upon what is called the viga in the cafilla mayor. The word means literally beam; but the viga no longer exists, and there have been several vague guesses as to what it was. Ceän Bermüdez interprets it as a canopy over the retable; Mayer 21 thinks rather of a general frame for this altarpiece ; and Gimenez Fernandez 22 believes it to have been the retable's upper part itself. Surely, however, Diego Angulo 23 is right in seeing in it nothing more recondite than what the word would naturally signify, the rood beam. When it is first mentioned in the documents,24 it is stated to be intended for the crossing of the cathedral, i.e., for the customary situation of a rood beam, at the entrance, in the crossing, to the apse; and, although subsequently 25 in 1526 20

Documentos fara la historia del arte en Andalucia, I, 12 ff. Die Sevillaner Malerschule, 19. The German word that he uses to describe it is Umrahmung, but then it would have been equivalent to the guardafolvos, which are treated separately in the documents. 22 Of. cit. 23 Archivo esfanol de arte y arqueologia, VI ( 1 9 3 0 ) , p. 242, n. 1. 24 Documentos fara la historia del arte en Andalucia, I, 13. 25 Ibid., 17. 21

A L E JO FERNANDEZ

13

there was raised the question of whether it could be safely put above the retable, the phrase could perfectly well apply to a position in front of the retable but at a rood beam's greater height, or the authorities may have then merely been considering the proposition of moving it from its original spot before the retable to one over it. As a matter of fact, in an earlier year, 1520, workmen had been paid for setting it in place.26 In this instance, the location is actually declared to be the altar mayor, but the term could be used loosely to allude to the whole cafilla mayor. We are definitely informed that upon the viga there was a representation of the regular subject for a rood beam, the Crucifixion, since an entry in the books of the cathedral reveals that in 1529 a canopy of splendid cloth was ordered to cover the Calvary. 27 The consideration that Alejo Fernandez painted some panels which were attached to the viga might give one pause in accepting the word to mean rood beam, but Angulo adduces the exactly similar adornment of a (likewise lost) viga in the church of Sta. Paula at Seville which is described in such a way in a document of 1592 28 as to leave no doubt that a rood beam is the object in question. There are many other allusions in the records of the time to large vigas in Andalusian churches, elaborately embellished with paintings. The panels executed by Alejo for the back of the beam were ceded by the Chapter as early as 1 5 1 3 29 to the archbishop Diego de Deza to be employed in the chapel of S. Pedro under his patronage in the cathedral. The cafilla mayor once contained other works by Alejo, a portrait, done on cloth in 1508, of the then reigning sovereign, Ferdinand, for decoration of the Paschal Candlestick30 and valances likewise on cloth, in 1510, for a kind of baldacchino, representing heaven, which was being constructed over the high altar. These first years of his establishment at Seville must have been a busy and popular moment of his career, since on April 26, 1509, he accepted a commission to paint two retables for the altars of the Virgin and Santiago in the church of the Carthusian monastery at Seville, Sta. Maria de la Cuevas,31 and on October 22 of the same year he agreed to do a retable of unspecified subjects at the order of a Martin Alonso of Antequera in the province of Malaga, for either this town 26 Ibid., 27 Ibid., z%

22. 18. Ibid.,\\, 1 9 - 2 0 .

25 31

I bid., I, 14. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 33.

i4

ALEJO

FERNANDEZ

or for Seville, in which his patron might have been residing. 32 A l l these works have been destroyed, or pieces of them exist in public or private collections unrecognized as derived from such sources. In a document of January 3 1 , 1 5 1 0 , he is described as enjoying the intimacy of a dignitary in the cathedral of Seville, Francisco de Penalosa. 33 At least as early as the second decade of the sixteenth century and probably at an appreciably prior date, Alejo had begun work upon some of his most memorable achievements at the request of Sancho Ortiz de Matienzo, a distinguished canon of the cathedral of Seville who helped to organize the merchant marine to ply between Spain and America and who in 1 5 0 5 was made treasurer of the Casa de Contratacion, the Board of T r a d e at Seville in charge of commerce with the new Spanish colonies. 34 T h e birthplace of this important official of Ferdinand and Isabella was Villasana de M e n a in the Valle de Mena in the northern part of the province of Burgos, and it was for the church of Sta. Ana which he erected in this town, so far distant from Andalusia, that Alejo's art was called into service. An inscription of 1498 on the sepulchral slab of Matienzo's father and brother in the church states that by this date the edifice had been begun and was far enough completed to receive the remains of these relatives, thither transferred from Seville. 3 5 That it was, however, not entirely finished until 1509 is mentioned on another inscription in the edifice, which is set, according to Matienzo's pride in his new home in the south, about an incised carving of the Giralda. 3 6 B y 1 5 1 1 , if not before, he founded a Franciscan convent in connection with the church, which until this time had functioned merely as his private chapel. F r o m 1 5 1 2 to 1 5 1 6 the institution, for which he imported nuns from the Andalusian town of Carmona, was receiving ecclesiastical authorization, and the conventual buildings were being constructed. Of the two retables done by Alejo for the church, which were calamitously Ibid., II, 117. 33 ibii_> vill, 18. F o r a partial biography of Matienzo, see Manuel de la Puente ν Olea, Los trabajos geograficos de la Casa de Contratacion, Seville, 1 9 0 0 , pp. 2 1 0 ff. I do not know his authority for stating· on p. 2 1 2 , n. 5, that A l e j o Fernandez in 1 5 1 3 , at Matienzo's order, did the polychromy on a sculptured retable of St. Dominic that was sent to the West Indies. 35 For these and almost all the following data, see Angel Nufio Garcia, El Valle de Mena y sus ftieblos, Santona, 1 9 2 5 , pp. 1 1 8 — 1 2 0 and 481—488. 36 Boletin de la Comision de Monumentos de Burgos, X I V ( 1 9 4 0 ) , 352. I have not learned whether the two inscriptions survived the conflagration of 1 9 3 6 . 32

34

ALEJO FERNANDEZ

15

destroyed by fire in 1936 but are preserved in photographs and were twice studied by me in situ before the conflagration, a smaller one on the right side of the nave bore his signature and seems the earlier of the twain, revealing no elements really incongruous with an assignment to about the year 1498, the time when the church must have been in the main finished, since the bodies of Matienzo's relatives were then here given an honorable sepulchre. Although the donor's affiliations were with Seville, he could even there have become an admirer of Alejo's art at near-lying Cordova. T h e other retable, over the high altar, is authenticated as Alejo's creation by style, and it is stylistic evidence also that would appear to imply a somewhat later year, perhaps the period of the transformation into a convent from 1511 to 1516. W e are not assisted in dating this retable by the age of the portrayed donor who has usually been identified with Matienzo, for we cannot be absolutely certain of the identification,37 and, although the canon died in 1521, we are uninformed of the year of his birth, so that there are no means of determining how old he ought to have looked at a given moment. Subsequently to my writing of this chapter on A l e j o Fernandez but without having read my pages, Angulo 38 has proposed the assignment of both retables to a single stage in the painter's life and provisionally suggested a date in the second decade of the sixteenth century just after his establishment at Seville in 1508. His principal reasons for this chronology are the resemblances of the retable over the high altar to the four panels now distributed between the Sacristia Alta and the Sacristia de los Calices in the cathedral of Seville, which perhaps should be placed in the vicinity of 1510; 39 but I shall suggest 40 analogies rather to slightly later creations of Alejo, and in any case his argument would not apply to the signed retable, which I find it hard not to set at a considerably earlier phase of the master's development. H e has perceived, however, what I failed to note, that the escutcheon of Ferdinand and Isabella at the summit of the retable over the high altar dates it before the accession of Charles V in 1517, and I should be disposed to give more weight than he to the fact that the escutcheon does not include the arms of Navarre, which Ferdinand added to his domains in 1512, by no means too 37 38 39

See below, p. 67. Archivo esfanol de arte, X V I ( 1 9 4 3 ) , 125—141 See below, p. 64

40

See below, p. 69.

16

ALEJO

FERNANDEZ

early a year for the retable's execution. No record informs us whether Alejo actually made what was then the arduous journey to the other extreme of the Iberian peninsula or merely dispatched the panels to Villasana. Almost without interruption he continued in demand for commissions in Andalusia itself. He was even called upon in 1 5 1 4 to exhibit his talents in the field of illumination, executing three miniatures in one of the choir books of the cathedral of Seville. 41 Angulo 42 has recognized his hand in a miniature of the Annunciation in a book of this sort belonging to the cathedral, but there are no sure means of determining whether it is one of the specified triad or instead a relic of another similar order that he may have received. On April 24, 1520, he contracted, in collaboration with the painters Pedro Fernandez de Guadalupe and Pedro's brother, Anton Sanchez, to do a vast retable of Christ and the Virgin for the Franciscan nuns at Seville.43 Statuary was included in the ensemble, but the document does not specify whether this also was executed by the painters or whether they merely applied polychromy to the work of unnamed sculptors. The retable no longer is to be seen in the church, and, if any of its parts exist in public or private collections, they have not been identified. During the same year, on November 24, he arranged to be paid for two altarpieces that he had painted in Jerez de la Frontera,44 one for the church of S. Juan, just conceivably, as we shall see,45 preserved, and the other for the Hospital de la Sangre. The negotiations in connection with remuneration for the former retable continued until at least 1523. 46 The paintings that, in distinction from the sculpture, constitute the major sections in the retable over the high altar of the church of S. Juan at Marchena are to be regarded as a documented achievement. It is not specified in the documents just what his contributions were, but stylistic considerations fill the lacuna and demonstrate all the paintings to be his creation. Until a short while ago we knew of this task of his only from a mention, in his last will, of a sum he had received by the time of his first wife's death for "the retable of the 41 42 43 44 45

46

Gestoso, of. cit., II, 33. Anales de la Universidad Hisfalense, Gestoso, o f . cit., Ill, 309. Ibid., 3 1 4 . P.

II, 2 ( 1 9 3 9 ) ) 4 3 - 4 4 .

88.

Documentas

para la historia del arte en Andalucia,

VIII, 19.

ALEJO FERNANDEZ

17

church of the town of M a r c h e n a ; " 4 7 but a more recently published document 48 definitely names the church as S. Juan and gives us 1521 as a date at which he was occupied in the undertaking, since on August 26 of this year he grants power of attorney to his servant to collect an amount there owed to him in partial remuneration for the commission, upon which he states that he was then engaged. T h e smallness of the amount certainly suggests a first payment down for the job, and an assignment of his paintings at March ena to c. 1520 accords with their style. T h e mere fact that Bartolome de Castro was decorating the rood beam of the church in 1507 is far from justifying Mayer in the supposition that A l e j o was laboring upon the retable at this early period, and it is difficult to find any ground for the usual assumption that the artist's first wife died about 1512, with the corollary that he was then already devoting himself to the Marchena altarpiece. W e shall subsequently adduce unescapable proof that she was still living in 1516, and there is nothing indeed to show that she did not survive until the date of the record of payment in 1521 or that A l e j o would have contented himself with the state of single blessedness for so long an interval from 1512 until his second marriage in 1525. T h e escutcheon of the archbishop of Seville, Diego de Deza, on the predella reveals that A l e j o must have been at work upon the enterprise at least by 1523, the year of the prelate's decease, but it does not aid us in determining when he began the task, since D e z a entered upon his episcopal duties as early as 1505. T h e possibility that A l e j o may have betaken himself to Villasana de Mena to execute or at least to install his altarpieces is strengthened by the fact that in 1522 he is known to have wandered as far afield as Cuenca on some short, undefined errand; 49 but no work that can be connected with him now exists in this city where, by reason of its central situation, artists from so many schools of the peninsula, particularly from Toledo and Valencia, found patronage. One of the walls of the cafilla mayor in the episcopal palace at Cuenca is decorated with a very beautiful retable of the Madonna, Santiago, and a papal saint which is not far removed stylistically from A l e j o but which in the final analysis I have become certain that he did not paint. Indeed I 47 48 49

Gestoso, of. cit., I l l , 316. Documentos fara la historia del arte en Andalucia, Gestoso, of. cit., II, 33.

III, 5.

18

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FERNANDEZ

am convinced that its author was a new personality in the Valencian school whom I shall endeavor to define in volume X I . On January 13, 1524, Alejo took as an apprentice a Juan de Tapia, and a document of April 6, 1525, informs us that he had done a (lost) retable for the church of Sta. Maria at Manzanilla in the province of Huelva. 50 In 1526 he joined with many other Andalusian artists in the decoration of the temporary, triumphal arches erected to welcome Charles V to Seville for the celebration of his nuptials.51 We have to wait until 1527 to get another documented achievement, the retable of the large Lamentation over the Dead Christ in the chapel of Sta. Cruz in the cathedral, a work that, until the publication of the record of a payment to Alejo for the picture on July 15 of this year,52 had been attributed to Pedro Fernandez de Guadalupe because Ceän Bermiidez in his Diccionario, stating vaguely that his source was the archives of the cathedral, declared him its author. The style, however, patently demonstrates the retable to have been painted by Alejo, and, if Pedro really had anything to do with the execution, he could have been no more than an assistant allowed to reproduce servilely Alejo's manner in subordinate passages. An inscription at the base of the Lamentation agrees with the document in date and in the fact that the altarpiece was ordered by Mencia de Salazar, the widow of an Alonso Perez de Medina. At the beginning of the next year Alejo was employed by another widow, Constanza de Guzman, doing at her order a (lost) retable of unspecified themes in the Sevillian monastery of S. Pablo.53 Except for notices of his serving several times, like Correggio, as a godfather between 1533 and 1538, 54 he does not emerge again in the records until he makes his last will on March 6, 1542. 55 The earlier testaments that he had caused to be drawn up in 1523 and 1531 56 do not refer to any of his paintings. The major part of the lengthy document of 1542 consists of the most careful and thoughtful provisions for piety, charity, his family, and household, but its most precious section, to the unsentimental historian of art, is the passage to which 50 For both these references, see Documentos fara la historia del arte en IX, 21. 51 Gestoso, of. cit., II, 34. 52 Documentos fara la historia del arte en Andalucia, V I , 81. 53 Ibid., VI, 53 and 81. 54 Ibid., I, 46. 55 Gestoso, of1. cit., I l l , 314. 56 Documentos fara la historia del arte en Andalucia, V I I I , 1 9 - 2 0 .

Andalucia,

ALEJO FERNANDEZ

19

we have already referred, where he enumerates a number of works completed by him or in process of execution at the time of his first wife's decease. Inasmuch as we do not know with certainty the year of the bereavement, it is impossible to state definitely a date at which this series of works were being or had already been carried out; but we have adduced evidence above to suggest that her death took place about 1 5 2 1 rather than, as has been generally guessed, in the vicinity of 1 5 1 2 , and we shall see forthwith that it could not have occurred before 1 5 1 6 . The first of these works that he mentions, after the beam for the cathedral of Seville and the altarpiece of Marchena to which we have alluded on former pages,57 is a retable for the chapel of a recently deceased Nicolas Martinez Durango in the cathedral, parts of which Mayer has wished, with no vestige of proof, to recognize in the four panels by Alejo now distributed between the Sacristia Alta and the Sacristia de los Cälices 58 in this church. The retable could not have been begun before September 9, 1 5 1 6 , when Durango founded a benefice in the chapel,59 which at least now is dedicated to Nuestra Sefiora de la Asuncion, so that we arrive at the certainty that Alejo's first wife, Maria Fernandez, was still living at least as late as this date. Moreover, Mayer 60 points out that, since he states in his will that their eldest daughter was married during her mother's lifetime and since his own union with Maria Fernandez had been celebrated in the very last years of the fifteenth century, it is hardly possible that this first wife could have died before 1 5 1 5 . Indeed it is highly probable that her decease did not take place until shortly before October 29, 1 5 2 3 , for on this date 61 Alejo ratified the enfranchisement of a slave named Isabel which she had stipulated in her will, and he turned over to this servant certain articles bequeathed to her by his wife. The painter would not naturally have delayed a long time in carrying out such testamentary directions. Next in the list of works in Alejo's will follows a statue sent to Portugal, but this entry does not justify the belief that Alejo sometimes himself intruded into the domain of sculpture, since he may have been responsible only for the polychromy or have purchased the piece from some sculptor as the intermediary in the transaction. 57 58 59 60 61

Pp. 12 and 16. See below, p. 62 Gestoso y Perez, Sevilla monumental y artistica, II, 564. Die Sevillaner Maler schule, 2 3. Documentos fara la historia del arte en Andalucia, V I I I , 20.

20

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T h e succeeding item, a retable for the "Universidad" of Seville, is by far the most significant, documenting, as it does, the extant altarpiece in the chapel of the Colegio de Maese Rodrigo, which even on stylistic grounds may be securely adjudged to A l e j o Fernandez. T h e reference in the will must have to do with this retable, since the Colegio de Maese Rodrigo was the kernel out of which the University of Seville eventually grew. In the perplexed problems that we shall encounter in the dating of the retable, the entry in the testament establishes at least the fact that it was painted about the time of the death of Alejo's first wife, which we have just shown not to have happened before 1516 and probably not before a period just prior to 1523. Inasmuch as in the testament he states that in the year of her death he possessed money derived from the commission for the retable of the Colegio, it was either still being executed in this year or could not have been long completed. Finally there is registered for labor at a place called Sanlucar a sum so small that it can scarcely have to do with a retable but rather with some minor decorative task. Alejo's patron in this instance is denominated as the lawyer (licenciado) Ribera, in all probability the legally minded canon of the cathedral at Seville, Diego de Ribera, who emerges often in the records of the period as supervisor of artistic undertakings in the edifice and as giving commissions at Sanlucar de Barrameda, which thus, of the three towns entitled Sanlücar in Andalusia, would be the one of the painter's activity. On February 7, 1543, 62 A l e j o both added a codicil to his will and also, in another document, ceded to the painter Juan de Mayorga his rights to participation in a retable and rood beam for the church of Santiago at Jerez de la Frontera which he had contracted to execute in collaboration with other artists. In each instance he is described as too ill to affix his signature, but he recovered at least in so far that he is mentioned on M a y 5, 1544, 63 as engaged, together with Cristobal de Cardenas, in painting a (lost) retable for the high altar of the church of S. Pedro at Seville and as receiving payments for this work until March 24, 1545, the last date on which he is recorded in the land of the living. H e must have died by M a y 2 1 , 1 5 4 6 , when one of the small bequests of his will was paid, and in various financial Gestoso, Ensayo de un diccionario, etc., I l l , 322. F o r this and the i m m e d i a t e l y f o l l o w i n g facts, see G i m e n e z F e r n a n d e z , of. end of his discussion of A l e j o ' s life. 62

63

cit.,

ALE JO FERNANDEZ matters of the year 1550 widow. 65 2.

64

21

Catalina de Aviles is denominated as his

H i s S I G N E D OR D O C U M E N T E D W O R K S

It is fortunate that what is in all probability the earliest example of this class of works should be not merely a single panel but an entire, though small, retable, furnishing us with a fairly ample outlook upon the master's style. The monument with which we thus first have to do is the altarpiece of Our Lady that until the fire of 1936 existed on the right side of the nave in the church of Sta. Ana at Villasana de Mena but is now preserved only in photographs, and we have already had occasion to observe that our factual information, however scant, combines with the internal evidence of the paintings themselves to suggest a date in the immediate vicinity of 1500. W e shall eventually propose the possibility that Alejo began as an illuminator, and, inasmuch as the Villasana altarpiece fails to reveal the precision of a miniaturist to quite such a degree as even another large painting in a group of unsigned and undocumented works that we shall assign to his beginnings at Cordova, 1 it may slightly postdate his earliest extant productions. T h e subject of the principal compartment was the Madonna of the Milk adored by two angels leaning from behind the throne on its arms (Fig. 1 ) , and the signature appeared on the pavement at the centre of the bottom of the panel, Alexo Frns. 2 The iconographic type was probably suggested by the cult-figure of the Virgen de los Remedios in the cathedral of Seville. 3 The lateral spaces, equal in height to the chief compartment, were divided into two tiers with proportionately smaller, standing effigies of virgin martyrs, Sts. Barbara and Cecilia in the upper tier at left and right respectively, and Sts. Agatha and Agnes correspondingly placed at the lower level (Fig. 2). 4 A kind of predella was constituted by the Latin words, in 64

Documenta para la historia del arte en Andalucia, V I , 70 and 82. As a final but inconclusive reference to Alejo's production we may register the fact that Gestoso (Sevilla monumental y artistica, II, 484) states to have existed until the end of the eighteenth century in the chapel of S. Andres in the cathedral a retable said to have been our master's creation. 1 See below, p. 58 2 Alexo is the older spelling for Alejo, and Frns an abbreviation of Fernandes, the earlier form for Fernandez. 3 See my vol. I l l , p. 3 1 4 . 4 St. Cecilia carried only the non-distinctive emblems of a book and a palm, but was identified by inscriptions beside her and in her halo. St. Agatha, as customarily, displayed her breasts on a plate, but with very direct (Spanish?) naturalism there 65

FIG. I. ALEJO FERNANDEZ. MADONNA AND ANGELS, CENTRE OF RETABLE. FORMERLY IN STA. ANA, VILLASANA DE ΜΕΝΑ (From Angulo's monograph on the -painter)

ALEJO FERNANDEZ

23

Gothic script, used in the modern Roman Breviary for the responsory after the eighth lesson of the third nocturn for the feast of the Circumcision and beginning, "Nesciens mater virgo virum peperit sine dolore."

Fic. 2. A L E J O F E R N A N D E Z . STS. B A R B A R A A N D AGNES, SECTIONS OF R E T A B L E . F O R M E R L Y IN S T A . ANA, V I L L A S A N A D E Μ Ε Ν Α {Photo. Archivo Regional,

Burgos)

The general tendency has been to consider Alejo Fernandez too largely a mere product of Flemish and Italian influences 5 but the fundamental fact about him is that, like Pedro Berruguete, he began were two openings in her dress over her bosom to reveal that they had been amputated. In addition to her regular iconographic companion, the lamb, St. Agnes held conspicuously in the fingers of her right hand the unusual attribute of a ring, as in a panel by Antonio de Comontes in S. Pedro at Avila: see my vol. IX, p. 294.

24

ALEJO

FERNANDEZ

as little else than a continuer of the indigenous, Hispano-Flemish style of the second half of the fifteenth century and actually remained partly true to this tradition until the end, although, living to a more advanced moment of the Cinquecento, he gradually modified his basic manner to a further degree than Berruguete in the directions both of an increasing indebtedness to the Flemish achievements of the Renaissance and of greater freedom and a loosened technique. It is, of course, the Andalusian phase of the Hispano-Flemish style that he perpetuated. There was a long history in Seville behind his composition of an unusually broad triangle for the Madonna and Child at Villasana, and her mantle is diapered in a peculiarly Andalusian mode, consisting, not of a continuous brocade, but adorned with a single, large gold figure repeated at intervals upon the background of the cloth. The precedent that most readily suggests itself is Juan Sanchez de Castro's Virgen de Gracia, but the Cordovan school also had been fond of these vast spreads of Flemish drapery and ostentatious, patterned stuffs. T h e addiction of Spanish mediaeval painting to the decorative effects obtained by the insertion of formal expanses of brilliant brocades and golden fabrics persists also in St. Agnes's bodice and in the auric textile constituting the back of the throne 5 but such adornment of a sacred personage's throne was by no means unknown in the Flemish and Italian schools. It is a serious question whether the increase of suavity in the types of Our Lady, the angels, and virgin martyrs beyond Hispano-Flemish standards is provoked at this early date in Alejo's career by an admiration for Italian art of the Renaissance and for the work of those Flemish painters whose manner at the time was being softened by breezes from Italy, or whether the change was not rather an aspect of the general alleviation of asperity that was occurring about 1500 spontaneously in the production of many masters throughout the Iberian peninsula.5 The women painted by Pedro Fernandez de Cordoba 6 would require only the slightest relaxation in order to be transformed into Alejo's maidens 5 but, be it said at once, no works of Alejo supply indubitable evidence that he owed anything to the lessons of Cordovan rather than Sevillian teachers.7 It is also a ticklish matter to determine whether at this first stage in his development he knew more of north-European painting than 5 6

See above, p. 3. Vol. V , p. 66.

7

See below, pp. 4.7 and 5 1 .

