by An early talented artist, barely from his teenagers, was commissioned in 1620 to paint the portrait of an fearless nun, which led his hometown Sevilla on the way to one of the most distant outpost of the huge empire of Spain.
His painting reveals a clever, impressive woman in the late middle age who closes a book in her left hand while wearing a crucifix, almost as if it were a weapon, right.
Christ is close to the viewer, his left leg has easily attached himself to the instrument of his death through four nails: a hand surface; One through every foot.
Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez would become the most famous artist of the Golden Age of Spain. The 66-year-old nun, mother Jerónima de la Fuente, sailed to Mexico and crossed the country to lead another ship over the Pacific, and founded the first monastery in the Philippines, where she would die in dedication and physical penance 10 years later.
Velázquez ‘portrait of mother Jerónima is more than 400 years later, for the first time in public. In addition, it will be a bronze cast of the body of Christ, from which it was assumed that it was modeled by Michelangelo, which inspired the nun from the nun. From March 15, the works will be exhibited at Tefaf Art Fair Fair in Maastricht, the Netherlands, where they are offered for sale.
The 25 cm high bronze body was at a price of € 1.8 million (€ 1.5 million). Stuart Lochhead Sculpture, the company behind sales, does not give estimates for the price of the Velázquez, which was kept in a monastery in Toledo until it came into the hands of a family Madrid in the 1940s. But past prices tell their own history. Velázquez ‘portrait of Saintina was sold in 2007 for £ 8.4 million, while his painting by the Spanish Queen Isabel de Borbón received around 27.8 million GBP with around 27.8 million GBP at the beginning of the year.
According to Lochhead, Stuart Lochhead dizzy as the likely prices, says that the goal of the exhibition is to look at the side of Velázquez and Michelangelo and explore the stories behind the two works, not least that of the two women who inspired them.
Lochhead believes that Michelangelo’s close, platonic relationship with the poet and the noble Vittoria Colonna, Marchioness of Pescara, could have informed his design for the tender, anatomically detailed bronze of Christ. The couple connected to their common belief and love of art, and in 1540 Colonna gave him an edition of her poems. One of his verses – a reflection on how the saint can inform the creative – has deepened with her friend: “From now on, let the holy nails to my feathers and the precious blood my pure ink, my lined paper, the holy, lifeless body.”
While Michelangelo’s best -known marble sculptures were made, he also used wood and bronze. The statue of Christ, which was discovered in a private collection in San Sebastián a few years ago, reflects many of its designs, not least the bronze body in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, which is described as “according to a Michelangelo model”.
“It is also very similar to the big wooden body that he makes in Santo Spirito when he is still very young,” says Lochhead. “I think it is an issue and an idea that he has developed his whole life and that his relationship with Vittoria Colonna and his investigation of spirituality and religion summarized in his life at that moment. He keeps returning to this motif. “
A bronze line-up of Michelangelos Corpus-as well as in the Rome Workshop one of the students of the artist, the bronze founder Guglielmo Della Porta, came to Sevilla in 1597, with the kind permission of a well-known Spanish Silversmith. It turned out to be extremely popular and numerous casts in bronze and silver were shown, some of which were painted.
The Sevilla artist Francisco Pacheco, who mentions the line-up in his writings three times and paints a polychromatic version of it, was Velázquez ‘teacher and father-in-law, which it probably did that the younger man would have come across the model several times in his workshop.
The link raises a tempting question: Where did the crucifix come from in mother Jerónima’s hand from? “Was it yours who brought her?” asks Lochhead. “Or was it Pacheco’s? Was it always there in the workshop, so it got something that she handed over? “
In view of the behavior and the dedication of the nun, the dealer doubts that she would have been made to do everything she didn’t want to do. “It has this strength and strength,” he says of the portrait, of which another version is exhibited in the Prado in Madrid. “She is on this epic journey. But nobody knew if she would ever get there – or what she would do – before she was going. “
Lochhead believes that she has the crucifix in her hand and turns to the viewer that she wanted to show it.
It is averse to imagining more than whether the body in 1620 under the grip of the nun was the same line -up that arrived in Seville 23 years earlier: “It would be nice to believe that our body is the one on the cross, but …”
All he can say is that the line -up that is issued in Maastricht is too good to have been made in Spain at this time and to have to come from a workshop in Rome, probably from Della Porta. The design with its four nails would come back all over Spain and its empire and recurring in works by artists such as Francisco de Zubarán, José de Ribera and Francisco de Goya.
Lochhead considers it unlikely that the two works will stay together. “I am a little concern that someone will say:” I will buy the Velázquez and you can throw in the Michelangelo, “he says.” I don’t think the owner of Michelangelo would be too happy about it. It would be fantastic if [they were bought together]But the painting is such a powerful thing that I probably don’t see that. “
Whatever happens at the trade fair, the dealer hopes that the short time of the works in a specially constructed stood later this month the visitors will remind you that art – and the iconography transmitted therein – is deeply static and rarely static. It transmits its creators and partly belongs to those who inspire it.
“We can understand why these things have been done – their background story and who influenced them,” says Lochhead. “So we bring the influence of Vittoria Colonna and Jerónima into the creation of two works of art that they normally look at and say: ‘Well, these were made by the great artists and that is the end of history.’ But it is not. “