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what had sifted into the immediately antecedent Hispano-Flemish manner. He exhibits a proficient and entirely delightful control over the delicacy of Flemish technique in color, as especially in the rendering of St. Barbara's and St. Cecilia's red draperies, but by virtue of his innate talents he might have evolved this ability through an examination of the many pictures imported from the Low Countries, if not into Andalusia,8 at least into other sections of the peninsula and through familiarity with the Flemish methods that long since had been ingrained in the Spanish school, attaining great heights of dexterity in Alejo's Cordovan forerunner, Bermejo. Diego Angulo 9 stresses, in my opinion wrongly, 10 his general indebtedness to Quentin Matsys, but in any case he would not, I gather, wish to discern it here at the beginning of Alejo's artistic life. By about 1500 Matsys had not yet perfected a distinctive and highly individual style that would inspire imitation, and it would be difficult to discover factors in the Villasana retable that could be traced to his inspiration. If we must seek a non-Spanish source in the school of the Low Countries for the transmutation of Hispano-Flemish harshness into more radiant types of femininity, it would be preferable to choose Gerard David as the fountain-head. Certainly one can lay his finger upon nothing in the retable or indeed elsewhere in Alejo's output that could be called so specifically Teutonic as to justify the theory that he was born in Germany or was from the first conversant with German art. 11 The composition of the Madonna enthroned between two or more angels is frequent throughout the history of the Flemish school and the various schools of Italy, but the place where it most finds a home in just the form that it occurs in the Villasana retable, with the angels leaning over the arms of the throne or the parapet upon which she sits, is Umbria. To realize this fact, one need only thumb through the illustrations in volume X I V of Van Marie's Italian Schools of Painting, stopping especially, for example, over the works of Matteo da Gualdo or Pintoricchio's painting in the Collection of Lord Crawford at London. 12 Both Von Loga 13 and Angulo 14 recognize in Alejo 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

See above, p. 4. Archivo espanol de arte y arqueologia, V I ( 1 9 3 0 ) , 244. See below, p. 64. See above, p. 1 1 . Fig·. 1 6 7 on p. 256 of Van Marie's volume X I V . Die Malerei in Spanien, 90. Archivo espanol de arte y arqueologia, V I ( 1 9 3 0 ) , 245.

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Fernandez a debt to Pintoricchio, and we shall eventually come upon other factors in his art that point in this direction. 15 It is perhaps possible to discover additional Umbrian elements. If, for instance, a tendency to a certain freciosite of gesture, as in the Sts. Cecilia and Agatha, is not an innate quality of A l e j o himself, it may be derived from Perugino's somewhat mannered elegance. In the Madonna and virgin martyrs there exists a kind of facial resemblance to the types of the Venetian Alvise Vivarini and in the case of Our Lady even to those of Bartolommeo Vivarini; but the correspondence may be fortuitous, and the partial analogy to Venetian color could be explained by the great influence exercised in the school of Venice by the Flemish strain in Antonello da Messina. Nothing in the Villasana retable conclusively substantiates the theory of Alejo's familiarity with the achievements of Venice championed by Bertaux and Mayer, but we shall subsequently find that his triptych at Saragossa practically demonstrates contact, however little determinative, with the art of this Italian centre. It is perhaps not necessary to go farther afield than the earliest Spanish adaptations of Italian architecture of the Renaissance to account for the Madonna's throne, but we shall discover other, pretty definite examples of his admiration for Venetian buildings. She recalls Antonello's Virgin in the altarpiece at Messina, but this is only because both masters appropriated the Flemish triangular breadth of drapery and because independently they superimposed the technique of the L o w Countries upon lovely specimens of humanity. T h e hypothesis of an apprenticeship amidst the Flemish influences prevalent in the school of Naples, where in all probability Antonello and perhaps Alejo's Cordovan predecessor, Bermejo, were educated, 16 need not be called into service in order to solve the problem of Alejo's own origins, since at his later date Italianism was already sufficiently naturalized in Spain to explain what knowledge of it he possessed in his first achievements and in its fusion with the north-European strain. W e cannot elicit from the works of Alejo's beginnings the absolute proof that he had enjoyed the advantage of submersion in the life-giving streams of Italian art, but, if he had already been in the sister peninsula, Umbria seems the likely region for his most fruitful, Italian experience and would supply quite as good a reason 15 16

See below, pp. 44, 61, and 91. See my vols. IV, p. 55, and V, 221 ff.

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as Flemish painting of the turn of the fifteenth into the sixteenth century for whatever increased idealization and formal beauty of his personages we refuse to elucidate as a natural and spontaneous evolution. 17 "In 'volume V 18 I suggested that Bermejo may have owed some slight debt to the school of Portugal, and the Marques de Lozoya 19 would wish to find a much more tangible dependence upon this school in Bermejo's successor at Cordova, A l e j o Fernandez. There is, however, nothing in Portuguese painting prior to the sixteenth century that is reflected in Alejo's early period and so could be regarded as a formative influence upon him, and we shall discover 20 objections to the Spanish critic's theory when applied even to the master's subsequent production. It really makes no significant difference what his sources were, for he merged them into a unified manner unmistakably his own, and he realized one of the essential qualities of any true artist, the creation of a definitely individual style. Alejo's works are so imbued with his distinctive personality that they are never very difficult to spot. H e was also endowed with the energy to develop, as we shall see, the still almost primitive manner illustrated by the signed Villasana retable into the freer modes of the later Renaissance. If we comprise within our survey the whole of Europe at the time, to claim for his achievements the adjective "great" would be absurd, but he easily takes rank with those secondary masters whose endowments are best described by the after all flattering adjective "competent," who now and then surprise us with powers of invention, and who are thoroughly equal to the honest profession to which they set themselves as craftsmen of religious art. H e does not lose by comparison with his most eminent rivals in other parts of Spain, with Pedro Berruguete, Juan de Borgofia, or Paolo da San Leocadio. Eventually in a certain number of his works he was to evolve larger and more varied potentialities than the Villasana altarpiece reveals, but his basic nature seems to have been 1 7 I am sure that T o r m o himself w o u l d no l o n g e r hold to the opinion that he expressed in 1902 in his Desarrollo de la fintura esfanola del siglo XVI ( p . 3 8 ) to the effect that A l e j o acquired his Italianism t h r o u g h an apprenticeship w i t h the cont e m p o r a r y Italian w o r k e r in faience at Seville, Francesco Niculoso of Pisa, w h o in style is indebted to Flemish art of the e a r l y sixteenth century but bears no other relation to our master. 18 IQ 20

Pp. 2 1 5 - 2 1 6 . Historia del arte hisfänico, See b e l o w , pp. 38 and 64.

I I I , 290.

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a tranquil one which neither at his beginnings nor even in the majority of his later creations cared to impart strong emotion to postures and gestures or intense expressiveness to countenances. The only very definite emotional reactions that one experiences in looking at the general run of his works are the impressions of a not very profound mysticism and of a perhaps somewhat excessive sweetness in which he joins hands, as an outstanding exponent, with the long line of local artists who led to the culminating embodiment of this typically Sevillian quality by Murillo. The gentle musings with which he invested his personages, particularly the feminine saints, may emanate entirely from his own nature, despite the fact that the Italians of the Quattrocento 21 gave to such mystic melancholy its highest and loveliest manifestation. Among his works certified by signature or document and preserved to us, the next capacious achievement is the retable in the only remaining original part of the Colegio de Maese Rodrigo at Seville, the chapel, which in our biography of the artist we have found to be authenticated through an entry in his will of 1542. A date for the retable about the time of his first wife's death is established by the entry, but it has appeared in our previous discussion that unfortunately we cannot fix the year of her death any more accurately than surely not earlier than 1 5 1 6 and in all probability immediately anterior to 1523. Just when in the region of these dates Alejo did the altarpiece, the facts that can be amassed in regard to the history of the chapel do not conclusively determine, and critics have disagreed somewhat about the chronological light that the internal evidence of the paintings throws upon the problem. The Colegio or Seminario 22 was founded by Rodrigo Fernandez de Santaella as an institution for the education of youths under clerical auspices. The building was already under construction in 1508, and indeed the chapel the altar of which is decorated by the retable was consecrated as early as 1506. The language of the account of the consecration 23 appears to imply that an altar was improvised for the function, suggesting therefore that the present altar and its retable had not yet been made. Santaella died in 1509, and, although he is represented in the principal compartment as donor holding a model 21

See below, p. 44. It is sometimes called the Seminario because from 1 8 4 8 - 1 9 0 0 served as the Seminario Conciliar. 23 Gestoso, Sevilla monumental y arttstica, I I I , 30. 22

the institution

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of the edifice, there is nothing to prove that it is not a posthumous portrait. Gimenez Fernandez 24 adduces as partial proof that the present retable was executed subsequently to the founder's death the considerations that in his will he specifically provides for the transfer of another altarpiece, which was in his oratory, to the chapel of the Colegio and that in this document even the masonry of the chapel is mentioned as not yet completed. It is just possible that this other altarpiece was a Byzantine Madonna which we shall find Alejo to have eventually incorporated in his retable, and, if perchance such was indeed the case, he could not have made or at least terminated the retable by 1509. If the description of the chapel in 1 5 1 8 as a finished work means that it already contained its permanent retable, Mayer's supposition of 1 5 1 0 - 1 5 1 5 for the date of the paintings would be approximately correct} but Angulo definitely believes that the death of Alejo's first wife did not occur before the period 1 5 2 0 - 1 5 2 3 and thus chooses the vicinity of 1 5 2 0 for the time of the altarpiece's execution. So far as I can trust my analysis of the stylistic evidence, I should be disposed to push the date into the region rather of Angulo's proposal than of Mayer's. T h e reason that the retable at first sight might seem a somewhat early creation is that Alejo was required to confine it almost solely to separate effigies of sacred personages, timehonored subjects, in which, as the guardafolvos even of the probably later altarpiece at Marchena show us, he naturally clung to the externals of the older methods ·, but the breadth of manner in the masculine saints and the nature of their countenances appear to me to embody a considerable step beyond the signed altarpiece at Villasana towards the H i g h Renaissance, just as the increased sjumatezza points in the same direction. T h e theme of the principal panel is one of the many, later adaptations of the popular, frescoed cult-figure of the cathedral, the Virgen de la Antigua. 2 5 Santaella, in the old-fashioned, diminutive size to which donors in works of art were still sometimes reduced, kneels in the lower right corner, carrying not only the model of the scholastic building but also a banderole with the inscription from I Chronicles, X X I X , 14, " T u a sunt omnia, et quae de manu tua accepimus, dedimus tibi." According to a frequent tendency in the iconography of the retable to emphasize the character of the institution as a centre of 24 25

Of. cit. Vols. I l l , p. 2 9 8 ; V I , p. 6 5 1 ; and b e l o w , p. 2 7 3 .

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studies, the four flanking compartments contain standing figures of the early Fathers or Doctors of the Church, from left to right Ambrose, Gregory, Augustine, and Jerome. Angulo has pointed out that, although they are divided from one another, A l e j o has endeavored to bring them together in unity by conceiving the architectural backgrounds and the pavements as if they were one, continuous expanse merely interrupted by partitions. T h e central piece in the upper tier of the retable displays the scene of Pentecost, with the Virgin, according to the usual Spanish composition, exalted among the Apostles. It finds a prominent place, of course, in the decoration of an educational foundation because of the H o l y Spirit's gifts of wisdom and intelligence. T h e lateral compartments are here occupied by figures of saints also partially unified by a consistent architectural setting, Gabriel and Michael closest to the representation of Whitsunday and Peter and Paul in the outermost sections (Fig. 3). T h e predella aligns another array of sacred personages, now in half length. Next to the tabernacle appear Christ of the Passion and an objet de fiete that had belonged to Rodrigo de Santaella, a panel of a Byzantine or ItaloByzantine Madonna. T h e four other saints in the predella, labelled in their haloes, are, from left to right, Thomas Aquinas, Isidore, Catherine of Alexandria, and Nicholas. T h e introduction of St. Thomas, the great theologian and philosopher, is again due to the institution's dedication to the purposes of learning. H e is distinguished by several of his regular attributes,26 the chain and pendant, the miniature, ecclesiastical edifice as a symbol that he is a Doctor of the Church (the rays with which he illumines it here very curiously and materialistically taking the form of three prongs projecting from a handle), and the host and chalice neatly combined with the little edifice as visible within its portal on an altar. St. Catherine graces the assemblage probably because she also is a patroness of erudition. Even before the fact of the retable's documentation was realized, the attribution to A l e j o had been pretty generally championed, and such a very cautious scholar as Angulo 27 has now definitely abandoned his doubts. Indeed it seems to me utterly impossible even on internal evidence to question for a moment Alejo's authorship. In the midst of the ubiquitous and entire conformity with his style and V o l . I X , p. 36. See his article in the Anales de la Universidad Hisfalense, II, 2 ( 1 9 3 9 ) , 46, η. i , and his m o n o g r a p h on A l e j o published by the L a b o r a t o r i o de A r t e at Seville in 1 9 4 6 , p. 14. 26

27

FIG. 3. A L E J O F E R N A N D E Z . STS. G A B R I E L A N D PAUL, SECTIONS OF R E T A B L E . COLEGIO D E M A E S E RODRIGO, S E V I L L E (Photo. Archivo

Mas)

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methods, I will register a few of the most telling identities in types in the Villasana altarpiece and in some of his other authenticated works. T h e Gabriel displays a countenance that, reappearing constantly throughout his production, goes back as early as the maiden kneeling before the flagellated Christ in a panel that we shall ascribe to him with surety in the Cordovan Museum. St. John in the Pentecost belongs to the kind of serenely handsome youth of whom we shall note many examples, finding his absolute double in the representation of this Apostle in the Marchena Transfiguration. The features used for the adaptation of the Virgen de la Antigua are very similar to those of the Villasana Madonna, and the Child has a counterpart in the Infant of the Purification, one of his series of paintings in the cathedral that we shall eventually discuss. The central angel above Our Lady is the same celestial spirit who unites Sts. Joachim and Anne in the panel of the series that depicts the Meeting at the Golden Gate. The St. Catherine of the predella should be compared with the figures, at Marchena, of this martyr and of the Magdalene. For the Sts. Ambrose, Gregory, Augustine, and Isidore and, to a certain extent, for Mary in the Pentecost, a sort of face is employed that is always emerging in Alejo's subsequent achievements, as in the Virgen de la Rosa in the church of Sta. Ana de Triana at Seville. It is not only the retention of the ancient motif of single sacred effigies, probably at the request of the donor or his executors, that creates the illusion of a date earlier than the actual one. Although the architectural settings in the paintings embody everywhere the severer ideals of the High Renaissance in contrast to Plateresque modes (despite the carved, late Gothic frames for the panels), in no other work has Alejo adhered so profusely to the mediaeval Spanish passion for the spreading of expanses of gold, in all likelihood again by reason of the traditional character of the retable's themes and perhaps at Santaella's express desire. The garments of the Virgin and Child are of solid, patterned gold (in imitation of the like encasement of the original Virgen de la Antigua); the outer vestments of all the Fathers except St. Jerome and of Sts. Isidore and Nicholas in the predella are brocaded in the precious material 5 conspicuous plaques of diapered gold accent the architecture against which all of the standing saints, save Michael, are relieved; and in every compartment of the predella except that of the Byzantine Madonna the similar backgrounds are extended over the whole spaces. The retable

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provides one of the finest examples to illustrate the supremacy of the Spaniards in the quality of their gold and in the inimitable skill with which they tooled it. T h e nature of the subjects also permitted the master to maintain the satisfying composure and the lovely types of humanity which, I believe, were more congenial to his nature than the sharper and more ambitious manner of Marchena. T h e Gabriel must be set among the most rapturous realizations of his serene ideals, a figure in which the dullness that might result from placidity is avoided by the animated and yet monumental swirls of drapery. As one of Alejo's few, certain excursions into the field of portraiture, the representation of Rodrigo de Santaella has special interest. Although probably working here merely from his memory of the deceased donor's features or from others' descriptions, he has endowed his personage with a distinct individuality, somewhat more incisive than in the cases of the presumptive Matienzo whom we shall find in his second retable at Villasana and of the cleric kneeling beside the Madonna in the archiepiscopal palace at Seville. 28 Portraits, however, were not entirely his sphere, and in this aspect of his profession he yields slightly both to Pedro Berruguete and to Juan de Borgona. T h e next evolution in his style is most comprehensively embodied in the documented retable at Marchena. W e have seen that the records do not specify just what his contributions to the enterprise were, but internal evidence here comes to our aid, revealing him as the author of all the paintings, although, as always in such large undertakings in Spain of the Gothic period and Renaissance, we have to take account of assistants who merely echoed the manner of the head of the shop. In mentioning the retable briefly in volume I V / 9 I too readily, without more ado, accepted the judgment of certain other critics in assigning the eight narrative panels to the Flemish school and only the six sacred effigies on the guardafolvos, because of their more indigenous character, to A l e j o Fernandez, but, in my renewed and more intensive study of Andalusian art for the present volume, the absolute conformity of the types and methods in the narrative panels with his standards has entirely convinced me that Gimenez Fernandez 30 and, in his first opinion, 31 Diego Angulo were right in claiming for him 28 29 30 31

See below, p. 76. P. 32. Of. cit. Anales de la Universidad

Hisfalense,

II, 2 ( 1 9 3 9 ) , 48 ff.

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these sections as well. In his ultimate pronouncement Angulo 32 hesitates, and, reverting to my former idea, would not be loath to ascribe the narrative sections to some Fleming, who, however, had considerably adapted himself to Andalusian pictorial fashions; but I myself am now fully persuaded of the exact converse, i.e., that A l e j o Fernandez is the painter but that in this later stage of his development he has undergone the influence of Antwerp mannerism. T h e documentation would then cover not only the guardafolvos but also the narrative panels, and on a former page we have amassed arguments for a dating of his whole activity at Marchena in the neighborhood of the year 1520. Parts of the retable were entrusted to a sculptor's craft, in the centre at different levels statues of the Virgin and the saint to whom the church is dedicated, John Baptist, and a kind of predella divided into reliefs that have to do with the H o l y Infancy. Of Alejo's eight painted panels in the body of the structure, five take their themes from the life of Christ, the Circumcision, Flight into Egypt, Marriage at Cana, Temptation, and Transfiguration. A sixth scene, the Baptism, is an event in which both the Saviour and St. John participated, and the Baptist definitely emerges as the protagonist in the last two compartments, one depicting his delivery of a sermon and the other his decapitation (Fig. 4). On the guardafolvos A l e j o placed at the left three canonized men, Christopher, Sebastian, and Lawrence, and at the right the Magdalene, Catherine, and Barbara. T h e eight narrative panels of the Marchena retable prove that in the interval since his early creations A l e j o had experienced an effective acquaintance with the paintings of his contemporaries, the Antwerp mannerists, whereas the subjects of the altarpiece of Maese Rodrigo, like the figures on the Marchena guardafolvos, were not of a character to call into play the evidence for such Flemish contacts; and it is the partial stylistic alteration exhibited by the eight panels that has misled students into a failure to recognize his handicraft. It was Angulo who with his customary keenness of perception and breadth of knowledge discerned and stressed the relationship to the school of Antwerp, and he leaves little to add to his analysis of the panels from this standpoint. In the matter of composition, the pivotal scene that he uses to establish beyond peradventure the dependence 3 2 In his m o n o g r a p h on A l e j o published by the L a b o r a t o r i o de A r t e at Seville in 1 9 4 6 , p. 25.

FIG. 4. ALEJO FERNANDEZ. DECAPITATION OF ST. JOHN BAPTIST, SECTION OF RETABLE. S. JUAN, MARCHENA (Photo.

Archivo

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upon the Antwerp mannerists is the decapitation of the Baptist, which reproduces so closely the version of the theme in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum at Berlin by the so-called Pseudo-Blesius as to leave no doubt whatsoever that Alejo knew and appreciated the picture or some Flemish or Spanish replica. Angulo also notes such details taken over from this phase of the school of the Low Countries as the rugged and eery trunk of a tree in the foreground of the scene of the Baptist's sermon, probably derived from the featuring of such wild and knotted growths by another mannerist, Jan de Cock. Alejo's adoption of the Antwerp artists' specific peculiarities of physique and costume are likewise tabulated by Angulo — the tendency to attenuation of form, the stylization of masculine legs into affected lines, the men's gaunt, bony countenances, the fondness for high foreheads, the spidery hands, the ribbons nervously fluttering from the women's headdresses, and the metallic ornaments as fringes on various parts of their garments. In the earlier works of Alejo that admit landscape, we find the paramount concern with the figures permitting only small vistas of country, which, however, reveal a charming appreciation of natural beauty. The creations of Juan Correa de Vivar and Francisco de Comontes contain views similar to those which he unfolds to us as a younger artist. In the Marchena retable, however, landscape assumes much greater importance and space in the scenes, with a consequent reduction of the size of the figures enacting the narrative and a partial approximation to the Giorgionesque ideal of an equal significance for the story and its setting. It is hard to believe that this change also did not take place under the influence of the Antwerp mannerists. Angulo sees in the nature of the landscapes a continuing dependence upon Quentin Matsys; but this Flemish master rarely gives to backgrounds such prominence, and even in their very character Alejo's landscapes at Marchena seems to find in the Antwerp mannerists closer parallels. For one thing, they provide precedent for his love of exotic buildings in his paintings, if we refuse to interpret this idiosyncrasy merely as a spontaneous expression of his own artistic leanings. We shall discover in many of his works even a predominant concern with architectural settings which almost makes of him, mutatis mutandis, an Andalusian Piero della Francesca, and the occasional obtrusion of bizarre buildings would be only one phase of this interest. A conspicuous example at Marchena is the polygonal edifice meant to represent the Jewish

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Temple in the compartment of the Temptation. The main episode in the foreground is Satan's proposal that Christ turn the stones to bread; further back on the summit of a rock, in the smaller size demanded by the perspective, we see the devil offering Him "all the kingdoms of the world" in vain hope of homage; and in the still more remote distance two very tiny and dimmed forms on the topmost pinnacle of the Temple recall to us the Saviour's third ordeal in the Temptation, the exhortation to cast Himself down in reliance upon divine mercy. A very similar, fantastic building is apparently likewise meant to be the Temple inside the circuit of the walls of what probably, with a disregard of geography, represents the city of Jerusalem in the background of the Baptism. In corresponding fashion there is featured in the landscape of St. John's sermon a strange edifice that looks like a Christian church with a very unstructural, two-storied fagade. Upon the terrace that elevates it above the water, among other figures in diminished scale the resurrected Lord receives St. Peter walking upon the water of the Jordan as if it were the Sea of Tiberias. A queer, somewhat analogous architectural pile rises in the setting of a work by the Pseudo-Blesius at least now actually in Spain, the left wing of his triptych in the Prado. The episodes standing forth in the landscape of the Marchena Flight into Egypt are the commonly represented scene of the farmer deceiving the Holy Family's pursuers 33 and the rarer incident (for which, however, there is warrant in the apocryphal gospels) of the idol's collapse on their arrival in the foreign country. All the affinities with the Antwerp mannerists enumerated in the last paragraphs must have constantly stirred in the mind of the reader the question whether Alejo could have acquired them without a sojourn in Flanders subsequent to his prior achievements. The connection with Flemish mannerism is so much more tangible in the Marchena retable than it is with the somewhat earlier style of the Low Countries in the Villasana altarpiece that this later visit to northern Europe becomes more of a likelihood, and yet it is by no means incredible that Alejo should have culled the distinguishing qualities of the Antwerp fashions from the many examples imported into the peninsula and from the exponents of these pictorial fashions who by reason of the popularity of their wares actually found employment within the limits of Spain itself. Since the ultimate provenience of the Berlin decapita33

Vol. IV, p. 188.

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tion of the Baptist by the Pseudo-Blesius has not been discovered, he might not have been obliged to betake himself to the Low Countries to see it. W e have rejected 34 the Marques de Lozoya's hypothesis of Portuguese affiliations, so far as Alejo's beginnings are concerned, but, inasmuch as the contemporary school of Portugal was permeated with Antwerp mannerism, the question is again raised when we have now come to the later modifications of his style. Some kind of connection with Portugal is definitely proved by his dispatch of a statue to this country,35 but, since Antwerp mannerism does not seem to have entered the Portuguese school prior to its appearance in Alejo, it may very well have intruded into both Seville and Portugal independently and without interinfluence. The Portuguese painter who created types somewhat similar to those of Alejo's late period is the Master of Santa Autaj but, on the other hand, this Master reveals few or no traces of Antwerp mannerism, and the vague resemblances between the two artists may easily be fortuitous. The not very significant problem of his travels and foreign contacts thus remains as insoluble at this moment in his career as at its start. His further acquaintance with the architecture of the Renaissance manifest in the Marchena retable he could have obtained in Spain itself or from the settings of the Flemish painters of the period, and certainly no element in the retable necessitates the assumption that he had made a second trip to Italy after an earlier residence there which is itself at least to some degree hypothetical. Despite the alteration that has taken place in his manner, the links with his earlier works are by no means absent. The affiliations would be clearer and more numerous if we took into account at this point the paintings authenticated only by style; but our discussion of the altarpiece of Maese Rodrigo has already brought out a number of identities, and even the evidence supplied in the Villasana panels, limited though it be because of their themes, leaves no doubt that we have to do with the same master in the narrative scenes at Marchena. The heads of the two angels framing the central Madonna at Villasana are so nearly reproduced in those of the pair in the Baptism that they all could have issued only from the brush of a single artist, and to this facial category there belong also the Virgin and kneeling handmaid 34 35

See above, p. 27 See above, p. 19.

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in the Circumcision, the St. John Evangelist 3 6 in the Marriage at Cana, and the Christ of the Transfiguration. In this last compartment the St. John reasserts the ideal beauty of the St. Barbara at Villasana. It was perhaps possible to discern the beneficent influence of Gerard David in the earlier altarpiece, and both the composition of the Baptism at Marchena and the type of Christ so closely reiterate David's version at the centre of the triptych in the Bruges Museum as to confirm the relationship unless perchance Alejo was indebted to an intermediary source. Although the connection with his beginnings emerges as thus obvious, the fundamental point about the Marchena retable is that it reveals him to have possessed the breadth to advance from the still largely primitive style of Villasana to modes that are practically those of the High Renaissance. The change was in part due to the Zeitgeist and to his sympathetic study of the Flemish Renaissance in its aspect of Antwerp mannerism, but the fact remains that he was sufficiently elastic in nature to take the pronounced stride, whereas some even of his most distinguished contemporaries, such as Juan de Borgona, scarcely ventured beyond the old paths. T o a great extent he now abandons primitive simplifications, eliminations, and conventions, and he draws, models, and uses color so as to achieve the more literal rendering of the human form and of draperies that was one of the ways in which the Cinquecento varied from the Quattrocento. The postures and gestures are more naturally and easily articulated. Even in the two angels of the principal compartment at Villasana, he seems inclined to sacrifice primitive firmness of outline to effects of sjumatezzay and this tendency is extended to many of the figures in the Marchena panels. Furthermore, he now has the hardihood to essay and solve delightfully problems that exhibit in him the very essence of a pure painter's nature. W e have already found him introducing subordinate incidents of the stories into the settings of some of the Marchena compartments, but in his concern with pictorial problems he gives the finest embodiment to this custom in the background of St. John's decapitation. In a chamber raised upon an elevated platform, with the figures diminished to the proper scale required by the distance, Herodias at the banquet table has just received the Baptist's head from her 36

T h e reason that he is here strangely the only Apostle represented in the scene may be that he alone of the Evangelists describes the event.

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daughter. Through bestowing upon the scene additional lighting by the rays of the sun streaming into the chamber from a large window at the left, Alejo has created for himself difficulties in the representation of an interior that would have engaged the eager energies of a Dutch master of the seventeenth century. Now and then, inspired by Flemish examples, the Spaniards of the fifteenth century had experimented, more or less lamely, with such representations of a space within a space, but Alejo perfects what they had tried and seizes, moreover, upon the dramatically illuminated room of Herod's feast as an opportunity for a series of subtle and beautiful effects of chiaroscuro that, prophesying Rembrandt, have been delicately analyzed by Diego Angulo. 37 In the six saints whom he set in the formal and decorative sections of the Marchena altarpiece, the guardafolvos, he naturally felt himself more bound by tradition, executing them in a style not differing much from that of his earlier period except in a certain greater ease of draughtsmanship and more illusory rendering of actuality (Fig. 5). They reveal practically none of the consciousness of Antwerp mannerism that stands forth so sharply in the narrative compartments. Almost the only detail betraying the epoch of the Renaissance is the archaeology of dressing Sebastian as the Roman soldier that he actually was instead of as the dapper young nobleman of the Middle Ages into whom Spanish art of the fifteenth century liked to transmute him. In the Christopher, on the other hand, Alejo still clings to the peculiar Sevillian iconography of the theme which had represented the saint as carrying miniature pilgrims in his belt. H e even seems to have had definitely in mind the prototype by Juan Sanchez de Castro in the church of S. Julian, 38 but he renounces the conspicuous and bold brocade with which Spanish taste of the previous century had clothed Christopher in the Sevillian retable of the Military Orders. 39 The three feminine saints embody at its loveliest and with more mature technical resources the sensibility to the beauty of women evinced in the Villasana altarpiece. The more traditional character of the figures on the guardafolvos is shown by a retention, although in a somewhat chaster aspect, of accentuation of paintings with gold. The garments 37

Anales de la Universidad Hispalense, II, 2 ( 1 9 3 9 ) , 53. Vol. V, p. 39. The painting was destroyed in 1932 by the conflagration of the church. 39 Ibid., p. 50. 38

ALEJO FERNANDEZ

41

of all of them are edged with the precious material, and it intrudes also into the hanging textiles against which they stand. Angulo seems to be right in dating somewhere between the inauguration of Alejo's residence at Seville and his activity at Marchena a

Fig. 5. A L E J O FERNANDEZ. STS. CHRISTOPHER AND M A R Y MAGDALENE, SECTIONS OF GUARDAPOLVOS OF R E T A B L E . S. JUAN, MARCHENA (Photo. Archivo Mas)

small, signed panel of St. John Baptist that he has published 40 as in an unnamed private collection at Madrid. The signature, in almost the same form as at Villasana, is inscribed on the right pier of the arch of the Renaissance in front of which the Precursor stands. Neither his gentle figure nor the pretty bit of landscape visible behind the arch 40

Anales de la Universidad Hisfalense, II, 2 ( 1 9 3 9 ) , 42.

42

ALEJO

FERNANDEZ

betray that A n t w e r p mannerism had as yet come to mean anything to the master. T h e achievement of A l e j o best known to the general public is the Virgin of the Rose on the trascoro of the church of Sta. A n a de T r i a n a at Seville ( F i g . 6 ) , signed with exactly the f o r m of his name that appears on the panel of St. John Baptist. T h e difficulty in assigning it even to an approximate date is betrayed by the fact that A n g u l o first proposed the vicinity of the year 1525

41

and subsequently placed

it among works of a prior moment in A l e j o ' s development. 4 2

The

composition, the character of the throne, and the arrangement of the Madonna's drapery are strikingly similar in the central compartment of the Villasana retable.

E v e n the two angels w h o lean over the

throne's arms are almost repeated, especially the one at the right w h o in the T r i a n a panel is conceived, with a naturalistic touch, as endeavoring to peer into the book held by the H o l y C h i l d . N o t only does A l e j o retain the broad, triangular, Flemish spread of the Virgin's mantle and embellish it with an ostentatious brocade, but he still accents the brocade with g o l d and similarly brightens the hangings both behind her and on the canopy above the throne. T h e precedents at Villasana, however, have obviously been translated into terms of a later date, and the question is, what date. T h e closest analogues in A l e j o ' s other productions for the type of O u r L a d y of the Rose emerge in the St. A n n e and the woman holding the newborn Virgin in his representation of her Birth in the Sacristia A l t a of the cathedral at Seville, a w o r k that cannot be surely placed with greater chronological accuracy than between c. 1 5 1 0 and c. 1520; and the handmaid directly at the side of the parturient St. A n n e has virtually the same face as the angel at the l e f t in the pair w h o in the T r i a n a panel draw aside the curtains above the M o t h e r . Nevertheless, one seems to feel v a g u e l y a certain, almost indefinable dryness in the picture as in the works of his last days, for instance the Virgin of the Navigators.

Even

a partial analogy may be discerned between these two representations of O u r L a d y both in the canon of the body and in countenance.

The

face of the angel at the throne's l e f t , moreover, is actually repeated in the St. John of the A g o n y in the Garden belonging to the Conde de Montseny, a work that on other grounds we must conclusively place towards the end of A l e j o ' s life. 4 3 O n e cannot, however, trust too con41 42 43

Archivo esfanol de arte y arqueologia, V I ( 1 9 3 0 ) , 246. Anales de la Universidad Hisfalense, II, 2 (1939)» 51· See below, p. 85.

FIG. 6. ALE J Ο FERNANDEZ. VIRGIN OF T H E ROSE. STA. ANA DE TRIANA, SEVILLE {Photo.

Archivo

Mas)

44

ALEJO

FERNANDEZ

fidently to one's sensibilities in tenuous matters of style such as dryness and the like, but the feeling remains sufficient to forestall unqualified agreement with a classification in the group of Alejo's first productions at Seville and to supply some substantiation for Gimenez Fernandez's proposal of the decade between 1525 and 1535. 44 The traditional nature of the subject and of its treatment would not be calculated to evoke much dependence upon Antwerp mannerism, and yet the Virgin's face and the strained emotionalism of all the angels, except the one trying to read in the Child's book, could be interpreted as under such influence. It is in connection with this painting that Angulo expresses his belief in a derivation of Alejo's mystic melancholy from Italy and especially Botticelli. There are undoubted analogies in Botticelli's works to the two angels beside the throne of the Virgin of the Rose but not exact enough, in my opinion, to demonstrate an acquaintance with the Italian master's creations. A much more intimate relationship exists between the Holy Child and Pintoricchio's representations of this figure, thus increasing the possibility that, if Alejo had been in Italy, as we already have guessed, Umbria was a region to which he was attracted. I should still wish to abide, however, by my earlier contention that the sentiment with which he imbues many of his personages may have no other source than his own temperament. The wistful musings continue, in any case, to be expressed in the same terms of the Sevillian cult of sweetness as in the retable at Villasana. The altarpiece of the Lamentation over the Dead Christ in the chapel of Sta. Cruz in the cathedral of Seville, dated in 1527 and recently documented as a work of Alejo, 45 is intimately affiliated in style with his activity at Marchena (Fig. 7). Behind the Lamentation itself there are enacted in smaller scale, quite according to the mode of Marchena, a series of related events in a landscape again like the examples in the Marchena panels, as, especially, for instance, in the Temptation. The middle of the background is occupied by the Crucifixion, with the central cross of Our Lord towering high above the others but already vacant, with the thieves still suspended, with a mounted soldier breaking the legs of the unrepentant malefactor, and with a henchman carrying down the hill of Calvary the ladder that had been employed for the Deposition. At the right takes place 44 45

Of. cit. C f . above, p. 1 8 .

FIG. 7. A L E J O F E R N A N D E Z . L A M E N T A T I O N OVER T H E D E A D CHRIST. CATHEDRAL, SEVILLE {From Mayer's "Die Sevillaner

Malerschule")

46

ALEJO FERNANDEZ

the Harrowing of Hell amidst the Antwerp mannerists' eery effects of chiaroscuro, and into the spaces at the left are inserted the episodes of the preparation of the Holy Sepulchre and the Noli me tangere. The main compartment of the predella exhibits the curious composition for the Flagellation, in the presence of a very much featured St. Peter, that was almost general in Andalusia of the period,46 and the lateral compartments are reserved for creditable kneeling portraits of the donor, Mencia de Salazar, and her deceased husband, Alonso Perez de Medina. The brushes of Alejo or his shop were called into service to decorate also the lower parts of the soffit of the arch that frames the Lamentation, where at two levels we descry on the left side Sts. Andrew and Michael and on the right Sts. James Major and Francis (receiving the stigmata). Time and an overlay of dirt have darkened the Lamentation to an unhappier degree than the predella. Angulo 47 would now like to see in this retable and in Alejo's other late works a more extensive collaboration of assistants than in his earlier period, and, trusting that Ceän Berrruidez had valid documentary grounds for ascribing the retable to Pedro Fernandez de Guadalupe,48 he thinks that this painter was Alejo's associate in the retable and that Pedro and his brothers 49 continued to execute large sections of the other commissions at the end of Alejo's life. He would wish to demonstrate the collaboration by discerning in the figures in the background of the Lamentation and in the whole predella and adornment of the framing arch a less careful craftsmanship than in the principal forms in the main body of the altarpiece; but the demands of aerial perspective would have prevented Alejo himself from defining so accurately the figures in the background, and, if the predella and arch were consigned to his atelier, as well as passages in his other last undertakings, and if he himself did not carry out such subordinate parts more hurriedly, Pedro Fernandez and the additional assistants are entirely inspired by him and dependent upon him, so that they fail to disclose any personal manner. We shall find it doubtful, moreover, whether Pedro Fernandez de Guadalupe ever possessed a style of his own. The Lamentation resembles so closely in composition the version by 46

See below, p. 5 1 . M o n o g r a p h on A l e j o published by the Laboratorio de Arte at Seville in 1 9 4 6 , pp. 20—23. 48 See above, p. 1 8 . 49 See below, p. 1 8 8 . 47

ALEJO

FERNANDEZ

47 Lisbon,50

the Andalusian painter, Bartolome Ruiz, now at that we are bound to predicate an interrelationship, whichever of the twain was the earlier. Even some of the subordinate incidents in the background appear also in the Lisbon version, the empty cross between the still hanging thieves, the group of cavaliers as participants in the Crucifixion, and Joseph of Arimathaea and Nicodemus who spread the winding sheet over the waiting tomb. If Bartolome Ruiz really came from Cordova rather than Seville, we are provided with a further suggestion that Alejo might have learned from the school also of the former city.51 The types of persons in the altarpiece of the Lamentation are so similar to those of Marchena that it hardly seems possible that six years had elapsed between the two undertakings, and yet the ancient predilections of Spanish painting persist in the gold used not only for the haloes but also for the garments' edges and, in some instances, for passages in the fabrics themselves. Progress beyond Alejo's pristine standards, nevertheless, is incorporated in the change from the still primitive nude of Christ in the Marchena Baptism to the more correct realization of a practically undraped body in the dead Saviour of the Lamentation, in whose form the master quite surprises us with an un-Spanish and almost classical sensibility to physical beauty. The latest work of Alejo Fernandez authenticated by signature or document is the little Epiphany which the Conde de la Vinaza mentions in his Additions 52 to the Dictionary of Cean Bermudez as a part of his own Collection and which now belongs to his widow at Biarritz (Fig. 8). In this case it is the signature, at the bottom of the panel beneath the first Magus's vesture, assuming precisely the abbreviated form that he had used many years before at Villasana. The types and increased sjumatezza prove that Angulo, who first formally published the picture,53 was entirely right in classifying it with the productions of the master's ultimate phase. The kneeling Wise Man, for instance, should be compared with the personage in the picture of 50 Vol. V, p. 72. In his Catalogue of the Exposition of Pinturas esfanholas dos seculos XIV, XV e XVI, Lisbon, 1940 (p. 2 0 ) , Dr. J o ä o Couto states that the picture by Ruiz entered the Museum at Lisbon from one of the extinct religious institutions of the city. If he is rightly informed, the picture can scarcely be the one from Cordova mentioned in 1893 and 1900 by Ramirez de Arellano as in the Cepero Collection at Seville, and a part of the proof for its assignment to the Cordovan school would thus collapse. 51 52 See above, p. 27. II, 189. 53 Archivo esfanol de arte y arqueologia, VI ( 1 9 3 0 ) , 241.

FIG. 8. ALEJO FERNANDEZ. EPIPHANY. COLLECTION OF THE CONDESA DE VINAZA, BIARRITZ (From Angulo's monograph on the fainter)

ALEJO FERNANDEZ

49

the Virgin of the Navigators who has arbitrarily been identified with Columbus. 54 The panel has exactly the width of the St. John Baptist in private possession at Madrid and only a slightly greater height; but the two works are widely separated in stylistic chronology, and Alejo would not have signed two parts of a single monument. 3.

T H E P O S S I B L Y D O C U M E N T E D M I N I A T U R E OF T H E

ANNUNCIATION

With one of the three illuminations that Alejo is recorded to have done in 1 5 1 4 for the cathedral, Angulo 1 tends to identify a lovely miniature of the Annunciation that has now been somewhat cut down and pasted into another of this church's choir-books to which it did not originally belong (Fig. 9). Although we may change his cautious attribution into a definite affirmative and although the style can be harmonized with the given date, we possess no certain proof that the Annunciation remains to us from the series of three rather than from some other order of the same sort with which Alejo may have been honored. The book in which he painted the triad of illuminations is described in the document as for the "feast of Jesus." If this means Christmas rather than the Transfiguration or Corpus Christi, the Annunciation would be an appropriate theme, but it would also be suitable for the feasts of the Virgin, especially Lady Day. Mary is still a very Flemish type and recalls in features the Madonna and the St. Cecilia of the signed retable at Villasana, but her nearest counterpart, among Alejo's works that we have already studied, is the Mother in the Flight into Egypt in the Marchena altarpiece. Gabriel resembles the angel at the left in the Baptism of this monument and the St. John Evangelist in the Marriage at Cana, as well as the angels who lift the curtain above the Virgen de la Rosa. The natural deduction would be that the illumination lies chronologically somewhere between Alejo's beginnings and his activity during the third decade of the sixteenth century, namely in the vicinity of 1 5 1 4 . The pretty landscape, with its street at Nazareth and its Galilean hills, has little as yet of the broad sweep that distinguishes the settings to the scenes in the Marchena retable, but the reason may be the unfitness of such grandeur to a miniature. 54 1

See below, p. 80. See above, p. 1 6 .

FIG. 9. ALEJ Ο FERNANDEZ. MINIATURE OF THE ANNUNCIATION. CATHEDRAL, SEVILLE (Photo.

Archivo

Mas)

ALEJO 4.

FERNANDEZ

H i s W O R K S AUTHENTICATED BY

51 STYLE

W e may inaugurate this category with a group of three paintings which were perhaps executed at Cordova before Alejo moved to Seville and possibly prior to the signed retable at Villasana, but they uncover no further evidence for the theory that the Cordovan, as well as the Sevillian school, meant much in his artistic education, at least so far as we know the earlier Cordovan school in the very few specimens that have survived. One of the triad still remains at Cordova, in the Museo de Bellas Artes, with a peculiar iconographic composition very popular in Andalusia of the period, in which St. Peter kneels in adoration beside the Saviour represented, according to one hagiological tradition, as tied to a column in His prison after the Flagellation (Fig. 10). 1 T h e intent may have been not only to achieve a devotional image of Christ of the Passion but also to symbolize St. Peter's repentance, and, as a matter of fact, in the right background of this Cordovan picture there is inserted in much diminished size a little scene that may depict, as certainly in other versions of the theme and of the Flagellation, 2 one of the Apostle's three denials of Our Lord. In a scale of proportion much less than that of the Redeemer and St. Peter and yet larger than in the case of the episode in the offing, two figures who have usually been interpreted as donors kneel on either side in the foreground, a young man and maiden, possibly a handsome bridal couple or perhaps rather a brother and sister. Even another personage is included, a nun on her knees close to the column, probably, because of the absence of a halo, 3 not a saint but another member of the donating family. She obtrudes a still further example of the variation in sizes throughout the picture which is one of the factors implying an early moment in Alejo's career. In view of the consideration, however, that, when he wished, he could achieve rather incisive likenesses, it is curious that he should not have sought in the three presumptive donors exact portraiture but accommodated their features to favorite types of his. Perhaps the reason was that they were 1 See in vol. I X , pp. 8 3 8 - 8 4 0 , my discussion of the Valencian treatments of the theme. 2 Compare the renderings by the St. Lazarus Master, mentioned in the last note, and by J u a n de Z a m o r a , below, p. 1 2 8 . 3 Whereas Our L o r d and St. Peter possess haloes, the y o u n g couple also lack them, and it is f o r this reason that I find it hard to believe them sacred personages. A youthf u l masculine saint, J o h n Evangelist, however, is introduced into the Valencian versions of the theme: cf. the reference to vol. I X mentioned just above.

FIG. IO. ALE J Ο FERNANDEZ. CHRIST A T T H E COLUMN. MUSEO DE BELLAS ARTES, CORDOVA (Photo. Archivo Mas)

ALEJO FERNANDEZ

53

posthumous effigies, but we must also take into account the possibility they were meant not as definite individuals but merely as representatives of various classes of worshippers. Mayer 4 guesses that the work may have been a part of the retable which Pablo de Cespedes records A l e j o to have done over the high altar in the Hieronymite monastery at Cordova. 5 T h e material upon which it is painted, cloth, would seem to preclude this supposition; but cloth might just conceivably have been used for one of the lesser retables in the monastery that Pablo de Cespedes credits to A l e j o , and the picture is large enough to have constituted alone the decoration over a subordinate altar. T h e attribution to our master imposes itself. T w o different artists could not have painted persons so nearly identical as the young masculine donor and, in the Marriage at Cana in the Marchena altarpiece, the St. John Evangelist and the foremost of the two boys who are busied with the jars of miraculous wine. T h e same Evangelist in the Marchena Transfiguration furnishes another exact parallel. Equally convincing counterparts to the young and beautiful woman we can discover both early and later in Alejo's career, the St. Barbara, for instance, in the Villasana retable, the Gabriel in the altarpiece of Maese Rodrigo, and the kneeling handmaid in the Marchena Circumcision. If we extend our vista to include works that on subsequent pages we shall confidently claim for Alejo, many other telling analogues emerge. T h e nun is like the St. Anne in the panel at Dublin; and even the central figure of Christ vividly suggests the St. Christopher in the second retable at Villasana. T h e probability is that the picture was painted before Villasana began to engage his activities. T h e style seems in general more cramped and primitive, despite the ideal comeliness of the two youthful donors, and the draperies, such as the nun's habit or the sleeves of the girl's dress and of St. Peter's tunic, are truer to the modes of the Flemish folds of the fifteenth century. T h e Apostle's mantle exhibits a characteristic Andalusian brocaded pattern, 6 and the diapered figure is rendered in raised stucco, whereas in the similar design on the Madonna's robe in the signed retable at Villasana the embossing is abandoned. T h e opulent architectural setting of the Renaissance has been taken as evidence that A l e j o had already been in Italy, but, although the details, especially the frieze of futti and of fantastic 4 5

Second Spanish edition of his Geschichte, See above, p. 9.

1 9 4 2 , p. 202. 6

See above, p. 24

54

ALEJO

FERNANDEZ

monsters and the inlay of varied marbles, are very definitely reminiscent of Venetian buildings of the Quattrocento, we cannot state categorically that he could not have seen such ornamentation in Spain. In view, however, of the much more certain traces of a Venetian sojourn in a work by him that we shall soon examine, it is indeed likely that in the background of the figure of the Flagellated Christ he was recalling Venetian edifices. It is of much more significance that at the very beginning of his career, perhaps even before the end of the fifteenth century and prior to his first commission in Villasana, we find that he actually does use architecture of the Renaissance, from whatever source he derived it, thus as a young man already sympathizing with the new tendencies. We must next register, as an indubitable work of Alejo 7 and as belonging to just the phase of his development incorporated in the painting of the Flagellated Saviour, a small panel of the Anna selbdritt now in the National Gallery at Dublin (Fig. 1 1 ) . If the escutcheon at the front of the dais on which the three sacred personages are placed has been rightly recognized as that of one of the sons of the Gonzalo Fernandez de Cordoba who was the earliest lord of Estrella la Alta, near Cordova, 8 we are provided with further confirmation that Alejo executed this group of pictures before his establishment at Seville. Entire conformity with his general manner and with his types takes the place of a signature. It is not necessary to bore the reader with an enumeration of the many obvious analogues for the Madonna among his virginal figures. The closest affinities to the Child we shall find in the Infant carried by St. Christopher in the second retable at Villasana. The St. Anne, who is still reminiscent of certain of Roger van der Weyden's ladies, should be compared with 7 T h e attribution is questioned by A n g u l o in his monograph on A l e j o published by the Laboratorio de A r t e at Seville in 1 9 4 6 , p. 1 3 . 8 F o r the probability of this identification, see the Catalogue of the Exhibition of Sfanish Old Masters at the Grafton Galleries, London, 1 9 1 3 — 1 9 1 4 , p. 1 9 . T w o of the quarters on the shield certainly embody the arms of the huge Fernandez de Cordoba family, but, since this family was scattered over all western Spain, the escutcheon in the picture would not necessarily localize the work in Cordova or its province, unless the charge on the other two quarters belongs to a branch there resident. Despite my efforts, I have not been able to v e r i f y the suggestion in the above-mentioned Catalogue that we have to do here with the shield of the Estrella branch of the Fernandez de Cordoba family. So far as chronology goes, one of the sons of the first lord of Estrella would suit the situation, since the father did not die until before 1 4 8 0 : cf. F . Fernandez de Bethencourt, Historia genealogica y heräldica de la monarquia esfanola, VIII, 318.

FIG. I I . ALEJO FERNANDEZ. ANNA SELBDRITT. GALLERY, DUBLIN (Photo. Sfarkes)

NATIONAL

56

ALEJO

FERNANDEZ

the nun in the painting in the Cordovan Museum that we have just studied. The charming little landscape at the left of the dais and throne of the Renaissance recalls vividly the similarly placed expanse in the signed panel of St. John Baptist published by Angulo. The triumphal arch to the right of the throne seems to have no other reason for existence than Alejo's enthusiasm for the new architecture of the Renaissance and especially for such arches, which, like other Andalusian painters of the period, he was often thereafter to introduce into his backgrounds, eventually ornamenting actual structures of the kind for the reception of Charles V at Seville in 1526. It is in all likelihood to the same very early period in Alejo's evolution as the Flagellated Christ and the Anna selbdritt, probably during the years when he still resided at Cordova, that we should assign the small and lovely triptych in the Sacristia Mayor of the church of the Pilar at Saragossa, which I am confident that Bertaux, Mayer, and Angulo are right in placing in his authentic production (Fig. 1 2 ) . The Last Supper occupies the central panel, and the subjects of the wings are the Entry into Jerusalem and the Agony in the Garden. Since the triptych's history is unknown, there are no means of determining whether Alejo actually executed it for the church or whether, instead, it embodies a later gift to this great shrine of pilgrimage. The former alternative has less in its favor since Saragossa is remote from Andalusia and we are informed of no such historical link as his patronage by Ortiz de Matienzo in northern Castile that would similarly explain a commission in Aragon. Moreover, if, as seems probable, the Last Supper served as a model for the rendering of the subject by the Sevillian artist, the Moguer Master, 9 the work must have been seen by him in the south. At any rate it appears impossible to question Alejo's authorship. The type of the kneeling young man in the picture of the Cordovan Museum is exactly repeated no less than five times: in the Entry into Jerusalem, by the St. John behind Christ and by the two youths spreading the garments before the Saviourj again in the St. John of the Last Supper; and in the same Apostle in the Agony in the Garden. Many further reiterations are not lacking among the other actors. The Pentecost in the retable of the Colegio de Maese Rodrigo, for instance, aifords such precise counterparts as the St. Peter, duplicated by the Apostle (also St. Peter?) foremost in the throng following Our Lord to Jerusalem, 9

See below, p. 1 0 2 .

J «

ο

Ο

*

ζ

W (Λ


< Η λ Κ-ι « Η

Ο

2 «S

58

A L E JO

FERNANDEZ

and the first prominent figure at the Virgin's right recurring as the second gesticulating Apostle at the extreme left in the Last Supper. The separate, standing effigy of St. Paul in this retable is practically the same person as, in the Last Supper, the second, long-bearded Apostle at the Redeemer's left. The Apostle leaning forward in contraffosto on the right side of the table directly suggests the Christ of the picture in the Cordovan Museum and the first, standing Magus in the Epiphany that we shall claim for Alejo in the Sacristia de los Cälices of the cathedral at Seville. Even as late as in the painting of the Virgin of the Navigators, Alejo employs the type of the aged Apostle facing us on the right side of the table for the old man leaning on a crutch under her robe. There is much in the triptych to imply contemporaneousness with the two works that we have already set in his presumptive, early Cordovan phase. In his maturity, to be sure, he created types of youths like the supposed donor of the Flagellated Christ, but he never again approximated him so absolutely as in the five examples in the triptych that we have noted. It is not from a long subsequent moment that there derive almost all the other productions to which we have referred to prove his authorship. Like the Dublin Anna selbdritt, the Saragossa picture is rendered with the technique of an illuminator, and their small size would not be the sole reason for this, since the painting of the Flagellated Christ has also much of the precision of miniatures, justifying at least the guess that Alejo may have begun his career as a decorator of manuscripts. In an actual illumination that he did probably about 1 5 1 4 , the Annunciation in the cathedral of Seville, the technical perspicuity is even slightly less than in the triad of works that we are ascribing to the turn of the fifteenth into the sixteenth century. On the other hand, we must not be too arbitrary about grouping the Saragossa triptych with the Cordovan and Dublin pictures, inasmuch as it contains some elements from which one might conceivably argue for a later stage in Alejo's evolution. In the Agony in the Garden, the roughness of the landscape, the weird nocturnal effects, and the subordinate incident of Judas approaching with two soldiers might be taken to indicate already a familiarity with the Antwerp mannerists. Gold is restricted to the haloes. A few of the Apostles in the Last Supper at times give to the spectator something of the impression of figures from the full Roman Renaissance, an effect, however, that may be the fault of repaint.

ALEJO FERNANDEZ

59

The triptych assumes considerable importance for our definition of Alejo's personality because it is the work in which the evidence for the theory of his contact with Venetian art is hardest to escape. The most convincing factor in this evidence is his adoption of the Venetian painters' custom of dotting the elevated loggias and balconies in the architectural setting with small figures of spectators and supernumeraries. Characteristic examples in the Venetian and related schools are Crivelli's Annunciation in the National Gallery at London, the St. Sebastian by Antonello da Messina at Dresden, and Mantegna's fresco of the dead St. Christopher that, in the Eremitani at Padua, was one of the most serious losses occasioned by the recent war. Approximations to such details occur now and then in other Italian schools, as at Ferrara in the ceiling of the Palazzo Costabili, and very occasionally we encounter similar elements in Flemish painting, as once or twice in the scenes on Isabella's polyptych by Alejo's contemporary, Juan de Flandes. In previous volumes 10 we have noted a few examples even in Hispano-Flemish production as well in the Castilian school of the early Renaissance, 11 and it is not an entirely incredible hypothesis that, with the help of antecedent and contemporary non-Venetian analogues, Alejo should have himself evolved the idea of using these details in the representation of the Entry into Jerusalem. By far the most natural explanation, however, is an acquaintance with the much more exact Venetian parallels. The knowledge of the art of Venice does not seem to have been a determinative component in his style or to have meant more than the addition of such accessories as bits of Venetian architecture and figures to embellish them, since the fundamental traits of his manner can be elucidated on other grounds. His affection for triumphal arches is conspicuously illustrated by his coercion of a specimen into unlikely employment as a kind of viaduct over one of the streets of Jerusalem. T w o companion-pieces once in the possession of Don Jose Maria de Älava at Seville but now in the Lazaro Collection at Madrid, representing St. Francis, receiving the stigmata, and St. Clara 1 2 (Fig. 1 3 ) , are manifestly works of Alejo Fernandez and on internal evidence should in all probability be assigned to the moment in his life when he was doing the signed retable at Villasana, whether this 10 11 12

See, f o r instance, vol. I V , pp. 365 and 426. Vol. I X , pp. 70, 2 7 1 , 602, and 656. No. 1 0 2 2 on p. 498 of vol. I I of the Catalogue.

FIG. 13. ALEJO FERNANDEZ. STS. FRANCIS AND CLARA. LÄZARO COLLECTION, MADRID (Photo. Archivo Mas)

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61

moment occurred before or after his removal to Seville. Effigies of Sts. Francis and Clara were included in the retable for the Franciscan nuns at Seville on which he collaborated in 1520, 13 but for several reasons the Läzaro panels cannot be identified with these figures. Whether or not they are rightly described as the wings of a triptych, their rather small size makes it impossible that they should have been sections of the vast structure at Seville 5 the backgrounds and certain details in the figures themselves do not accord with the very precise specifications in regard to the two saints included in the elaborate contract for the altarpiece; 14 the style forestalls a year as late as 1520j and the juxtaposition of the founders of the Grey Friars and the Grey Sisters was by no means, as we shall discover in the second retable at Villasana, an unusual phenomenon in sacred art. T h e St. Clara is so close in type and manner to the Madonna in the signed retable at Villasana as to render it incredible that any long chronological interval should have separated them. Moreover, her lower draperies billow forth in a mode very characteristic of the virgin martyrs who in this retable fill the lateral compartments. Both figures are relieved, according to the old convention, against uninterrupted backgrounds of gold, here chastely diapered with a not too ostentatious pattern. It is entirely conceivable that A l e j o independently arrived at the composition for the representation of St. Francis, which he and his successors in the Andalusian school continued to employ; but the fact that he had a precedent for it in Antoniazzo Romano's altarpiece at Rieti might also be taken as further evidence for his sojourn in Italy and particularly, as in so many other instances in his production, for the belief that it was the central part of the Italian peninsula where he chiefly spent his time. Of the works that he did after his abandonment in 1508 of residence at Cordova, the two first, extensive specimens remaining at Seville itself are the unsigned and not specifically documented series of four panels now divided between the Sacristia Alta and the Sacristia de los Calices in the cathedral and the retable in the chapel of the Colegio de Maese Rodrigo that we have already studied as accredited to him by an entry in his will. In the absence of any conclusive evidence in regard to the date of either cycle of paintings, a comparison gives me the general feeling that the former is the earlier; but the two works 13 14

See a b o v e , p. 16. Gestoso, Ensayo de un diccionario,

etc., I l l , 3 1 1 .

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are not far removed from each other in Alejo's chronological evolution, and, since one's aesthetic feeling is not a very trustworthy touchstone, it would cause me no surprise if documentary discoveries in the future should reverse the order that I propose. In any case, the style of both sets of panels appears to show that they were executed at least a short time before the altarpiece at Marchena, which we have assigned to about the year 1520. The four large paintings in the cathedral are demonstrated by their manner and their sizes to have once constituted parts of a single assemblage — the Meeting at the Golden Gate, the Birth of the Virgin, and the Purification (Fig. 14) now in the Sacristia Alta and the Epiphany in the Sacristia de los Cälices. As to what the assemblage was, there have been various and divergent guesses. We have seen that Mayer had no other grounds than divination for suggesting that the panels derive from a retable for the chapel of Nicolas Durango in the cathedral which Alejo was commissioned to carry out sometime after September 9, 1516. Gestoso 15 ventures no more definite a surmise than that the Epiphany comes probably from a retable which has disappeared; or his language may mean that he believes it to have even originally constituted by itself a separate altarpiece. If the latter alternative is the significance of his words, he is in error, because the picture plainly belongs to the same series as the triad in the Sacristia Alta. The series, however, must have been dismantled by 1 5 5 1 , for Gestoso summarizes a document according to which in this year a frame was made for the Epiphany, then already in the Sacristia de los Cälices, by two partners, Andres Morin and Antonio Rodriguez. The early removal of the panels from their original destination is highly suggestive. We have found 16 that the paintings begun by Alejo in 1508 for the reverse of the rood beam in the cathedral were even by 1 5 1 3 reemployed in a retable of Diego de Deza's chapel in the same church, and, since they must have been rather loosely and perhaps unsatisfactorily coerced into their new function, the process of their peregrination, once started, might easily have continued, justifying the suspicion, expressed by Angulo, 17 that they are the works with which we are now concerned. Bertaux 18 had imagined that they 15 Sevilla monumental y artistica, II, 490, n.i, and Ensayo de un diccionario, etc., 16 II, 85. See above, p. 1 3 . 17 Articles in the Archivo esfanol, etc., p. 2 4 3 ; Anales, etc., p. 4 7 ; and in Revista espaiiola de arte, X I I (1934—1935), 240. 18 Catalogue of the Exfosicion Retrosfectiva de Arte, Saragossa, 1908, p. 76.

FIG. 14. ALEJO FERNANDEZ. PURIFICATION. CATHEDRAL, SEVILLE {Photo.

Archivo

Mas)

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once helped to compose a painted back to the retable of the cafilla mayor in the cathedral; but there is no reason to believe that such a back ever existed, and it is probable that he wrongly so interpreted the word viga, which really means rood beam, so that unwittingly he would have indicated the very derivation of the panels which we have tentatively predicated. They may seem large for the reverse of a rood beam, but its descriptions reveal that it was a pretentious structure. As sections of the beam the series would be assigned to the years 1509 to 1 5 1 3 , but Angulo creates for himself an unnecessary chronological difficulty by discerning in them, following an implication of old Justi, an indebtedness to Quentin Matsys and by finding it hard to explain so early an acquaintance of Alejo with the Flemish master's developed style. 19 The two instances that he adduces, the woman holding the Virgin in the scene of her Birth and St. Anne's handmaid in the Meeting at the Golden Gate, do not appear sufficiently concrete to establish the relationship, and both artists, in my opinion, could separately have arrived at such vaguely similar types. The countenance of the former figure in particular is a constant in all Alejo's own subsequent production. Definite contact with Matsys's achievements is a knotty proposition to demonstrate at any moment in our painter's career. The Marques de Lozoya states his belief in the relationship and calls into service as an explanation his hypothesis 20 of a substantial liability on Alejo's part to the school of Portugal, upon which it is scarcely possible to doubt that Matsys exercised some influence. Frei Carlos is the painter of this school who both exhibits some effect of Matsys's manner and evolved types not wholly unlike those of Alejo at the stage in his career embodied in the panels in the cathedral of Seville; but it is not in the aspect of an admiration for Matsys that the types are analogous, and at any rate it is questionable whether Frei Carlos had developed his characteristic mode of expression before the series in the cathedral and other similar works were executed by the Andalusian master. The mutual resemblances would thus be independent evolutions from partially corresponding sources other than the models in Matsys. It is not easy to follow Angulo in using the single detail of the fluttering draperies on one of the parturient St. Anne's attendants as 19 20

See above, p. 25. See above, pp. 27 and 38.

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65

proof that A l e j o was already conversant with Antwerp mannerism. Certainly the general style of the panels in the cathedral falls far short of the surrender to the harshness of such mannerism that emerges in the Marchena retable. It represents, instead, merely a further step beyond the signed Villasana altarpiece and the works of his presumptive Cordovan period in the adaptation of the Hispano-Flemish manner to the aesthetic demands of the new century and to the grander standards of the Renaissance as well as to its desired idealizations. T h e placidity of his earlier productions is maintained, together with his love of serenely beautiful women. T h e Flemish ingredient in the Spanish manner of the fifteenth century in which he had had his origins is still witnessed by the angel who, hovering above the heads of Sts. Joachim and Anne in the Meeting at the Golden Gate, is executed according to the modes of the older masters in the L o w Countries. T h e passion for decorative accents of gold persists in such details as the candle held by the Virgin's companion in the Purification, St. Joachim's mantle in the two scenes where he appears, and the yet more brilliant brocades of the first two Wise Men. Nevertheless, an idealization of more classic character than in his previous achievements has overspread the panels, whether or not through direct contact with Italian art. Although the edifice under which the H o l y Family receives the three Kings resembles the structures in Perugino's altarpieces, the analogy may be fortuitous, and, in general, the architecture throughout the set of four panels provides less clear evidence of an acquaintance with Italian buildings than do the productions that we have assigned to his activity at Cordova. T h e lovely bits of landscapes, as we already have had occasion to remark, 21 are like those depicted by Juan de Borgofia's followers at Toledo. Not only does A l e j o now show himself able to conform largely to the artistic exigencies of the Cinquecento but he surprises us by new powers of invention. Angulo 22 has perceived that for the cartoon of the Epiphany he was indebted to Schongauer's engraving, but for the compositions of the Birth of the Virgin and the Purification I am familiar with no exact foreign or indeed Spanish precedents. In the former instance St. Anne's bed is projected directly at us from the practical centre of the back of the picture; and, although he cannot quite cope with the problem of foreshortening and although a void, 21 22

See above, p. 36. Archivo esfanol ie arte, X V I I ( 1 9 4 4 ) , 233.

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the coverlet, is thus somewhat unpleasantly left at the very middle of the space, the mere effort for innovation is praiseworthy. He departs from the traditional iconography of the Purification by throwing the composition off centre, with the priest under a stately portico of the Renaissance at the right and the Virgin, St. Joseph, and their attendants aligned towards the left. As frequently, however, in the Spanish treatments of the theme Our Lady is given the kneeling posture. The camels of the Magi's suite betray, like the dogs in the foreground of the Marchena Marriage at Cana, that Alejo was not much of an animalier. Since there are many instances of masters of all nations and periods who have oscillated in manner at given moments in their lives, it is a dangerous procedure, as I have often remarked in my volumes, to date works solely on internal evidence, and this caution is especially applicable to Spanish artists of the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, who were not so intellectually ambitious or curious as their Italian brothers, but, having once evolved a style, maintained it with less change until the end; and yet, so far as I can trust my own critical reactions, I should still abide by a contention which I have hazarded in Alejo's biography, i.e., that he painted the retable over the high altar of Sta. Ana at Villasana de Mena at a later epoch than the signed example in the nave, probably after his establishment at Seville and perhaps somewhere in the region of the years 1 5 1 1 - 1 5 1 6 . 2 3 The four panels in the cathedral of Seville give the impression of being earlier creations, and the paintings at Marchena are certainly subsequent products of his brush. The middle of the retable, before its destruction in 1936, was occupied by sculpture provisionally ascribed by Gomez-Moreno 24 and Angulo 25 to Alejo's brother, Jorge Fernandez: above the tabernacle, the church's patroness, St. Anne, standing beside her husband St. Joachim, with their heads joined by an angel, as if in the Meeting at the Golden Gate; at a higher level the Crucifixion, as a setting for which, however, Alejo painted one of his loveliest landscapes; and in the two compartments that flanked the tabernacle, the Lamentation over the Dead Christ and the Noli me längere. The subjects of the 23

See above, p. 15. Archivo espanol de arte y arqueologia, I ( 1 9 2 5 ) , 253. In his additions on Spain to the Spanish translation, La escultura en occidente, of a book by Hans Stegrnann, Barcelona, 1926, p. 159, and an article in the Archivo esfanol de arte, X V I ( 1 9 4 3 ) , 138. 24

25

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four painted panels by Alejo in the same row as the statues of Sts. Anne and Joachim were, from left to right, St. Michael, the Annunciation, the Nativity, and St. Christopher (Fig. 1 5 ) . The compartments for which he was responsible in the upper tier depicted St. Francis receiving the stigmata, St. Jerome with the kneeling donor, St. Catherine of Alexandria, and St. Clara. The themes that he placed at either end of the predella, in simulated niches for the sake of bringing the panels into harmony with the recesses of the adjacent sculptured groups, were the paired Sts. Peter and Paul and the Mass of St. Gregory, but the latter panel looked as if he had turned over its execution to an assistant. The donor, in clerical costume and in the smaller scale to which such figures were sometimes still reduced in sacred art, was accompanied by a scroll with the inscription, "Deus propitius esto mihi peccatori." 26 The few writers who have interested themselves in the retable have designated him as the founder of the church, the canon Sancho Ortiz de Matienzo, and this would be the natural deduction 5 but it remains strange that a man named Sancho should be represented under the patronage of St. Jerome, and it is not impossible that the figure was a portrait rather of the rector of the church or of some other ecclesiastical dignitary in the region. T h e guardapolvos, curiously restricted to the top of the structure, were decorated only with a long Latin inscription honoring Our Lady, one of the antiphons for the feast of the Conception in the older breviaries. 27 Although the retable, in distinction from the other one in the edifice, was not signed, the attribution to Alejo has been universally accepted and is indeed so obvious that the reader, as in the case of the four panels in the sacristies of the cathedral of Seville, may be spared the boredom of a list even of selected proofs. For the St. Francis he retained the composition that he had employed in the panel of the Läzaro Collection. In this figure and its draperies, furthermore, he still harked back to the Flemish illuminator's manner of his beginnings, and gold brocades and accents were liberally scattered throughout the panels; but many of the forms seemed to bespeak a date well on in the second decade of the sixteenth century. The St. Clara resembled the nun worshipping the Flagellated Christ at Cor26

Luke, X V I I I , 1 3 . For the words, see Diego Angulo in Archivo esfanol de arte, X V I ( 1 9 4 3 ) , 1 3 2 , η. i. It occurs, for instance, in the Sarum Breviary as the antiphon to the Magnificat in the first Vespers of the feast. 27

ο C /3 Ζ ο Η υW 2ω §

ω 0 < ζ< Λ ί< ο 1J-3 to a > 05 suggests that I m i g h t conceivably have been correct in m y surmise that it could h a v e been a part of the predella of the retable of Sto. D o m i n g o de Silos. T h e monk in the background about whose activity I w a s in doubt appears to be cooking. A l t h o u g h these volumes abundantly prove h o w often I have been glad to f o l l o w A n g u l o ' s perceptive guidance, I must take exception to his desire 9 to remove f r o m B e r m e j o ' s canon and to assign to the painter of the early Renaissance active in C a t a l o n i a , J u a n G a s c o , or to his shop, the veronica of Christ in the M u s e u m at Vich. H e adduces f o r a comparison that I find most unconvincing G a s c o ' s panel of St. B a r t h o l o m e w as an exorcist also in the Vich M u s e u m but coming f r o m the Hospital de Pelegrinos in the t o w n . H e m i g h t have f o u n d closer analogues in G a s c o ' s m a n y representations of the Saviour in the Crucifixion and in the Passion, especially the Christ of the M a s s of St. G r e g o r y on the tabernacle in the ( n o w destroyed) retable at San P e d r o de V i l a m a j o r ; but such confrontations merely betray that G a s c o w a s entirely incapable of executing the veronica not only because of his types and style but also by reason of his relatively inferior c r a f t . I n other w o r d s , I a m disposed to cling to the attribution to Bermejo. T h e rapidly increasing pictorial deposit handed d o w n to us by the master must include with certainty t w o pieces of a predella depicting the A g o n y in the G a r d e n and the V i a Dolorosa ( F i g s . 1 4 4 and 1 4 5 ) and n o w belonging to a private collection in E n g l a n d . 1 0 T h e i r right to be set in the 8

Vol. VII, pp. 874-875. Archivo esfanol de arte, X V I I ( 1 9 4 4 ) , 329, n. 3. I was first put on the track of the panels by Mr. Harry G. Sperling·, to whose intelligent interest in Bermejo we have already referred in vol. I X , p. 819. 9

10

FIG. 143. BERMEJO. B E N E D I C T I N E SAINT WRITING. A R T I N S T I T U T E , CHICAGO (Courtesy

of the Art

Institute)

FIG. 144. B E R M E J O . AGONY IN T H E G A R D E N . P R I V A T E COLLECTION, ENGLAND (iCourtesy of the Arcade Gallery,

FIG. 145. B E R M E J O .

VIA DOLOROSA.

London)

P R I V A T E COLLECTION, ENGLAND

(Courtesy of the Arcade Gallery,

London)

A P P E N D I X

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cluster of his most characteristic productions needs no demonstration even to one w h o has no more than a passing acquaintance with his achievements, but I see no sure w a y of deciding into just w h a t mature moment in his career they fit. T h e y must be later than the Berlin Dormition, which fails to exhibit yet all the tokens of his fully developed manner that they patently display; and the very manifest dependence upon Jan van E y c k in the St. John of the A g o n y in the Garden cannot be taken to imply an early phase of his developed manner, since a similar debt is apparent in so late a picture as the Acqui Madonna. JACOMART AND R E X A C H

T h e r e has emerged from the Pams Collection, Perpignan, a panel of St. M a r g a r e t ( F i g . 1 4 6 ) that might be considered grist to the mill of D o n L e a n d r o de Saralegui 1 in his tentative desire to make Rexach responsible for the works in which I have wished to descry rather the superior skill of Jacomart. It furnishes support for his thesis since, although the styles of the two artists are closely interlinked, it is very manifestly executed in the finer mode that I connect with Jacomart and since, on the other hand, w e have definite record that Rexach painted a St. M a r g a r e t exactly corresponding to the picture that now concerns us. M a y 28, 1 4 5 6 , is the date of a contract with Rexach to do a retable for the town of Bocairente, south of Valencia, in one of the two chief lateral compartments of which it was prescribed that St. M a r g a r e t should be depicted precisely as in the Pams panel, "bursting through the dragon's b a c k " ; 2 and, moreover, the panel is of a size, 1.40 metres in height by .78 in width, that would have constituted a principal compartment in an altarpiece. Because, however, St. M a r g a r e t is very popular in Spain and often thus represented as breaking forth from the Satanic beast, it is more than possible that Jacomart should also have been called upon so to paint her in another place than Bocairente; and I should still prefer to assign to him the Pams panel and the other similarly more distinguished works, since, as I have argued in volume I X , 3 no production that with surety can be attached to Rexach justifies the supposition that he was capable of rising to such artistic heights. E v e n if a provenience from Bocairente should ever be established for the Pams panel, w e could fall back upon the hypothesis that in the. partnership of Jacomart and Rexach it was not always the former w h o received the orders and turned some of them over to the latter but that Rexach occasionally was the contractor and asked Jacomart to collaborate with him. Certainly the panel of St. M a r g a r e t is one of the masterpieces, if not the actual masterpiece, among our preserved examples of the more talented style with which I am loath to discontinue honoring Jacomart, and it See my vol. I X , p. 822. For the contract, see M . R. Zarco del Valle, Documentos ineditos para la historia de las bellas artes en Esfana, in the series Documentos ineditos para la historia de Espana, L V ( 1 8 7 0 ) , 289—291. 3 Pp. 822-823. 1

2

FIG. 146. J A C O M A R T . ST. M A R G A R E T . F O R M E R L Y IN T H E PAMS COLLECTION, PERPIGNAN

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must be exalted also to the rank of one of the most beautiful, as well as most typical, specimens of primitive Spanish painting. T h e composition constitutes an instance, as striking as it is lovely, of the general affection of early Spanish art for formal designs, accented here by the arbitrarily conspicuous brocade of the virgin martyr's gown and by the handsome gold background, patterned, as customarily in the Valencian school, only at the borders. T h e formality of the design is carried to the point of a symmetry that balances practically every detail on the right by a detail on the left, as, for example, St. Margaret's spear by the dragon's upraised tail, but the design is saved from too great rigidity by such touches as the fall of her mantle over a portion of the beast's body. T h e panel indeed exhibits a nice calculation of all factors. T h e dragon is among the most powerful realizations of the Gothic grotesquerie that European and especially Spanish artists of the period cultivated in their representations of the monsters which are the attributes of such saints as Margaret, Michael, or Martha, and the fierceness is augmented by the streams of blood pouring from the mouth and riven back as effective chromatic accents in the scheme of color; but the head is modelled closely enough upon that of an actual wolf, and the bizarre extravagances of some of Jacomart's rivals in these themes are avoided. A telling contrast is also created between the dragon's savagery and the delicacy of Jacomart's draughtsmanship in what is perhaps his gentlest and loveliest embodiment of girlish beauty. RODRIGO DE OSONA T H E

YOUNGER

T w o versions of the enthroned Madonna should be added to the extensive bequest from Rodrigo de Osona I I that the centuries have spared to us. I ought long since to have perceived his hand — and his hand at its finest ·— in the rendering 1 sold at the Hotel Drouot, Paris, on April 24, 1 9 2 9 , under the attribution of the "school of Van E y c k " (Fig. 1 4 7 ) . T h e Virgin's head reiterates with great delicacy his constant feminine type; the nearest counterpart for the Child appears in the Anna selbdritt at Zürich; 2 and the decoration of the throne shows, as often in his production, that he was already alive to the new interest in the architecture of the Renaissance. T h e incised gold of the background is treated in a rather exceptional way. At the borders, beside the green fabric behind the Madonna, are two patterned bands of gold, but whereas at the left the band is finished, according to the customary Valencian mode, with a simple edging, the place of the edging, in a violation of the habitual symmetry, is taken at the right by an elaborately designed stripe. From the second version, in private possession at Barcelona, a large piece has been lost at the left (Fig. 1 4 8 ) ; and since the research that the great authority on Valencian heraldry, the Baron de San Petrillo, kindly undertook at my request has not resulted in the certain identification of the 1 2

T h e dimensions are 68 centimetres in height by 5 6 in width. V o l s . V I , fig. 2 9 4 , and V I I , p. 8 9 1 .

FIG. 147. RODRIGO DE OSONA T H E YOUNGER. MADONNA. SOLD A T T H E HÖTEL DROUOT, PARIS, IN 1929

FIG. 148. RODRIGO DE OSONA THE YOUNGER. MADONNA AND ANGELS. PRIVATE COLLECTION, BARCELONA (Photo. Archivo

Mas)

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escutcheon on the throne's right arm, we are balked in the endeavor to find for what personage or place the picture was made. T h e Virgin's drapery is gathered in somewhat closer folds than was the master's wont, but all else entirely accords with his practices. T h e Provincial Museum at Valencia has lately acquired a Crucifixion which, despite the disfiguring repaint, especially on the Magdalene, Saral e g u i 3 has justly perceived to be one of Rodrigo de Osona II's most autographic works. T H E S T . NARCISSUS M A S T E R

A m o n g Saralegui's many outstanding contributions to our comprehension of Spanish art, none is more so than his recent recognition 1 of another painting by the St. Narcissus Master, both because our acquaintance with this member of the circle of the Osonas had hitherto been limited to the merest handful of works 2 and because the painting supplies the missing links to attach to the Master an important achievement about the right of which to be included in his authentic production I had retained some doubts. Saralegui's discovery is a panel of the Resurrection in the Collection of the Marques de Montortal at Valencia, and the illustration that he publishes is enough to demonstrate the authorship, without comment, to anyone at all familiar with the St. Narcissus Master's style. T h e work that I had hesitated somewhat to follow T o r m o in claiming for the Master is the predella of the Pietä and eight feminine saints once to be seen in the Sala Capitular Moderna of the cathedral of Valencia 3 but destroyed, I believe, in the civil w a r . Saralegui amasses the detailed comparisons substantiating the unity of authorship, most convincing among which is the facial similarity of the St. Anne (and, in my opinion, even more so of the St. L u c y ) to the adoring soldier in the Resurrection. T h e Holy Sepulchre in the Pietä, as well as in the Resurrection, is decked with the antique motifs for which the St. Narcissus Master appears to have acquired a passion through contact with the circle of M a n t e g n a . T H E PEREA MASTER

All the marks of the style and accessories that characterize the production of this artist, who started at the end of the fifteenth century a longlived current in the Valencian school, declare themselves in a panel of St. Bartholomew as the great exorcist which now belongs to the Collection of Don Jose M a r i a M u n o z at Barcelona and once must manifestly have been the principal compartment or one of such compartments in a retable, 3

Archivo espanol de arte, X I X ( 1 9 4 6 ) , 1 3 1 . Arte esfaitol, X V I I ( 1 9 4 7 ) , 34. 2 Of the altarpiece in the cathedral of Valencia that gives the Master his name, the compartment representing the resuscitation of a dead woman by St. Narcissus perished in the civil war, but the other three pieces blessedly survived and are now in the sacristy. 3 See my vol. VI, p. 246. 1

FIG. 149. T H E PEREA MASTER. ST. BARTHOLOMEW. MUNOZ COLLECTION, BARCELONA (Photo. Archivo

Mas)

APPENDIX

364

rather than a member of an Afostolado ( F i g . 1 4 9 ) . T h e saint's head, for instance, illustrates a peculiar and very hirsute type that the Master frequently affects, as in the figures just behind Christ in the scene of the presentation of the redeemed of the old dispensation to the Virgin in the altarpiece from which the painter derives his pseudonym; and in the Valencian mode the gold background is patterned only at the borders. More interesting, in several ways, is a small panel 1 of the Holy Family in the Koetser Gallery at New Y o r k , which is quite as manifestly his creation (Fig. 1 5 0 ) . Although the types are reiterated again and again throughout his production, we need go no farther for proof than the picture adduced in the last paragraph in connection with the St. Bartholomew, since counterparts of the Virgin and St. Joseph are found several times among the Hebrew worthies of both sexes whom the Saviour leads to His mother. No other Spanish artist of the period spreads heavy shadows in just this fashion over the visages or indulges himself in just such dour specimens of humanity; and the Virgin wears one of the abnormally large and sumptuous haloes that the Master often flaunts in his paintings. T h e first special interests of the panel are iconographical. T h e combination of St. Joseph with the Madonna and Child to form the subject of the Holy Family is, in Spain at this time, conspicuous by its rarity. Indeed, the artist has so little familiarity with the theme that he treats Joseph almost as he might introduce any other saint into a retable beside a central subject of Our Lady enthroned, distinguishing him by his emblem of the lilies. A s a matter of fact, she is not here seated on the throne but, as seldom in Spain, 2 on a cushion in front of it, according to a mode that the Perea Master's follower, the Martinez Master, was to emulate. 3 T h e border of the brocade that decorates the throne's back is adorned with the beginning of the Magnificat, which is continued on the edge of the seat's base. F u r thermore, the partridge with which his pupils 4 were sometimes to punctuate their paintings struts already across the pavement beneath St. Joseph. Still another significance of the panel consists in the opportunity that it gave him, in the vistas seen through the openings of the Holy Family's house, to reveal the lovely feeling for landscape which we discover in so many of his Valencian contemporaries but which otherwise, in the Perea Master's extant output, declares itself in any degree only in the retable of the Colegiata at Jätiva 5 and in the Visitation of the Prado. 6 His participation in the general Valencian artistic milieu is manifested, in the bit of landscape at the right, 1

The dimensions are inches in height by 12/4 in breadth. See my vol. I X , p. 778. 3 Vol. VI, p. 359 and fig. 149. 4 Vols. VI, pp. 302, 320, and 442, and I X , p. 8 3 1 . Saralegui (Archivo esfaüol de arte, X X I , 1948, p. 204) follows Μ. Gonzalez Marti (see the references given by Saralegui) in stating that the partridge was a regular symbol of Christ's enemies, especially the Mohammedans. 5 Vol. V I , p. 274. 6 Ibid., p. 290. 2

FIG. 150. T H E P E R E A M A S T E R . HOLY F A M I L Y . NEW Y O R K (Courtesy of the Gallery)

KOETSER

GALLERY,

APPENDIX

366

by the representation of a favorite motif of R o d r i g o de O s o n a the y o u n g e r , 7 a bullfight. I o w e to one of D r . W i l h e l m Suida's m a n y courtesies m y acquaintance with a panel of Christ before Pilate in a private Swiss collection ( F i g . 1 5 1 ) which he has rightly recognized as an unmistakable w o r k of the P e r e a M a s t e r and which looks as if it might originally h a v e belonged to the same series f r o m the Passion as the V i a D o l o r o s a in the L e g e r Collection at London.8 A small version of the E n t r y into J e r u s a l e m by the M a s t e r , which w a s sold at the H o t e l D r o u o t , Paris, on A p r i l 2 4 , 1 9 2 9 , and w a s probably once a section of a predella, can scarcely be placed in the above-mentioned series by reason of the panel's shape ( F i g . 1 5 2 ) . 9 T h e visages and their dusky chiaroscuro that w e have seen in so m a n y of his productions greet us once again, and even the diminutive boy in a tree in the b a c k g r o u n d gathering the branches to " s t r a w in the w a y " is the kind of adolescent that he likes to depict. T h e D r o u o t picture acquires a considerable, added interest in that it enables us to attribute conclusively to the P e r e a M a s t e r a panel of almost unique iconographic significance which once belonged to the B o e h l e r F i r m at L u c e r n e and is n o w in international c o m m e r c e 1 0 ( F i g . 1 5 3 ) . The subject had l o n g been an e n i g m a to m e , a haloed, y o u n g soldier stabbing a seated old g e n t l e m a n , but, more and m o r e taking cognizance of the objects in the b a c k g r o u n d connected with the Passion, the column of the Flagellation as a perch f o r the cock of St. P e t e r ' s treachery, the cross, and, in the starred sky to which at the top the conventionalized room of the assassination opens, the sun and m o o n , here, as frequently, indications of the " d a r k n e s s o v e r all the l a n d " at the C r u c i f i x i o n , I began to w o n d e r w h e t h e r the panel could not have something to do with the less creditable early history of the thief eventually converted on C a l v a r y , St. D y s m a s . I therefore sent photographs to the eminent B e l g i a n iconographical scholars, P e r e B a u d o u i n de G a i f f i e r , of the Societe des Bollandistes, and M o n s i e u r G u y de T e r v a r e n t , w h o in the past had graciously solved f o r me m o r e than one desperate problem in the themes of Spanish art, asking if they could relate the representation to any event in the life of St. D y s m a s , and soon I received a n s w e r s that they forthwith recognized it as his m u r d e r of his father. D e G a i f f i e r i n f o r m s m e of an ancient and established tradition that he w a s guilty of fratricide, mentioned, f o r instance, in a passage of the writings of an actual Spanish author of the ninth c e n t u r y , St. E u l o g i u s ; 1 1 but in another passage 1 2 E u l o g i u s speaks of D y s m a s as defiled instead, by 7

8 Ibid., pp. 2 1 2 and 232. Ibid., p. 282 and fig. 1 1 1 A . No. 19 of the Catalogue of the sale, where the picture is attributed to the nebulous "school of Avignon." The dimensions are 60 centimetres in height by 67 in breadth. 10 The dimensions are 83 Yz centimetres in height by ηοτ/ι in width. II Migne, Cursus comfletus Patrologiae (Latinae), CXV, col. 855. 12 Ibid., col. 816. 9

FIG. 151. T H E PEREA MASTER. CHRIST BEFORE PILATE. PRIVATE COLLECTION, SWITZERLAND (Courtesy

of Dr. Wilhelm

Suida)

FIG. 152. T H E PEREA MASTER. E N T R Y I N T O JERUSALEM. SOLD A T T H E HÖTEL DROUOT, PARIS, IN 1929

FIG. 153. THE PEREA MASTER. ST. DYSMAS SLAYING HIS FATHER. FORMERLY OWNED BY T H E BOEHLER FIRM, LUCERNE

A P P E N D I X

370

patricide, and D e Gaiffier questions whether in the former passage the reference to jratricide may not be a textual error for -patricide. T h e age of the victim in the picture certainly suggests a father rather than a brother, but neither the research of the two Belgian scholars nor my own has yet succeeded in unearthing a written account of the actual details of the crime, which would perhaps explain the objects in the setting not as mere symbols of the Passion but, according to the literalism of the late mediaeval period, as integral parts of the story. T h e rayed cross behind Dysmas, for example, might not be that of Christ but a visionary manifestation, at the moment when the homicide was committed, of the form of execution by which the thief was eventually to suffer and to be redeemed. T h e general style of the Boehler panel had often caused me to suspect that it was a work of the Perea Master, but I have not dared so to state or to publish it until the youth spreading his garments before Christ in the Drouot Entry into Jerusalem emerged as a duplication of the St. Dysmas. A provenience from the Valencian school, to which the Perea Master belonged, was indeed implied in the first place because St. Dysmas enjoyed the distinction of a special chapel in the cathedral of Valencia 1 3 and therefore particular honor in the city and its territory. 14 T h e Boehler panel is one of the most obvious instances of the tendency of mediaeval Spanish artists to cast their compositions in formal designs or even symmetry and, in accordance with this tendency, to render the large and schematized figures of brocades the more conspicuous by presenting them in bald frontality. THE

SAN FRANCISCO

MASTER

Don Apolinar Sanchez of Madrid is the present owner of two panels that not only are most characteristic of this purveyor of Valencian fashions on the island of Majorca but agreeably superior to the general average of his attainments ( F i g . 1 5 4 ) . So large 1 as to have been once the principal, or among the principal, compartments of a retable and representing, as the Catalan inscriptions in their haloes declare, Sts. Pontius and Quiteria, they are said to derive from the cathedral of Palma. T h e virgin martyr, who certainly enjoyed a cult in the city, 2 is accompanied by one of her common attributes, the mad dog, but St. Pontius has only the palm and the book, without the emblem of the knife that he sometimes carries. 3 T o be convinced of the authorship, one need make no further confrontations than between St. Pontius and the St. Martin at Alcudia 4 or between the St. 13 Sanchis y Sivera, La catedral de Valencia, 3 1 4 . In my next volume I will take up a painting· of St. Dysmas on his cross in this chapel executed by Fernando de Llanos and Fernando Yäfiez de la Almedina. 14 See my vol. VI, pp. 397, 4.10, and 4.50. 1 The dimensions are 2.30 metres in height by .95 in width. 2 Vol. I l l , p. 1 4 1 . 3 Vol. VII, p. 308. " V o l . VI, fig·. 203.

FIG. 154. T H E SAN FRANCISCO M A S T E R . STS. PONTIUS AND QUITERIA. COLLECTION OF APOLINAR SÄNCHEZ, M A D R I D (Courtesy

of the

oirnier)

A P P E N D I X

372

Quiteria and the V i r g i n of the Visitation in the retable in S. F r a n c i s c o , P a l m a ; and even the figuration of the g o l d in the haloes and b a c k g r o u n d s accords with the M a s t e r ' s practices. L u i s DALMÄU M a d u r e l l ' s divulgation of d o c u m e n t s on C a t a l a n art a u g m e n t s the record of D a l m ä u ' s lost w o r k s by s u m m a r i z i n g

1

the painter's contract of Septem-

ber, 1 4 4 8 , to do a retable for the parish church of the t o w n of San Baudilio de L l o b r e g a t , just south of B a r c e l o n a .

W h e n w e recall that the archives

s h o w him to have been held in high esteem and to have received a n u m b e r of commissions

2

and w h e n w e note that the productions of his rival, M a r -

torell, are copiously preserved, it is indeed one of the inexplicable caprices of fortune that has left us at the most only a f e w f r a g m e n t s of D a l m ä u ' s achievements, just as a similar perverse turn of her w h e e l has nearly obliterated the l e g a c y of his g r e a t Italian c o n t e m p o r a r y , D o m e n i c o V e n e z i a n o . THE

VALLMOLL

MASTER

Since it has been discovered tion at B a r c e l o n a

I had

1

(the

"Pedralbes

Master")

that in m y visits to the M u n t a d a s C o l l e c -

been w r o n g l y

informed

that the c o n v e n t

of

Pedralbes w a s the source of the panel of the M a d o n n a and angels w h i c h g a v e m y Pedralbes M a s t e r

2

his n a m e and since it has been established that

instead it once g r a c e d the church at V a l l m o l l , just north of I a m u n d e r the necessity of c h a n g i n g the artist's pseudonym.

Tarragona, The

fact

that the A n n u n c i a t i o n in the Diocesan M u s e u m , T a r r a g o n a , w h i c h I r e c o g n i z e d as by the same h a n d , comes also f r o m V a l l m o l l w o u l d imply that both pieces m a y once have been parts of a single retable. JAIME HUGUET

*

B y all odds the most important thing that has recently happened in the study of H u g u e t is the publication of the m o n o g r a p h by Jose G u d i o l and J u a n A i n a u d de L a s a r t e , 1 a l a n d m a r k not only in the developing c o m p r e hension of the- master and of the late mediaeval C a t a l a n school but also in the general evolution of m o d e r n scholarship irf th.e F i n e A r t s .

B e f o r e Γ turn

to this distinguished a c h i e v e m e n t , I will set doWn the additions in r e g a r d to H u g u e t that ί had already m a d e in the appendix before the book reached m y hands. I registered, on page 67 of v o l u m e V I I , the a n o m a l y t h a t - H u g u e t should not have been included in the list of painters recorded on September 30, 1 4 6 4 , as relieved f r o m military service in order to cooperate in the decoraIn Anales y Boletin de los Museos de Arte de Barcelona, III, 4 ( 1 9 4 5 ) , 331. Vol. V I I , pp. 1 3 - 1 5 . 1 Catälogo monumental de Espana, Ciudad de Barcelona-, 1 4 8 ; cf. also p. 5 1 of the n e w m o n o g r a p h on H u g u e t b y G u d i o l and A i n a u d , w h i c h w i l l concern us in the next section of this a p p e n d i x . 2 V o l . V I I , p. 25. 1 Huguet, Barcelona, 1948. 1

2

APPENDIX

373

tion of D o m P e d r o ' s palace, but I did not then k n o w that J . E . M a r t i n e z F e r n a n d o , in his book of 1 9 3 6 on this temporary sovereign of C a t a l o n i a , 2 had published a d o c u m e n t of M a y 28, 1 4 6 4 , revealing that H u g u e t had already been indeed thus exempted for the purpose. Subsequently to m y discussion of H u g u e t ' s retable of the G u a r d i a n A n g e l and St. B e r n a r d i n e in v o l u m e V I I , 3 F . P . V e r r i e and J . A i n a u d brought out an article

4

that considerably illuminates o u r k n o w l e d g e of the m o n u -

m e n t . I n the first place, they include n e w l y e m e r g e d d o c u m e n t s c o n f i r m i n g the attribution to H u g u e t that w e had m a d e on stylistic g r o u n d s and establishing the retable's c h r o n o l o g y .

O n l y the h e a d i n g of the actual contract

w i t h the master, dated F e b r u a r y 2 2 , 1 4 6 2 , has c o m e to light, but w e h a v e his receipts of J a n u a r y 2 1 , 1 4 6 8 , and J u l y 3, 1 4 7 0 , for p a y m e n t s for the principal c o m p a r t m e n t and C r u c i f i x i o n respectively. T h e internal evidence seems to m e insufficient either for an a g r e e m e n t or disagreement with the t w o scholars' belief that H u g u e t did the predella itself soon a f t e r signing the contract.

I n this proposition they are influenced by their desire to recognize

in the aristocratic personage kneeling before the A n g e l at the l e f t of the predella the virtual ruler of B a r c e l o n a f r o m 1 4 6 4 to 1 4 6 6 , D o m

Pedro,

w h o had a special devotion to the G u a r d i a n A n g e l and w h o s e appreciation of H u g u e t is demonstrated by his choice of the painter to do the retable of his palace. N o doubt can be entertained, h o w e v e r , that V e r r i e and A i n a u d

have

rightly explained the f r a g m e n t a r y scene of a haloed pope appearing to St. B e r n a r d i n e , w h i c h baffled m y iconographical k n o w l e d g e . episode

5

I t depicts the

w h e n , before his arrival at A q u i l a to die, he w a s g r a n t e d a vision

of the c a n o n i z e d Celestine V just a f t e r a friar w h o accompanied him had miraculously found a spring f r o m w h i c h to quench the moribund B e r n a r dine's thirst. I take it that the astonished friar in the f o r e g r o u n d is the c o m panion expressing his a m a z e m e n t at the discovery of the spring; a stream of w a t e r flows beneath the hut w h e r e the supernatural vision is taking place; and the heraldic eagles e m b l a z o n e d on the gates of the city in the backg r o u n d are a concrete symbol that the t o w n is A q u i l a .

I t is probable that

the scene w h i c h I illustrated as figure 28 in v o l u m e V I I is correctly identified by t h e m as, a m o n g St. B e r n a r d i n e ' s m a n y miracles for children, his cure of the infant d a u g h t e r of G i o v a n n i A n t o n i o Petrucci of Rieti, since the child represented is manifestly a little girl. 6 that the object painted on the guardafolvos,

F u r t h e r m o r e , they guess

w h i c h I t h o u g h t perhaps a

ciborium, m a y be a piece of g l a s s - w o r k as a token of the glaziers w h o joined with the m a t - m a k e r s in commissioning the retable. A f t e r the Spanish civil w a r there w a s discovered in a v e r y small A u g u s 2 3 4 5

Pere de Portugal, B a r c e l o n a , 1 9 3 6 , pp. 156 and 1 9 5 . Pp. 130 ff. Anales y Bolettn de los Museos de Arte de Barcelona, I , 2 ( 1 9 4 2 ) , 1 1 - 3 3 . See the monumental w o r k on St. Bernardine by V i t t o r i n o Facchinetti, M i l a n ,

1933, P· 497· 6

Facchinetti, of. cit., 496.

APPENDIX

374

tinian c o n v e n t at B a r c e l o n a and placed in the M u s e u m of C a t a l a n A r t in this city a panel of the L a s t Supper, obviously by H u g u e t , w h i c h there is m u c h reason for believing a relic of the predella of his retable for the guild of tanners. 7

T h e contracts for the retable

8

require f o u r , unspecified scenes

f r o m the Passion in the predella at the sides of the tabernacle, and the L a s t Supper is not only such a scene but of the size and shape that w o u l d have suited an altarpiece of the retable's dimensions.

Since the guild of tanners

ordered the retable for the church of the A u g u s t i n i a n monastery at B a r celona, an A u g u s t i n i a n c o n v e n t w o u l d be a natural place into w h i c h a f r a g m e n t of it m i g h t drift a f t e r the c h u r c h w a s destroyed in the seventeenth c e n t u r y , and indeed there is said to be a tradition in the c o n v e n t that the monastic c h u r c h w a s really the L a s t Supper's source.

I n our e n d e a v o r to

derive the panel f r o m the altarpiece of St. A u g u s t i n e , w e need not be troubled by the slight d i f f e r e n c e in the

figuration

of the gold b a c k g r o u n d

f r o m the designs in the extant c o m p a r t m e n t s by H u g u e t and the presumptive R a f a e l V e r g o s that are definitely ascertained to h a v e been sections of the structure's main body, since these designs actually vary a m o n g t h e m selves.

T h e t r e a t m e n t of the b a c k g r o u n d is fairly similar in the c o m p a r t -

m e n t of St. A u g u s t i n e ' s encounter with the heretics

9

and in the C r u c i f i x i o n

f r o m H u g u e t ' s retable of San C e l o n i , but the closest a n a l o g u e in the patt e r n i n g of the gold occurs in the central panel of his retable of the G u a r d i a n A n g e l and St. B e r n a r d i n e , a section that w e n o w k n o w to have been c o m pleted by J a n u a r y 2 1 , 1 4 6 8 .

T h i s consideration m a y be taken for w h a t

v e r y little it is w o r t h as suggesting that the L a s t Supper m a y h a v e been painted at about the same period in H u g u e t ' s career, or even that, if in fact it comes f r o m the predella of the retable of St. A u g u s t i n e , he did really fulfil his a g r e e m e n t with the tanners in his contract of 1 4 6 3 to finish the predella within t w o years.

So far, h o w e v e r , as stylistic evidence m a y pre-

cariously be used for chronological j u d g m e n t s , 1 0 it is difficult to discern any elements in the L a s t Supper that w o u l d disaccord with the hypothesis of execution at the time of H u g u e t ' s one extant contribution to the body of the tanners' retable, the coronation of St. A u g u s t i n e , w h i c h has been generally assigned to the eighties but w h i c h G u d i o l and A i n a u d , in their n e w m o n o g r a p h , 1 1 w o u l d push back to c. 1 4 6 6 . I have already expressed, at the b e g i n n i n g of this section of the appendix, m y t r e m e n d o u s admiration f o r the m o n o g r a p h .

I t is a book that I

should select to put into the hands of the uninitiated as an example of the best methods and achievements of the scholarship of the present day in the investigation and interpretation of art. T h e data on H u g u e t h a v e been 7 Inasmuch as the panel w a s found recently in the convent, it cannot be the part of the retable's predella w h i c h Sanpere in 1906 declared that he k n e w in the Barcelona M u s e u m : see my v o l . V I I , p. 85, n.2.

8 9

Ibid.., pp. 84-85. Ibid., p. 91.

See b e l o w , p. 402 " P. 89. 10

APPENDIX

375

assiduously gathered, lucidly ordered, and w o v e n into a coherent w e b ; the deductions from the facts are full, logical, and penetrating; the criteria are subjected to scientific tests; by the application also of j u d g m e n t s based on aesthetic sensitiveness, the development of the master in style and in technical procedure is for the first time consistently traced; his career is beautifully integrated with the political and social background of the t i m e ; the absolute values of his attainments, apart from archaeological interests, are incisively a n a l y z e d ; and at the end the w h o l e content of the book is clarified for the reader by a catalogue raisonne of H u g u e t ' s w o r k s and by a columnar tabulation of his biography, the documents, paintings, his various collaborators, and contemporary historical events. T h e additions f r o m n e w documentary material are considerable, increasing our k n o w l e d g e of the master's domestic and financial life, of his energetic membership in the guild of bridle-makers, and of his various apprentices, solving little biographical problems that had hitherto p u z z l e d us, and extending the span of his existence from the last date with which w e w e r e hitherto familiar, 1 4 8 9 , to his death between F e b r u a r y 14, 1 4 9 2 , w h e n he made his will, and M a y 4 of this year, w h e n his w i d o w started procedure to obtain her legacy. F r o m fresh information in the archives concerning his essentially pictorial activity, w e learn that in the case of the San Celoni retable the true date for the contract w a s one which accorded more with the style of the panels, 1 2 1 4 6 5 , not 1 4 7 9 , as had hitherto been misread in one of the t w o copies of the d o c u m e n t ; that in i 4 8 6 he almost certainly received the commission for the retable of Sts. T h e c l a and Sebastian in the cathedral of Barcelona, 1 3 which w a s eventually executed, h o w e v e r , by his frequent collaborator w h o m I have tentatively identified with R a f a e l V e r g o s ; and that this retable w a s finished by 1 4 9 8 . T h e research of G u d i o l and A i n a u d indeed casts much light a m o n g the artists w h o w e r e H u g u e t ' s contemporaries. I t is not unlikely that they 1 4 have found the real name of his f o l l o w e r w h o m I have called the G e r o n a M a s t e r · — R a m o n Sola, since a document, n o w lost, declared a painter surnamed Sola to have been the author, about 1 4 6 0 , of an Annunciation in the cathedral of G e r o n a , very possibly the one that is a m o n g the G e r o n a M a s t e r ' s principal extant w o r k s , 1 5 and since, if R a m o n is this follower of H u g u e t , his son, Esteban, w o u l d naturally have done w h a t he actually did in 1 4 6 7 — e n t e r as a twenty-year-old apprentice the shop of his n o w deceased father's teacher. O n c e again approaching the old enigma of the interrelation of H u g u e t and the V e r g o s family and applying to it keen surgical methods, the authors are perhaps right in refusing to " R a f a e l V e r g o s " the t w o panels in the retable of the tanners depicting the sermon of St. A m b r o s e and St. Augustine's dispute with heretics, in assigning them to other assistants, and in keeping for " R a f a e l " only the remaining three of the compartments not done by 12 13 14 15

See my vol. VII, p. 80. Ibid., p. 461. Pp. 59 and 94. See my vol. VII, p. 376.

APPENDIX

376

H u g u e t h i m s e l f ; but, a l t h o u g h in all probability they c o r r e c t l y believe the V i a D o l o r o s a of the C a r r e r a s C o l l e c t i o n

16

to derive f r o m the predella of the

t a n n e r s ' retable a n d thus to be a c o m p a n i o n - p i e c e of the r e c e n t l y discovered L a s t Supper, I still c a n n o t entirely c o n v i n c e m y s e l f that they o u g h t to see in it the h a n d of H u g u e t r a t h e r than of P a b l o V e r g o s . B u t I n o w c o m e to m y m u c h m o r e serious, a n d indeed v e r y f u n d a m e n t a l , d i s a g r e e m e n t w i t h some of their conclusions, a n d this despite the sincerity of the appreciation f o r their p r e e m i n e n t a c h i e v e m e n t that I h a v e expressed in the p r e c e d i n g p a r a g r a p h s .

T h e d i s a g r e e m e n t c e n t e r s upon their e n d e a v o r

to c o n s t r u c t a y o u t h f u l period f o r H u g u e t in A r a g o n f r o m c. 1 4 4 0 to c. 1 4 4 6 , a f t e r u n d e r g o i n g c o n t a c t in his teens w i t h M a r t o r e l l at B a r c e l o n a , a n d a second early a n d short period at T a r r a g o n a , c. 1 4 4 6 — c . 1 4 4 7 , b e f o r e , definitely established at B a r c e l o n a , he a r r i v e d at the style by w h i c h the w o r l d generally k n o w s him.

T h e y create the A r a g o n e s e period by c l a i m i n g f o r

h i m a n u m b e r of w o r k s , i n c l u d i n g the i m p o r t a n t triptych of St. G e o r g e , 1 7 t h a t I h a v e ascribed to his A r a g o n e s e f o l l o w e r , M a r t i n de Soria, a n d to a considerably l a t e r date in the

fifteenth

c e n t u r y ; a n d they add to the g r o u p

t w o o t h e r items, first, a picture on c l o t h , depicting the G u a r d i a n

Angel

k n e e l i n g b e f o r e the M a d o n n a a n d C h i l d , w h i c h , rescued d u r i n g the civil w a r f r o m the c o n v e n t of S a n t o S e p u l c r o at S a r a g o s s a , 1 8 n o w g r a c e s the M u s e u m in this city, a n d , second, the predella of P r o p h e t s in the

Juner

C o l l e c t i o n , w h i c h , a l t h o u g h I h a v e tentatively c o n s e n t e d to an a s s i g n m e n t to H u g u e t , does n o t e n t e r into the question, since its p r o v e n i e n c e is n o t surely a s c e r t a i n e d . 1 9

T h e hypothesis of such an A r a g o n e s e period I

in d u t y b o u n d to r e j e c t ; but an adequate a n d detailed r e f u t a t i o n

feel

would

require m u c h m o r e space t h a n I h a v e at m y disposal in this a l r e a d y s w o l l e n appendix, a n d I can d o little m o r e than baldly state m y conclusions. I h a v e o n c e m o r e f a i t h f u l l y r e v i e w e d the paintings t h a t they attribute to the y o u n g H u g u e t but I to M a r t i n de S o r i a ; a n d I a m unable to c h a n g e m y opinion, except perhaps in one or t w o slight points that h a v e n o b e a r i n g upon the p r o b l e m . I n discussing the h e a d of the P r o p h e t in the P r a d o , 2 0 I indicated the closeness to H u g u e t , a n d I a m n o t too m u c h bothered because G u d i o l a n d A i n a u d wish to retain it f o r h i m , since w e d o n o t k n o w w h e r e or w h e n it w a s d o n e . I a m w i l l i n g to believe that in the panels f r o m C e r v e r a de la C a n a d a , 2 1 w h i c h they register as H u g u e t ' s first e x t a n t creation, M a r t i n de Ibid., γ. 448. See my v o l . V I I I , p. 337. 1 8 See below, p. 377. 1 9 See my vol. V I I , p. 158. I was told by the owner, h o w e v e r , that the predella comes f r o m north of Manresa in Catalonia. 20 V o l . V I I I , p. 372. 21 Ibid., p. 332. T h e pieces are now distributed through various private collections at Barcelona. A fragmentary Pentecost, which I did not see in my visit to the church and which belongs n o w to Sefior Gudiol himself, exhibits in the Apostle at the front a type that is more like those of H u g u e t than are the other figures f r o m C e r v e r a ; but in many of his paintings M a r t i n de Soria equally approximates his great Catalan inspirer. 16

17

APPENDIX

377

Soria had assistance or even that they w e r e executed by an intimately affiliated artist; but, although m y v o l u m e s have a b u n d a n t l y s h o w n h o w often I have been g r a t e f u l l y guided or even corrected by G u d i o l and Ainaud> m y eyes refuse to see H u g u e t ' s c r a f t in the panels or to discern in them w o r k s that by any possibility could have been painted as early as in the decade prior to 1 4 5 0 .

E v e n so subordinate a detail as the haloes of a series of embossed,

concentric rings tells s o m e w h a t 2 2 against a dating before the second half of the fifteenth c e n t u r y . T o " m a k e assurance doubly s u r e , " I have submitted the photographs of the C e r v e r a panels and of some of H u g u e t ' s unanimously accepted w o r k s to one or t w o of m y colleagues in order to obtain an u n prejudiced opinion f r o m m e n w h o are g o o d connoisseurs but w h o m I p u r posely wished to be unfamiliar with the special p r o b l e m ; and I a m c o n f i r m e d by t h e m in m y conviction that the artist of C e r v e r a , with w h a t e v e r innate potentialities, could n e v e r have developed into the master embodied H u g u e t ' s securely authenticated achievements.

in

A b o v e all, it is incredible

to m e that anyone could place the triptych of St. G e o r g e at so early a m o m e n t as even the v e r y end of the first half of the Q u a t t r o c e n t o . G u d i o l and A i n a u d w o u l d like to explain the first reflections of H u g u e t ' s style a m o n g imitators in A r a g o n by the theory of his y o u t h f u l presence in the province, but none of the imitations can be accurately dated before the fifties w h e n he had already evolved his characteristic m a n n e r at B a r c e l o n a . I t is possible, t h o u g h by no m e a n s sure, that in 1 4 5 0 the A r a g o n e s e n a r d o de A r a s

23

Ber-

w a s already aping the fashions of H u g u e t , w h o , h o w e v e r ,

even by this year w a s established at B a r c e l o n a and had probably there created w o r k s d i f f e r i n g little f r o m those of a decade later. T h e t w o C a t a l a n scholars are loath to c o n c u r in m y attributions of a certain n u m b e r of productions to M a r t i n de Soria because inferior in quality to some of his other paintings; but in m a n y artists, as for instance M a n e t , w e must take into a c c o u n t unevenness in level of attainment, and especially in the M i d d l e A g e s it is often necessary to reckon with assistants' l a m e attempts to reiterate a master's style.

T h e r e are no w i d e r variations in quality b e t w e e n

the pictures that I allocate to M a r t i n de Soria than b e t w e e n P e d r o B e r r u guete's g r e a t cycles at A v i l a and his m o r e provincial w o r k s in the region of Palencia, and G u d i o l and A i n a u d a c k n o w l e d g e that H u g u e t himself did not a l w a y s maintain the same high standard. I n d e e d , in declining to accept for M a r t i n de Soria the paintings that they allot to a y o u t h f u l period of H u g u e t , they have neglected, I fear, to read t h o r o u g h l y and to examine perspicaciously the w h o l e nexus of a r g u m e n t s , interrelationships, and comparisons with w h i c h I have built up M a r t i n ' s personality. T h e only w o r k w h i c h I had not discussed in m y v o l u m e s and w h i c h they assign to H u g u e t ' s " A r a g o n e s e p e r i o d " is the painting of the M a d o n n a and G u a r d i a n A n g e l in the Saragossa M u s e u m that I have already m e n t i o n e d ; and I a m bringing grist to their mill by disclosing w h a t w a s not k n o w n for 22 23

See b e l o w , p. 389. See b e l o w , p. 402.

37»

APPENDIX

a surety but assists their argument, namely that the picture comes from an Aragonese religious institution. When I was graciously allowed in 1 9 3 0 to visit the clausura of the convent of Santo Sepulcro at Saragossa, I studied the picture and took a photograph which, though very dim, yet proves the picture to be the one adduced by Gudiol and Ainaud and now in the Museum. I had never published the painting because my photograph and notes taken on the spot were inadequate to establish a definite attribution; but I find set down in my notes that I felt at the time that the painting might be by the master of the Alloza panels in the Museum, for me Martin de Soria and for Gudiol and Ainaud, Huguet. A scrutiny of the excellent new photographs of the painting made by the Archivo Mas still inclines me to the attribution to M a r t i n ; but, like the Prophet in the Prado, it is a border-line case, and I should not demur very much at the possibility of Huguet's authorship. Gudiol and Ainaud advance a powerful argument for the latter alternative in that the very peculiar seat of the Madonna, with griffins' heads on the arms and claws on the supports (a peculiarity that I observe to be registered in my notes of 1 9 3 0 ) , is employed in two of Huguet's certified creations at Barcelona; but I could imagine Martin de Soria copying such a detail. T h e writers stress also in the picture the coincidence of the escutcheon of Barcelona in one of the tiles of the pavement with the fact that higher up there appears the inscription Angel Custodio in Castilian, the language that we should expect in Aragon; but, if Huguet sent the picture from Barcelona instead of executing it while resident in Aragon, he or someone else might have inserted the Castilian words at the request of the person who gave the commission, or, if Martin de Soria is the author, he could naturally have introduced the escutcheon of Barcelona, which was a part of the whole Aragonese kingdom. A t any rate, if Gudiol and Ainaud do not move me to a belief in an early Aragonese period of Huguet by the works that I still confidently claim for Martin de Soria, they cannot establish their contention, in my opinion, by the one debatable case of the Madonna and Angel. I am troubled even more than they by the absence of any notice, in the copious Aragonese records, of the activity of Huguet as a painter of religious works in the province, nor is the lacuna filled by the consideration that we possess documents referring to his partnership in 1 4 5 6 , 2 4 when he was definitely living at Barcelona, with a Pedro Ramirez and other Aragonese craftsmen for the manufacture and sale of painted shields. I am more leniently disposed to their proposition to make a second stage of Huguet's development out of my Vallmoll Master 2 5 and to localize this stage at Tarragona, but I still would wish to cling to my opinion that the Vallmoll Master is a separate individuality, particularly when we remember that there are so many names of prominent painters in the Catalan archives 24 See my vol. V I I , p. 4 8 . Gudiol and Ainaud (p. 1 5 ) publish further documentary references to the transactions. 25 See above, p. 3 7 2 .

APPENDIX

379

whose works we cannot yet identify but who, like J u a n Mates, 2 6 may some day emerge as definite personalities. If, as Gudiol and Ainaud desire, the Vich Epiphany could be soundly declared a creation of the Vallmoll Master and then of the Huguet who did the great series of retables at Barcelona, a chain would be forged converting the Vallmoll Master into the immature Huguet, but I am no more able than when I wrote volume V I I 27 to arrive at certainty in regard to either attribution. Of the other paintings attached by Gudiol and Ainaud to Huguet's T a r r a g o n a period, I have already 28 accepted provisionally his authorship of the Lamentation in the Louvre, although without venturing a chronological classification. T h e y may be right in transferring to his canon the St. Peter belonging to the Hispanic Society at New York, in regard to which 29 I wavered between the candidacies of Huguet and the Sant Quirse Master. I have not seen the remains of a small retable of the Magdalene formerly in the Estruch Collection at Barcelona, the central compartment of the enthroned saint and the capping Crucifixion, but, so far as a verdict is permitted from the photographs, I should hesitate to agree with the two Catalan scholars in making the attribution to Huguet categorical; and I am left with the same Laodicean attitude by the slight evidence emerging in a fragment of a Virgin Annunciate that has entered the Diocesan Museum at Barcelona from the parish church of Alella. Their manuscript may have gone to press before they read my volume I X , where 30 I humbly followed the authoritative lead of Saralegui in assigning to the Valencian Portiuncula Master the Madonna at Penäguila in the territory of Valencia, which they are strongly tempted to place to the credit of their hero.

Juan Figuera T h e distinguished Sardinian scholar, Raffaello Delogu, kindly wrote me several years ago that he had found the source of the T o z z i retable by Figuera to be the church of S. Domenico at Cagliari, thus confirming my opinion 1 that it was painted for the island; and he has recently published his discovery in an illuminating article on the master, 2 in which he convincingly, so far as can be judged by the reproduction, adds to Figuera's canon a Madonna in the church of S. Giacomo at Cagliari and accepts as his achievement at least certain parts of the altarpiece from Sta. M a r i a de Marquet that I have ascribed to him. Whereas it has been difficult for me to detect an assistant's hand in the documented retable of St. Bernardine, Delogu is prone to assign to Figuera's collaborator in the enterprise, Rafael Tomas, the narrative compartments in the predella and possibly some slight 26 27

28 29 1

2

See above, p. 306. Pp. 1 4 6 and 1 4 9 .

Ibid., p. 160. Ibid., p. 236.

P. 825. Vol. V I I , p . ' 3 2 6 .

In the new periodical, Belle

arti, I (1948), 260.

38ο

A P P E N D I X

intrusion into the e x e c u t i o n of the m a i n b o d y of the s t r u c t u r e .

I n his desire

thus to m a k e s o m e t h i n g m o r e of the c o l l a b o r a t o r t h a n the c a r v e r of the f r a m e s that I w a s w i l l i n g to believe h i m , D e l o g u w i l l be g l a d to l e a r n t h a t I h a v e f e r r e t e d o u t the notice that in 1 4 7 0 the fainter

Rafael T o m a s (after

his r e t u r n to C a t a l o n i a ) designed a w i n d o w f o r the c h u r c h of St. M a t t h e w at P e r p i g n a n . 3

M o r e o v e r , this additional r e f e r e n c e to T o m a s as a painter

increases the possibility t h a t , a f t e r all, he w a s the d o m i n a t i n g personality in the partnership in Sardinia a n d that revelations in the f u t u r e m i g h t f o r c e us to substitute his n a m e f o r F i g u e r a . FRANCISCO

SOLIBES

I h a d occasion to n o t e , in v o l u m e V I I , 1 that I h a d seen in 1 9 2 6 in the s t o r e r o o m of the c h u r c h of Sta. M a r i a at M a l u e n d a a n u m b e r of panels w h i c h , so f a r as I c o u l d t h e n d e t e r m i n e , w e r e c r e a t i o n s of this f o l l o w e r of H u g u e t a f t e r his i m m i g r a t i o n to A r a g o n but the s u b j e c t s of v e r y f e w of w h i c h c o u l d I d i s c o v e r because I w a s n o t a l l o w e d to e x a m i n e c a r e f u l l y the whole accumulation.

I a m w o n d e r i n g , t h e r e f o r e , w h e t h e r o n e of

these

panels w a s a picture h a i l i n g f r o m M a l u e n d a a n d r e c e n t l y o f f e r e d f o r sale in the B a r c e l o n a m a r k e t , w h i c h telescopes S a l o m e ' s reception of the B a p tist's h e a d w i t h h e r presentation of the g r u e s o m e o b j e c t to H e r o d 155).

(Fig.

I n a n y case it is m a n i f e s t l y a w o r k of Solibes w h o m w e h a v e f o u n d

to h a v e e n j o y e d additional p a t r o n a g e in the t o w n . Too

m o d e s t a b o u t his g i f t s as a c o n n o i s s e u r ,

Saralegui

2

hesitates

to

specify f u r t h e r t h a n the school of H u g u e t , perhaps in its A r a g o n e s e r a m i f i c a t i o n , w h e n he publishes t w o l a r g e panels of t h e e n t h r o n e d

Magdalene

a n d St. L u c y in the C o l l e c t i o n of the V i z c o n d e de M i r a n d a at V a l e n c i a ; b u t e v e n u n d e r the repaint I s e e m to see v e r y definitely the h a n d of Solibes in his A r a g o n e s e period. I t is the embossed g o l d t h r o n e s , s u g g e s t i n g w o r k in filigree,

that l o c a t e the panels in A r a g o n , a n d t h e r e a r e m a n y close parallels

to the types a n d draperies of the saints in the n u m e r o u s paintings of his A r a g o n e s e period, p a r t i c u l a r l y in the c a n o n i z e d w o m e n of the predellas. RAFAEL

VERGOS

A l t h o u g h as l o n g a g o as 1 9 3 3 I studied t h e s m a l l retable of St. R o m a n u s of A n t i o c h in the c h a p e l of the estate called C a s a S a n r o m a n e a r T i a n a , just n o r t h of B a r c e l o n a , I h a v e r e f r a i n e d f r o m w r i t i n g a b o u t it because I l a c k e d p h o t o g r a p h s to c o n t r o l the impressions that I r e c e i v e d o n the spot.

This

l a c k has n o w been supplied by the M a s A r c h i v e , w i t h the result t h a t the a u t h o r plainly e m e r g e s as the personality I h a v e provisionally identified w i t h R a f a e l V e r g o s , possibly assisted by his shop.

T h e principal c o m p a r t m e n t is

occupied by a s t a n d i n g e f f i g y of the saint ( F i g . 1 5 6 ) , capped by the usual C r u c i f i x i o n , a n d at the sides are f o u r scenes f r o m his life, his d e l i v e r y of a 3

2

Francisco Monsalvatje y Fossas, Obisfado de Etna, Olot, III, 1913, p. 225. 360. Archivo espanol de arte, X I X ( 1 9 4 6 ) , 140.

FIG. 155. FRANCISCO SOLIBES. SALOME WITH HEAD OF T H E BAPTIST. D E A L E R , BARCELONA (Photo.

Archtvo

Mas)

FIG. 156. RAFAEL VERG0S(?)· ST. ROMANUS, CENTRE OF RET ABLE. CASA SANROMÄ, NEAR TIANA {Photo. Archivo

Mas)

APPENDIX

383

homily, his laceration on the eculeus, his torture by fire (with the miraculously extinguishing rain not clearly visible in the present impaired condition of the compartment), and his decapitation. The predella consists, in halflengths, of the dead Christ between Sts. Mary Magdalene, John Baptist, James Major, and Barbara. Since throughout the retable the chief recipient of honor is vested as a bishop and since in one instance he suffers the torture of having his flesh torn by combs, he might easily be mistaken for Blaise, but two factors are determinative for the identification with Romanus. 1 T h e episode of the pyre is not related of Blaise; and, as the estate where the retable exists is named after St. Romanus (Sanroma giving in Castilian San Roman) and as there is no reason for refusing to believe that the retable was done originally for the estate's chapel, the dedication of the paintings would naturally be to the celestial patron of the place. It is true that St. Romanus is not denominated a bishop in any of the hagiological sources known to me, being definitely described by St. Ambrose as merely a priest, but neither is there literary justification for the other Catalan representations of him as a monk. Amidst the uncertain traditions, it is readily imaginable that his devotees would have exalted him to episcopal dignity, or he may be conceived, like Bermejo's Sto. Domingo de Silos, as no more than a mitred abbot. In the retable by Juan de la Abadia (the Almudevar Master) at Pompenillo he wears a cope without the mitre, but the former may indicate simply a plain priest. Although the distinctive story of the extraction of his tongue is oddly omitted, all the events comprised in the narrative compartments are told of St. Romanus or depicted elsewhere, even the death by decollation rather than, according to the orthodox account, by strangulation. The style very obviously incorporates a softening of the vigorous modes of Rafael's brother, Pablo Vergos. W e could be deceived for the moment into thinking that Pablo might have done the fine, central effigy, but eventually we realize that the figure manifests in reality the presumptive Rafael's toning down of his brother's more incisive characterizations and draughtsmanship and is paralleled, for example, by the canonized bishop in the predella of "Rafael's" retable of Sts. Justa and Rufina in the Diocesan Museum at Barcelona. 2 Now and then, as in the representations of St. Romanus's persecutor, Asclepiades, when he appears in the scenes of the laceration and decapitation, the types of Pablo come to mind; but the reason for this may be that they were executed by an assistant cognizant of Pablo's performances, and, as a matter of fact, there are actually no forms 1 For the facts about St. Romanus to which reference is made in this paragraph, see my vols. VII, pp. 586 and 608, and V I I I , pp. 4 5 1 , 507, and 748. 2 Vol. V I I , p. 469. In a review of this volume in Analecta Bollandiana, LVII ( 1 9 3 9 ) , 204, Baudouin de Gaiffier mentions a study of the Passion of Sts. Justa and Rufina by Franz Cumont in Syria, V I I I ( 1 9 2 7 ) , 330, and interprets the one scene that puzzled me as merely a representation of the two sisters exercising their profession of the manufacture of earthenware.

APPENDIX

384

that could not have been done by " R a f a e l " and a helper dependent rather upon him. I n d e e d , the w h o l e e f f e c t even of any assistance or inferior c r a f t at all m a y be occasioned only by the impaired condition of the retable in the subordinate sections.

The

C r u c i f i x i o n repeats " R a f a e l ' s "

customary

treatments of the t r a g e d y on C a l v a r y , as in figure 1 6 9 of m y v o l u m e V I I , and the dead C h r i s t of the predella is excelled by none other a m o n g his v e r y similar paintings of this

figure.

T h e parts surely done by

"Rafael"

himself, the central effigy, the dead Christ, and the Saviour in the C r u c i fixion,

display him at his best and at his closest approximation to G a b r i e l

Guardia.

THE GIRARD MASTER The

O r r i o l s Collection at V i c h contains three panels most

obviously

executed by this rustic V a l e n c i a n intruder into the territory of the C a t a l a n school, w h e t h e r or not they w e r e all originally parts of a single retable. T h e subjects are the E p i p h a n y ( F i g . baptizing a k i n g and queen. 1

1 5 7 ) , C r u c i f i x i o n , and an Apostle

I n the C r u c i f i x i o n the painter witnesses to

his V a l e n c i a n beginnings by diapering the g o l d b a c k g r o u n d , in accord with his frequent practice, merely at the borders, but he also reveals his sensitiveness to his n e w e n v i r o n m e n t , a m o n g other C a t a l a n traits, by basing the composition of the E p i p h a n y upon H u g u e t ' s outstanding version of the t h e m e in the retable of the Constable rather than upon the nearly identical V a l e n c i a n r e n d e r i n g by R e x a c h at Rubielos de M o r a . 2

I t is particularly

the gesture of the y o u n g e s t M a g u s that tips the scale in f a v o r of a derivation from Huguet. A most characteristic panel by the G i r a r d M a s t e r , depicting St. U r s u l a and her bevy of maidenly c o - m a r t y r s ( F i g . 1 5 8 ) , w a s once to be seen in a private collection at A m s t e r d a m .

O r d i n a r i l y the eleven thousand

com-

panions are almost necessarily reduced in a painting to a v e r y small delegation, but the G i r a r d

M a s t e r transmits the impression of a considerably

l a r g e r division of the multitude by a c c u m u l a t i n g behind the first t w o r o w s of virgins a serried mass of the tops of the haloes b e l o n g i n g to m a n y others, whose bodies and faces are conceived as hidden by their friends in the f o r e ground.

T h e curves of the haloes, like w a v e l e t s in a golden sea, serve to

pull the composition into a m o r e manifest formality of pure design even than the m a j o r i t y of Spanish painters cultivated in the M i d d l e A g e s , and the e f f e c t is accentuated by the strict s y m m e t r y of the a r r a n g e m e n t of St. U r s u l a and those of her associates w h o are visible at the f r o n t of the picture. I n a similar w a y , the M a s t e r heaps up a g r e a t t h r o n g of heads and m e r e pates to indicate the h u g e c r o w d w h o mill about the sensational event of the discovery of St. Stephen's body in the retable of the C a r r e r a s C o l l e c 1 Probably St. B a r t h o l o m e w christening Polemius and his w i f e , in w h i c h case the a c c o m p a n y i n g y o u n g w o m e n w o u l d be the rest of his f a m i l y , w h o also received the sacrament. St. M a t t h e w ' s baptism, h o w e v e r , of K i n g E g i p p u s , his queen, and daughter w o u l d be similarly represented. 2 V o l . V I I , p. 74.

FIG. 157. T H E GIRARD MASTER. EPIPHANY. ORRIOLS COLLECTION, VICH (Photo.

Archivo

Mas)

FIG. 158. T H E G I R A R D M A S T E R . ST. URSULA A N D H E R M A I D E N S . F O R M E R L Y IN Α P R I V A T E C O L L E C T I O N , A M S T E R D A M (Courtesy of the Frick Art Reference

Library)

APPENDIX

387

tion at Barcelona. 3 T h e motif of the raised knobs in the haloes and borders of the garments probably implies a later moment in his career 4 than in the case of the panels of the Orriols Collection. MATEO MONTOLIU

W e had already owed to the scholar, D o n A n g e l Sanchez G o z a l b o , practically all our knowledge of this painter of the M a e s t r a z g o in the second half of the fifteenth century, 1 and he has recently 2 unearthed a f e w f u r ther data in regard to Mateo's public and private life at Castellon de la Plana, which, however, throw no additional light upon his artistic production or upon the exact date of his death. M I G U E L DEL R E Y

I t has always seemed strange to me that I had never come upon other works of the highly individual painter, transitional between the manners of the first and second half of the fifteenth century, w h o proudly signed his name on the retable of St. Nicholas in the church of Santas J u s t a y R u f i n a at M a l u e n d a in A r a g o n . 1 T h i s incongruous lacuna has now been filled by two fairly recent additions to the L ä z a r o Collection at M a d r i d , panels depicting the enthroned Virgin ( F i g . 1 5 9 ) and the standing St. Michael, obviously once the centres of retables or possibly the principal compartments of a single retable. I n the matter of types of humanity, perhaps most determinative for the attribution are the two angels on the arms of the Virgin's throne w h o closely resemble in facial traits and stylized, curling tresses the pair w h o place the mitre on the head of the central St. Nicholas. E v e n the vestments of the angels in the L ä z a r o and Maluenda panels are the same. T h e countenances of both the Virgin and St. Michael are of the more placid sort, as compared with the acrid, central St. Nicholas, that we meet here and there in the lateral compartments at M a l u e n d a , and they possess the same general cast of features. F o r example, the St. Nicholas directing the sailors to pour out the oil and the Christ of the Deposition in the predella are differentiated only by the beard from the L ä z a r o Virgin and St. Michael. A striking Morellian parallelism is provided by the abnormally large and protruding ears and by their anatomical formation. T h e appurtenances of the pictures are more than analogous. Both the Virgin and St. Michael are clad in brocades that, like the cope of the central St. Nicholas, surpass in an extreme of loudness even those of the L a n a j a M a s t e r and of other Aragonese painters. T h e architecture of the thrones of the M a d o n n a and St. Nicholas is scarcely diversified, and, a still more telling proof, their projecting bases are each simulated as inlaid with three medallions of polychrome marble in mudejar designs, with the one 3

Vol. V I I , p. 5 8 5 . Ibid., p. 5 9 1 . 1 See my vol. V I I , p. 700. 2 Β olefin de la Sociedad Castellonense de Cultura, X X I I I ( 1 9 4 . 7 ) , 7 3 - 7 6 . " V o l . V I I I , pp. 1 1 - 1 4 . 4

FIG. 159.

MIGUEL DEL REY. MADONNA AND ANGELS. COLLECTION, MADRID {Photo. Archivo

Mas)

LÄZARO

A P P E N D I X

389

at the right in the case of the Virgin practically repeating in figuration the three specimens beneath the canonized bishop. T h e single variation from the norm of the Maluenda retable is the use of embossings in haloes and borders of garments; but, at least as early, the Aragonese Lanaja Master and the Burnham Master were accenting the decorative effect of paintings with them, and Miguel del Rey would naturally have altered his practice in this respect from commission to commission at the transitional moment between the modes of the first and second half of the fifteenth century during which he was active. T h e multiplication of the rings in the haloes, though characteristic of the somewhat later Aragonese school, emerges also in works of Miguel del Rey's contemporary in the Maestrazgo, Valentin Montoliu, and, since the types of persons are rather similar to those of this artist, it is legitimate to wonder whether after all we may not have been wrong when in volume V I I I 2 we tended to discount the idea that Miguel might have emigrated into Aragon from the more easterly section of the peninsula. M A R T I N B E R N A T AND M I G U E L

JIMENEZ

It is difficult to forgive myself the oversight of not having registered in volume V I I I as a work of Martin Bernat, probably in collaboration with Miguel Jimenez, the retable in the Ermita de Sta. Ana at Tauste, 1 northwest of Saragossa. Naturally the patroness of the Ermita is honored in the principal compartment in the subject of the Anna selbdritt, and above is the usual Crucifixion. Standing effigies of Sts. Sebastian and Roch 2 occupy the larger panels at the sides, surmounted in smaller divisions by the seated figures of Sts. James M a j o r and Andrew. T h e middle section of the predella displays Christ of the Passion erect in His tomb adored by the grieving Virgin and St. John, and its other compartments are taken up by sacred personages seated on benches in front of parapets, Sts. Peter, Paul, Lucy, and the Guardian Angel of the kingdom ( F i g . 1 6 0 ) . One of the emblems that the Angel carries, a crown, is regular in the iconography of this figure,3 but I do not recall ever having seen the other elsewhere, a banner divided by a cross into four sections, each embellished with a masculine head. 4 A bust of the blessing Eternal Father adorns the centre of the topmost crosspiece of the guardafolvos, but otherwise these sections of the retable are decorated with Italianate arabesques and grotesques, which reveal that Bernat's employment at Tauste must have been one of his very last com2

1

P.

I I.

The documented retable of the Renaissance by Diego de San Martin in the •parish church of Tauste will concern us in a subsequent volume. 2 With an iconographical detail that is, for me at least, unique: Roch's regular attribute, the angel, here carries a scroll containing the words Noli timere, alluding doubtless to the angelic announcement to the saint that he would be healed of the plague. 3 See my vols. VI, p. 1 5 4 , and V I I , p. 1 3 0 . 4 While this volume is passing through the press, I have realized that the banner is the flag of the Aragonese sovereigns commemorating the victory of Alcoraz in 1096 over the Mohammedans in which four Moorish kings were slain.

APPENDIX

391

missions and which may have misled me originally into jumping at the conclusion, without careful examination of the paintings in the body of the retable, that it was a work of some artist of the early Renaissance. Bernat is not recorded by document after 1 4 9 7 , although, if he made the retable of the Magdalene at A m b e l , he survived at least a f e w years more, 5 but Miguel Jimenez, his presumptive collaborator at Tauste, did not die until between 1503 and 1505. 6 I t was certainly Bernat w h o took upon himself the major part of the execution. T h e panel of the Virgin of M e r c y 7 in his documented retable at T a r a z o n a furnishes parallels for several of the figures. T h e younger king in the foreground at the right and the persons at the back of the group at the left under the Virgin's mantle resemble closely the St. R o c h ; the women in the group at the right are like this saint's accompanying emblem of the angel, as well as the M a d o n n a held by the central St. A n n e ; and the aged monarch, with his formal, frizzed beard, beside the younger king is scarcely differentiated from the St. A n d r e w . A counterpart for the St. Roch is forthcoming also in the St. John Evangelist of the predella in the T a r a z o n a retable. Although the Anna selbdritt appears to embody in the main the craft of Bernat, the Child seems very definitely to reproduce the peculiar and unmistakable conception of infancy that w e discover in many paintings by Jimenez, 8 as if this one little figure had been oddly reserved for him in the central compartment. T h e only other constituents of the Tauste altarpiece in the case of which I should argue for the superior attainments of Jimenez are the forms of St. L u c y and the Guardian A n g e l , by reason of their actual identity with such types of his as the Virgin in the Visitation 9 of his retable at L u n a ; and yet I should not absolutely exclude the possibility that Bernat, in one of his better moments, could have succeeded, when he desired, in copying thus precisely the creations of his more gifted partner both in the Child of the principal compartment and in the two parts of the predella. T h e Pieta in the predella cannot be ascribed convincingly to either Jimenez or Bernat and was perhaps consigned to a third collaborator. T h e r e have recently emerged in the T o r e l l o Collection at Barcelona two panels from a retable of St. Anthony Abbot which are manifestly productions of the coterie in the Aragonese school of the second half of the fifteenth century dependent upon Bermejo. In one of them w e see the great hermit's servant carrying him to his cell after his cudgelling by demons and in the other O u r L o r d consoling him for the ordeal through which he has passed ( F i g . 1 6 1 ) . Unless they are works of a member of the coterie w h o m I have not isolated or here stupidly fail to recognize, a process of exclusion would seem to narrow down our choice to a decision between the interrelated Bernat and Jimenez. T h e problem is complicated because 5 V o l . V I I I , pp. 4 6 - 4 7 · 6 Ibid., p. 4 7 . 7 Ibid., fig. 15. 8 See, f o r instance, ibid., figs. 37, 44, 5 1 , 52, 53, and 54. 9 Ibid., fig. 38.

APPENDIX

392

the author, whoever he is, reveals few very distinctive traits in the two panels, but it does not seem possible to place the type of Christ appearing to St. Anthony in the output of any other exponent of this phase of the school of Aragon. T h e type is most nearly approximated in the Saviour manifesting Himself to St. Martin and wearing the cloak of the famous act of charity in the predella by Bernat attached to the retable at Daroca perhaps partly executed by Bermejo; 10 but the level of achievement in the Torello panels surpasses Bernat's meagre standard, and the likelihood is that we owe them to J i m e n e z . T h e representations of Christ in his paintings are sufficiently analogous; the other forms are reconcilable with his authorship; the servant bearing St. Anthony has the characteristic gaze that J i m e n e z gives to the eyes; and the trees and shrubs in the little landscapes are stylized in the modes that he, as well as Bernat, affects. Don Jose Gudiol Ricart kindly suggests to me in a letter that the two panels might embody a collaboration of J i m e n e z with Bermejo in a retable of which the central compartment would be the effigy of St. Anthony Abbot in all probability by the latter that has passed from the Romulo Bosch Collection at Barcelona into the Museum of Catalan Art. 1 1 T h e variation in the conception of the saint between the picture in the Museum and the Torello panels is no bar to the theory, since even a single painter not infrequently employed in the cult-figure in the main compartment of an altarpiece a type diverse from that which he used for the same saint in the subordinate, narrative sections. Nor need we reject Gudiol's hypothesis because the St. Anthony in the Museum does not wear one of the embossed haloes demanded by Aragonese taste, for, although Bermejo generally conformed to this taste in the works done in Aragon, he did not employ such a halo in the principal compartment of his outstanding achievement in the region, the Sto. Domingo de Silos of the Prado, and actually in this instance violated the terms of the contract so far as to exclude embossings from the vestments. 1 2 It might seem strange that the characteristic Aragonese haloes of raised stucco are used in the secondary parts, the pieces of the Torello Collection, and not for the great and conspicuous chief compartment; but this difference could be elucidated by the supposition that Bermejo allowed his Aragonese assistant to indulge his own predilections. Gudiol supports his assumption with the belief that he discerns the hand of Bermejo here and there even in the Torello panels; but in this I fail to follow him, and indeed I can see no reason or concrete proof whatsoever for predicating that they come from the retable of the St. Anthony in the Museum rather than from some other altarpiece of the hermit in which J i m e n e z painted also the principal figure.'3 T h e r e is even a slight possibility that Bermejo did not execute the St. Anthony in Aragon but during his 10

11 12

Vol. V I I I , p. 55 and fig. 18.

Ibid., p. 707 and fig. 335.

Vol. V , p. 1 1 6 . F o r instance the example at Luna, if Jimenez is really its author: vol. V I I I , p. 1 3 2 . 13

APPENDIX

394

sojourn in Valencia, 1 4 where he would not have had any Aragonese collaborator. If Jimenez did the narrative panels of St. Anthony, Bernat seems surely to have painted a seated Magdalene, a fragment from a predella, in an unnamed private collection at Madrid, since she possesses one of the clearest examples of a kind of countenance distinguishing his production from that of his comrade ( F i g . 1 6 2 ) . T o the renderings of the Crucifixion among Bermejo's Aragonese followers that may derive from a treatment or treatments by the master himself, 15 there must be added a large 16 panel once in the L a n g e n Collection, Munich ( F i g . 1 6 3 ) , which repeats with only a very f e w , minor variations the version in the retable of Blesa 1 7 by Jimenez and Bernat in partnership. I t is, however, again to the latter that the types and somewhat inferior skill of the L a n g e n panel would appear definitely to point. THE

ALFAJARIN

MASTER

Since the style of this outstanding Aragonese follower of B e r m e j o is so distinctive as to be easy to recognize, it does not require any prolonged examination of a panel in the Weissberger Collection at Madrid to realize that w e are in the presence of his craft ( F i g . 1 6 4 ) . St. Sebastian, as the central or at least a principal figure 1 from a retable, stands in front of one of the Master's characteristic and complicated late Gothic thrones, several specimens of which I have illustrated in volume V I I I . T h e face accords with a type that the artist employs for youthful persons of both sexes, framed in one of his luxuriant bursts of curled tresses, as in the case of the St. John Evangelist in the Brimo Collection, Paris. 2 E v e n the eyes stare out at us with something of the almost phrenetic intensity that he often affects. T h e embossed, ringed halo of the Aragonese school, though injured by time, is still visible. T h e St. Sebastian at Corella, which I have wished, albeit without absolute conviction, to assign to the A l f a j a r i n M a s ter, 3 is in general quite differently conceived, and yet he rejoices in the same kind of dandified chevelure. J U A N DE LA ABADIA

W i t h characteristic Aragonese liberality D o n Ricardo del A r c o has included in letters to me information about this Aragonese painter ( w h o m w e used to have to call the A l m u d e v a r Master) beyond the facts that I have listed in volume I X , 1 and he has subsequently published the additional 14 15 16 17 1 2 3 1

Vol. I X , p. 822. See above, p. 352 1.57 metres in height by 1.30 in width. Vol. V I I I , pp. 91 ff. T h e height of the panel is about three feet. Vol. V I I I , fig. 70. Ibid., fig. 76. Pp. 892-893.

APPENDIX

395

items in the Archivo espanol de arte, X X ( 1 9 4 7 ) , 2 2 2 . T h e exact date of Juan's destroyed retable of St. Peter at Biescas turns out to be 1 4 9 3 . On August 4, 1 5 0 8 , he gave his receipt for payment for retables, likewise now lost, that he had done at Aso de Sobremonte 2 (also northeast of J a c a ) . T h e master made a will on August 29, 1 5 0 3 , but he survived, as we have

FIG. 162. M A R T i N B E R N A T . T H E M A G D A L E N E . P R I V A T E COLLECTION, MADRID {Photo. Archivo

Mas)

just noted, at least five years more and is not definitely registered as long or recently deceased until June 1 5 , 1 5 1 3 . 3 For some reason or other he was at the town of Nueno (north of Huesca) when he made out the receipt for the Aso retables, in which document, furthermore, he is described as then a resident of Pertusa (southeast of Huesca), although generally in the records he appears as a citizen of Huesca itself. Don Ricardo suggests that the presence of the artist at Nueno and Pertusa should perhaps be explained by commissions for paintings in the towns, and more specifically he ascribes to him the 2 In his Catalogo monumental of Huesca, p. 308, Del Arco states that the remains of a Gothic retable in an ermita at Aso perished in the civil war. 3 See my vol. I X , p. 893.

FIG. 163.

M A R T I N B E R N A T ( ?). CRUCIFIXION. F O R M E R L Y IN T H E LANGEN COLLECTION, MUNICH (Courtesy of the Frick Art Reference

Library)

FIG. 164. T H E A L F A J A R I N M A S T E R . ST. S E B A S T I A N . W E I S S B E R G E R COLLECTION, M A D R I D (Courtesy of the owner)

APPENDIX

398

retable f r o m the parish church at N u e n o now in the Archaeological M u seum at M a d r i d . W e have found 4 that the centre of the retable, with the effigy of the presumptive St. Martin and the Crucifixion above, is the w o r k of an earlier Aragonese painter, but the numerous surrounding panels prove to be in fact, on stylistic evidence, indubitable achievements of J u a n de la Abadia. 5 T h e two sacred personages honored in these further panels are St. A n d r e w and, with an extraordinary but not unparalleled 6 iconographical juxtaposition as only on a par with the Apostle, O u r L o r d , w h o m w e should have expected to hold the principal space occupied by St. Martin. I t is in the phase of the standing Salvator M u n d i that Christ is represented in the panel at the right beside St. M a r t i n , and round about Him are smaller compartments with scenes from His life on earth, the Nativity, Epiphany, Flight into E g y p t , and Transfiguration. T h e erect figure of St. A n d r e w balances Him at the left, and the Apostle is also accompanied by four narrative episodes which occur in other Spanish retables dedicated to him. 7 T h e themes are his dragging through the streets of M u r g u n d i a , the encounter at Nicaea with the demons in the shape of dogs, his resuscitation of his forty disciples f r o m drowning, and his revelation of the demoniac character of a w o m a n w h o m a bishop is entertaining. T h e somewhat unusual semicircular shape of the altarpiece leaves spaces for the introduction of Gabriel and the Virgin of the Annunciation h a l f - w a y up on either side. F r o m the predella six saints have survived, seated on the pavements against parapets. T h e four virgin martyrs are easily recognized, reading from left to right L u c y , Ursula, Barbara, and Catherine, but the identification of the two old men with staffs w h o intervene between the pairs of virgins is a more difficult problem. T h e one next to Barbara, whose staff seems to flower at the end, is probably St. Joseph, and his companion may thus be guessed St. J o a c h i m ; but it is not impossible that w e should rather see in the latter St. Anthony Abbot. Since the carved wooden frame of the sections by J u a n de la Abadia is carefully adapted to the earlier pieces and since the relegation of Christ to a secondary position was apparently imposed by the necessities of the case and would not have been devised by a modern arranger of the conglomerate retable, the likelihood is that the first painter never went further than the central part or that his lateral sections, if he ever did them, were almost at once destroyed in some w a y and that J u a n himself put together the new structure when he had completed his additions. A large panel 8 of St. Sebastian, which appeared at the sale of the E . Gaillard Collection at Paris in February, 1 9 0 4 , and must have been origi4

See a b o v e , p.

5

See a b o v e ,

6

C f . the consignment of the M a d o n n a a n d C h i l d to a subordinate situation in a

fig.

313. 118.

retable of the school of P e d r o G a r c i a de B e n a b a r r e , discussed in v o l u m e V I I , p . ?

A s in the e x a m p l e in the M e t r o p o l i t a n

Museum,

New

York,

b y the

308.

Catalan

painter, the Roussillon M a s t e r (see vols. I I , p. 4 3 2 , a n d V I I , p. 7 7 7 ) , a n d another b y the St. N i c h o l a s M a s t e r at Ventosilla ( v o l . I V , p. 2 6 0 ) . 8

T h e dimensions are 1 . 6 5 metres b y . 7 5 .

399

A P P E N D I X

nally the main c o m p a r t m e n t or one of the principal sections in a retable ( F i g . 1 6 5 ) , displays an embossed foliate pattern in the g o l d b a c k g r o u n d that is of precisely the sort constantly employed by J u a n de la A b a d i a and c a n n o t be duplicated exactly in the w o r k s of any of his rivals in A r a g o n or Catalonia.

W e are thus f o r t h w i t h directed to him as the author, and the

rest of the evidence can easily be reconciled with the attribution.

N o n e of

his other productions closely repeats the St. Sebastian, but neither should w e immediately perceive that he executed the central St. C a t h e r i n e of the church of the M a g d a l e n a at H u e s c a , 9 w e r e it not that the lateral c o m p a r t m e n t s reveal his m o r e customary types.

A s a m a t t e r of fact, not only do

the draughtsmanship and other technical aspects c o n f o r m to his habitual procedure, but, if w e should take the countenance of the St. M i c h a e l in the B a r c e l o n a M u s e u m

10

and f r a m e it in the locks of the y o u n g e s t M a g u s

in the E p i p h a n y of one of the retables at A l m u d e v a r , 1 1 w e should arrive at a replica of St. Sebastian's head. B E R N A R D O DE A R A S ( t h e P o m p i e n

Master)

O n e of the f e w satisfactions that I myself h a v e felt as compensations for the tedious mass of dull and pedantic research with w h i c h these v o l u m e s have been filled is the periodical discovery of the actual appellations of p e r sonalities w h o m I had isolated and n i c k n a m e d M a s t e r s of T h i s or T h a t . A n early r e v i e w e r of m y e f f o r t s expressed doubt as to the value of e m barrassing the history of art with such a n o n y m o u s personalities, but I trust that he has g r o w n less sceptical as in the later v o l u m e s I h a v e g r a d u a l l y been able to record the definite identification of a n u m b e r of t h e m .

Among

those to e m e r g e most recently is J u a n de la A b a d i a , w h o m w e have just studied, and by one of the strange coincidences that sometimes occur in historical investigations this disclosure has immediately been f o l l o w e d by the revelation of the n a m e of an a n o n y m o u s M a s t e r f r o m the same

town,

H u e s c a , and f r o m exactly the same phase of Spanish painting, the division of the A r a g o n e s e school ultimately deriving f r o m the C a t a l a n H u g u e t and his circle. T h e painter is the P o m p i e n M a s t e r , 1 w h o s e real n a m e turns out to be B e r n a r d o de A r a s .

I t is perhaps not so strange that the n a m e s of

t w o painters of H u e s c a should have been unearthed at almost the same time, since both discoveries are to be credited to the eminent archivist and historian of the city, D o n R i c a r d o del A r c o . K i n d l y i n f o r m e d by him in a letter that he had f o u n d a B e r n a r d o de A r a s to be the author of the retable at P o m p i e n , I had the temerity to ask him for the d o c u m e n t a r y proof, 2 w h i c h he most generously caused to be copied for m e and w h i c h fully and patently demonstrates B e r n a r d o de A r a s 9 10 11 1

V o l . V I I I , p. 4 4 8 . Ibid., fig. 209. Ibid., p. 4 4 7 . V o l u m e V I I I , p. 380.

S u b s e q u e n t l y D e l A r c o s u m m a r i z e d the Archivo esfanol de arte, X X ( 1 9 4 7 ) , 2 1 8 . 2

documents

on

Bernardo

de A r a s

in

Fic. 165. J U A N D E L A A B A D f A . ST. S E B A S T I A N . F O R M E R L Y IN T H E G A I L L A R D C O L L E C T I O N , PARIS (Courtesy of the Frick Art Reference Library)

APPENDIX

401

to have executed this retable, the work on which I had based the title of the Pompien Master. T h e documents, 3 in Spanish, consist of the legal preambles to the contract, the actual, detailed contract with Bernardo fortunately specifying all the retable's subjects, a deed having to do with the financial obligations of the communal council in connection with the enterprise, and Bernardo's receipt for final payment. T h e contract is dated January 26, 1 4 6 1 , and the receipt February 27, 1463. T h e commission is given to the artist by the council in conjunction with the lord of the town, Gilbert Redon, w h o had the same name as the founder of the family's seigniory at the beginning of the fourteenth century. 4 Virtually the entire retable, like so much else in the province of Huesca, perished in the Spanish civil war, but it had so far been photographed, as well as studied by others and me, that its correspondence with the terms of the contract is absolutely clear. A t the centre are demanded the enthroned Virgin and Child, receiving the homage of angels, and a surmounting piece of the Coronation; flanking effigies of Sts. John Baptist and Sebastian; and, above each of them, a scene from his life. T h e choice of these scenes is left in the contract to the arbitrament of Gilbert Redon, w h o was shown by the retable, as long as it existed, to have decided upon the martyrdoms of the two saints. T h e Crucifixion specified for the central pinnacle was lost before I studied the retable. T h e predella 5 was to consist of: a tabernacle in the middle adorned with paintings of the dead Christ, the mourning Virgin, and St. J o h n ; and at the sides, figures of Sts. Peter, L a w r e n c e , Vincent, Quiteria, Agatha, and Catherine. N o parts of the predella were attached to the retable in the church after it became generally known, but D e l A r c o , in his Catalogo monumental of the province of Huesca, 6 states that the ladies w h o now own the property of Pompien possess " f o u r small panels of the base," which, I take it, mean compartments of the predella and thus would be the retable's sad, sole surviving fragments. T h e other works authenticated by style as productions of the Pompien Master can now, of course, likewise be registered under the name of Bernardo de Aras. Pedro Zuera in his will of 1 4 6 9 7 mentions a debt owed him by Bernardo, and Del A r c o has also sent me a copy of a notary's entry of M a r c h 28, 8 1 4 7 1 , recording the marriage of our painter, then 3 F o r the most part the painter's surname is spelled in the documents as DARAS, but I take it that this is a shorter f o r m ( a n d p r o n u n c i a t i o n ) f o r DE ARAS, the w a y in w h i c h it is written in the stately first sentence of the actual contract. In the receipt it appears as DARIAS, but, t a k i n g into account the loose spelling· o f the period w h i c h disfigures the rustic P o m p i e n documen's even to a greater degree than usual, I c l i n g to the m u c h more frequent occurrences w i t h o u t the I.

R i c a r d o del A r c o , Catalogo monumental, Provinc':a de Huesca, 166. T h e w o r d banco o r d i n a r i l y applied in the contracts of the period to a predella is used f o r the body of the retable, and the predella is described as el fie. 6 P. 168. 7 See above, p. 3 1 3 . 8 T h e date is so g i v e n in the document copied f o r me, but in his above-mentioned article D e l A r c o puts the m a r r i a g e on A p r i l 26, 1 4 7 1 . 4

s

402

A P P E N D I X

a w i d o w e r , to a l a d y w h o w a s herself a relict, L e o n o r G a r c i a . activity is c a r r i e d back as f a r as J u n e Serrano y Sanz,9

which

H i s artistic

1 0 , 1 4 5 0 , in a notice published by

describes h i m as a l r e a d y

a painter d w e l l i n g

at

H u e s c a a n d r e c o r d s that on this date he n a m e d a g o l d s m i t h , G u i l l e n E v e r a r t (also spelled A v e r a r d ) , as his a g e n t at S a r a g o s s a . The

documents about the P o m p i e n

retable b e t r a y , f u r t h e r m o r e ,

how

h a z a r d o u s it is, as I h a v e o f t e n w a r n e d in these v o l u m e s , to a t t e m p t to date a p a i n t i n g w i t h e x a c t a c c u r a c y o n the basis of d e g r e e of d e v e l o p m e n t w i t h i n a g i v e n style.

O f this f a l l a c y I w a s m y s e l f g u i l t y w h e n I assigned

the P o m p i e n M a s t e r to the c o n c l u s i o n of the

fifteenth

century,

10

finding

a reason in the consideration that he s e e m e d to e m b o d y the sort of j a d e d a n d w h i m s i c a l attitude t o w a r d s the A r a g o n e s e imitation of C a t a l a n a c h i e v e m e n t w h i c h w o u l d s t i g m a t i z e the e n d of a tradition.

I t turns out

that

instead he a d o p t e d the t e n d e n c y to f a n c i f u l stylization at a surprisingly e a r l y m o m e n t in the second h a l f of the Zeitgeist

fifteenth

c e n t u r y , n o t because of

but p r o b a b l y t h o u g h his o w n p e r s o n a l artistic l e a n i n g s .

the

Moreover,

the f a c t t h a t B e r n a r d o de A r a s w a s p a i n t i n g in his characteristic m a n n e r by at least 1 4 6 1

r e n d e r s it d o u b t f u l w h e t h e r , as I h a d h i t h e r t o t h o u g h t , he

c o u l d h a v e a c q u i r e d the f u n d a m e n t a l s of the m a n n e r w i t h w h i c h he t o y e d f r o m M a r t i n de Soria, w h o does n o t e m e r g e to the l i g h t of history until 1 4 7 I, a l t h o u g h , of course, it is quite possible that he h a d t h e n been p r o d u c i n g f o r s o m e ten or

fifteen

years.

I n a n y case w e m u s t h e n c e f o r t h

entertain

an a l t e r n a t i v e t h e o r y of the e d u c a t i o n of B e r n a r d o de A r a s , n a m e l y , t h a t i n d e p e n d e n t l y of M a r t i n de Soria he m i g h t h a v e l e a r n e d his lessons directly f r o m H u g u e t o r f r o m a n e x a m i n a t i o n of his w o r k s .

H e w o u l d h a v e been

o n e of the C a t a l a n M a s t e r ' s v e r y first f o l l o w e r s in A r a g o n , if in the earliest y e a r to w h i c h w e c a n t r a c e his artistic a c t i v i t y , 1 4 5 0 , he w a s a l r e a d y w o r k i n g in the m o d e s of H u g u e t r a t h e r t h a n as y e t in the A r a g o n e s e

"inter-

n a t i o n a l " style. J U A N DE B O R G O N A A N D HIS S C H O O L

J. M . Azcärate

1

has published a m o s t i n t e r e s t i n g sketch of M a y ,

1525,

by J u a n de B o r g o n a f o r a s c u l p t u r e d m o n u m e n t that w a s n e v e r a c t u a l l y carried o u t , a h u g e a n d elaborate retable, m a i n l y d e v o t e d to the o v e r the h i g h a l t a r of the c h u r c h of the g r e a t m o n a s t e r y of

Virgin,

Guadalupe.

T h e r e is n o reason to t h i n k that J u a n himself w a s to d o a n y of the c a r v i n g , b u t the sketch does a d d a n o t h e r a c t i v i t y , t h e d e s i g n i n g of s c u l p t u r e d a l t a r pieces, to the a b u n d a n t e v i d e n c e t h a t w e amassed in v o l u m e I X

demonstrat-

i n g that he w a s a j a c k of m a n y trades. T h e vital c o n c e r n of a conscientious c r a f t s m a n w i t h m a t t e r s of t e c h n i q u e a n d m e d i u m is s h o w n by notes on the back of the sketch e m b o d y i n g his s t r o n g r e c o m m e n d a t i o n of pine of C u e n c a f o r the s c u l p t u r e as m o r e d u r a b l e t h a n o t h e r available w o o d s . mission illustrates also his p r o m i n e n c e in the artistic milieu 9

10 1

Revista de archives,

Vol. VIII, p. 381. Archivo

XXXVI (1917), 449.

esfanol ie arte,

XXI (1948), 55.

The

com-

of his d a y , f o r

A P P E N D I X

403

it brings him directly under the august patronage of the Emperor Charles V , to whom it is stated that the sketch is to be submitted for approval and whose heraldic insignia and even kneeling figure were to be comprised in the structure. It is furthermore provided that this figure shall be balanced by a corresponding portrait of his future Empress, whom he did not marry until the next year on March 1 0 , 1 5 2 6 . Among the very few works of J u a n de Borgona to be seen outside of Spain, we must reckon two panels belonging to M r . Edward O. Korany of New Y o r k displaying the standing effigies of a canonized pope and of St. Quiteria (with a pair of mad dogs as an emblem instead of the usual single hound) ( F i g . 1 6 6 ) . 2 T h e only question of attribution that arises is whether the author is Juan de Borgona himself or one of his pupils, such as especially Antonio de Comontes, but the superior craft and the nature of the chiaroscuro compel me to cast my vote for the former alternative. T h e figure of the pope constitutes a prototype for the St. Clement by Correa de Vivar in the cycle from San Martin de Valdeiglesias. 3 Since I have finally obtained good photographs of the panels from the life of the Virgin in the chapel of S. Roque in the cathedral of Cuenca which I registered in volume I X 4 as executed by an anonymous follower of J u a n de Borgona, it has been possible for me to make comparisons with the productions of his several disciples, especially those active in the same general region, but the result has been that the author does not seem to me identical with any of them, not even with the painters at Alcocer and Muduex. T h e rather unusual composition for the Presentation of Our Lady ( F i g . 1 6 7 ) may stem remotely from Juan's fresco in the Sala Capitular of the cathedral at Toledo. T h e painted panels that form with sculptured images of the Madonna and the Saviour a retable in the Diocesan Museum of Cuenca which was shown as No. 2 2 2 in the Barcelona Exposition of 1 9 2 9 derive more distantly from the school established by Juan de Borgona in Toledo and were executed by a bungler who had perhaps come into contact with the achievements, in the school, of Correa de Vivar. FERNANDO DEL

RINCON

T w o significant facts in the biography of this master have emerged in a legal document published by A . Represa in Fasciculos X L — X L I I (1945— 1 9 4 6 ) 1 of the periodical that becomes more and more valuable for our understanding of Spanish art, the Boletin del Seminario de Estudios de Arte y Arqueologia of the University of Valladolid. T h e document, dated 2 T h e measurements of each panel are 4 1 inches in height by 1 6 ^ in width. T h e o w n e r kindly tells me that they were o r i g i n a l l y accompanied by t w o further, corresponding· panels w h i c h depict "saints in the costume of p i l g r i m s " but have n o w strayed f r o m his k n o w l e d g e . 3

V o l . I X , p. 3 0 8 .

" P . 234. 1 Pp. 1 6 1 - 1 6 2 .

FIG. Ι66. JUAN DE BORGONA. A CANONIZED POPE AND ST. QUITERIA. KORANY COLLECTION, NEW YORK {Courtesy

of the

owner)

FIG. 167.

SCHOOL OF J U A N D E BORGONA. P R E S E N T A T I O N OF T H E VIRGIN. C A T H E D R A L , CUENCA {Photo. Pando)

APPENDIX

4O6

J u n e 26, 1 5 1 6 , surprises us first with the information that, most exceptionally in Spain of the period, a w o m a n of the t o w n of H u e t e , M a r i G u t i e r r e z de V a l d e l o m a r , w a s exercising the profession of p o l y c h r o m y of sculpture, and it then tells us of her complaint that F e r n a n d o del R i n c o n , in his office of overseer of artistic activity in the r e a l m , had refused to examine her w o r k by reason of the personal enmity that he and his relatives at H u e t e entertained t o w a r d s her.

W e thus learn that he continued to p e r f o r m the

duties of this office, w h i c h w e already k n e w that he held u n d e r K i n g F e r d i n a n d , a f t e r the death of the sovereign on J a n u a r y 2 3 , 1 5 1 6 , and before in 1 5 1 7 he f o r m a l l y petitioned the n e w m o n a r c h , C h a r l e s V , to be retained in his functions. 2 T h e second fact that the d o c u m e n t reveals is that he w a s a native of H u e t e , since it definitely so denominates him and thus explains w h y some of his kin there lived. I n the records hitherto unearthed he had been described as a citizen of G u a d a l a j a r a , but H u e t e , t h o u g h in the province of C u e n c a , lies not v e r y far south of G u a d a l a j a r a , w h i c h , as one of the important centres near his birthplace, w o u l d h a v e been a logical place in w h i c h eventually to establish himself. ANTONIO

DE

COMONTES

B y an odd coincidence there have c o m e to m y attention practically at the same time t w o small triptychs of the Passion, one virtually a replica of the other and both apparently executed by A n t o n i o de C o m o n t e s , w h o m in v o l u m e I X w e succeeded in differentiating f r o m his intimately affiliated master, J u a n de B o r g o f i a . T h e y have the interest both of constituting Spanish examples of the triptych, a f o r m of altarpiece m u c h m o r e f r e quently used by the F l e m i n g s , and of disclosing in A n t o n i o unexpected gifts of composition. I will describe first the specimen in the T o r e l l o C o l lection, B a r c e l o n a ( F i g . 1 6 8 ) . T h e main subject in the centre is the L a s t Supper, prettily set in a loggia and f r a m e d at the f r o n t by the sort of supports e n d i n g in zafatas and above by the sort of frieze for w h i c h J u a n de B o r g o n a established the precedent in the frescoing of the Sala Capitular in the cathedral of T o l e d o . 1 I n the fashion of P e d r o B e r r u g u e t e , profiles of a helmeted g e n t l e m a n and his w i f e decorate the faces of the zapatas, perhaps intended as portraits of the donors, and it is probably their escutcheon — for m e , u n r e c o g n i z a b l e — by w h i c h the middle of the frieze is embellished. T h e frieze separates the L a s t Supper f r o m a higher register in w h i c h the C r u c i f i x i o n is represented and set bet w e e n the A g o n y in the G a r d e n and the Resurrection, these t w o not m a r k e d o f f by partitions and in smaller dimensions. T h e triptych is so shaped as to end at the top in a small, protuberant square in w h i c h the body of O u r L o r d upon the cross is elevated above the other figures. T h e left w i n g is devoted to the B e t r a y a l and the right to the L a m e n t a t i o n over the D e a d Christ, but at the outer edges of these rise t w o little pieces des i g ^ d to cover the protuberant square w h e n the triptych is closed and 2

V o l . I X , pp. 260 and

1

V o l . I X , p.

181.

265.

FIG. Ι68. ANTONIO DE COMONTES(R). TRIPTYCH. COLLECTION, BARCELONA (Photo. Archivo Mas)

TORELL0

4-0 8

APPENDIX

each therefore half the square's width, the one at the left depicting the sacrifice of Isaac and the other representing Melchizedek offering bread and wine in the presence of Abraham, as prototypes, in the Old T e s t a ment, respectively of the Crucifixion and the Eucharist. In the predella the actors are reduced to busts, forming at the centre a long, horizontal, effective composition of the E n t r y into Jerusalem and consisting, in the wings, of Gabriel and M a r y of the Annunciation. Although the Torello triptych obtrudes one of the cases in which it is a delicate matter to discriminate between the claims of J u a n de Borgofia and Antonio de Comontes to authorship, the types, to my eyes, incorporate rather the latter's slight alterations of the former's models, and some of the compositions are scarcely varied from his other treatments of the themes. T h e fact, however, that the Last Supper practically repeats the renderings in the principal retable in S. Andres, T o l e d o , and in the altarpiece at Fuente el Sauz 2 cannot be used as proof that the painter is Antonio, for all three renderings depend closely upon the version in the centre of J u a n de Borgoiia's triptych in the sacristy of the T o l e d o cathedral. 3 A comparison with this version, however, pretty clearly brings out the superiority of J u a n ' s own craft. In the Torello triptych the composition for the Betrayal at Fuente el Sauz, with the detail of the soldier throwing the rope over Christ's head, is finely adapted to the narrow, vertical shape of the left wing by moving the episode of St. Peter cutting off the ear of the high priest's servant to a lower level of the sloping ground, and correspondingly in the Lamentation of the right wing the Magdalene kissing the Saviour's foot is transferred to a spot beneath the main group. T h e virtual replica, manifestly by the same artist and formerly in the Collection of the Baron de K u f f n e r at Dioszegh, Hungary, was sold at auction in the Parke-Bernet Galleries, N e w Y o r k , on November 1 8 , 1 9 4 8 . 4 T h e principal variations consist in the substitution of Latin inscriptions of the Gloria in excelsis and the Nicene Creed for the Betrayal and L a m e n t a tion respectively (although the pinnacles of Abraham and Melchizedek are retained) and the insertion of a section of the words in the canon of the mass in place of the frieze with the escutcheon in the T o r e l l o example. T h e K u f f n e r triptych thus affords a prototype of the cards with parts of the text of the mass now placed upon altars for the assistance of the celebrant. T h e heraldic shield of the different but likewise unidentified donor of this triptych is twice included, upheld by paired futti, at the spots where in the predella of the Torello replica the actors in the Annunciation are introduced. T h e very slight changes in the compositions of the sacred themes are negligible, and even the E n t r y into Jerusalem in the predella is again confined within the scope of half-lengths. F o r the attribution of a Crucifixion of St. Peter the Apostle in a private collection at Barcelona ( F i g . 1 6 9 ) the choice must lie between J u a n de z

3 Ibid., fig. 86. Ibid., fig·. 58. The dimensions are 24Y? inches in height by 2 3 ^ in width — approximately, it is probable, those also of the specimen in the Torello Collection. 4

FIG. 169. ANTONIO DE COMONTES(?). MARTYRDOM OF ST. PETER. PRIVATE COLLECTION, BARCELONA (Photo.

Archivo

Mas)

4io

A P P E N D I X

B o r g o n a and one of his two followers, Antonio de Comontes and J u a n C o r r e a de Vivar. T h e links with the latter of these followers seem less intimate than with the former, but the decision between Antonio de Comontes and J u a n de B o r g o n a himself is again a more ticklish one. O n the whole, the balance tips in f a v o r of considering the panel a w o r k of Antonio in which he reproduces his teacher's manner more exactly than was his wont, with less of his own tendency to an incipient sfumatezza and more of J u a n de B o r g o n a ' s harder draughtsmanship. N o t only does a technical performance somewhat inferior to J u a n ' s ordinary standard argue rather for his disciple, but Antonio's productions furnish many analogous physical types. T h e soldier at the extreme right, for instance, is the same kind of individual as the R o m a n watching the casting of lots in the Valladolid Crucifixion, 5 the bravo with his hand at Christ's throat in the Betrayal of the retable at Fuente el Sauz, or the St. L u k e in the retable of the Museo de S. Vicente, T o l e d o ; 6 and the spectator at the extreme left in the Barcelona panel is hardly differentiated from the Apostle in a corresponding location in the L a s t Supper at Fuente el Sauz. 7 W i t h the addition of two certain works by Antonio de Comontes ( F i g . 1 7 0 ) the L ä z a r o Collection at M a d r i d still further justifies its prestige as one of the great repositories for the study of Spanish art. T h e figure of a Benedictine abbot, probably St. Benedict himself, is authenticated as a production of Antonio by its virtual identity with the St. Benedict (making the sign of the cross over the poisoned cup) in the left, smaller retable in S. A n d r e s at T o l e d o . 8 T h e painter seems even to have used a single model for the pastoral staff in both instances. T h e second panel in the L a z a r o Collection, depicting St. Peter M a r t y r , displays the same general type of human being, whether or not deriving from the altarpiece to which the abbot once belonged. Furthermore, between the Dominican and the landscape there is interposed a textile of precisely the material employed for the backgrounds of the Apostles in the predella of the main retable in S. Andres. 9 J U A N C O R R E A DE V I V A R

O f the series of panels in the parish church of the village of Maqueda in the province of T o l e d o west of the city itself, t w o , the Birth of the Virgin and the Epiphany, are manifestly due to C o r r e a , whose principal achievements indeed derive f r o m the monasteries of San M a r t i n de V a l deiglesias and Guisando, just south of which M a q u e d a lies. Such aged masculine types as St. J o a c h i m in the Birth of the Virgin ( F i g . 1 7 1 ) and the kneeling M a g u s plainly reveal the master's hand, and the feminine heads, particularly those of the w o m a n w a r m i n g the cloth at the parturition and the Virgin of the Epiphany, are often paralleled in C o r r e a ' s output, for example in O u r L a d y as she is represented in the Adoration 5 6 7

Vol. IX, fig. 85. Ibid., fig. 83. Ibid., fig. 86.

8 9

Ibid., p. 277. Ibid., fig. 78.

Pi >