Workshop of LUIS DE MORALES "El divino" (Badajoz, 1509 - Alcántara, 1586).
"Pietà".
Oil on panel.
Size: 44 x 30 cm; 51 x 38 cm (frame).
The Virgin Mary embraces the inert body of Jesus, with a sad expression; Christ's olive complexion harmonises with his mother's gesture. Despite the fact that Christ is dead, his face retains the signs of torture: his mouth half-open, the drops of blood trickling down his forehead. These features introduce us to the great drama expressed in this image in which a mother picks up the inert body of her son. The artist shows us a concentrated scene, with both protagonists in the foreground, showing the difference between life, which can be seen in the Virgin's tense hands, and death, reflected in Christ's body, which falls under its own weight. This purity and mysticism reveal the influence of Luis de Morales (Badajoz, 1515-1586), whose elegant, schematic style manages to convey the drama in a simple, superbly executed manner. The iconography of the Virgin of Sorrows or Dolorosa does not appear in the Gospels; it is a creation that arose from the exaltation of pathos at the end of the Middle Ages. However, the episode would always take place after the death of Christ, either with her Son on the cross, after the Descent from the Cross (with the body on her lap), or with the pain suffered by a mother in solitude. In this case it is the suffering of the martyrdom and death of her son.
Luis de Morales, a painter of great quality and marked personality, is perhaps the best of the Spanish painters of the second half of the 16th century, with the exception of El Greco. His training poses serious problems, although Palomino makes him a disciple of the Flemish painter Pedro de Campaña, who lived in Seville between 1537 and 1563. Certainly the meticulousness and detail of his brushstrokes and the conception of the landscape are Flemish in origin, and most of his iconic themes are of late medieval tradition. But he painted human types and used a colouring and sfumato related to the Lombard tradition of a Bernardino Luini and a Cristoforo Solario, whom he probably met not on a trip to Italy but possibly to Valencia, in order to catch up with the innovations of the Leonardesque Fernando Yáñez and Fernando de Llanos and the Raphaelesque Vicente and Juan Masip. However, the most personal aspect of his painting lies in the tormented, almost hysterical atmosphere in which his figures breathe, more focused on an intense inner life than on action, full of melancholy and ascetic renunciation and characteristic of the climate of tense religiosity imposed in 16th-century Spain by the reform movements, from the less orthodox Erasmianism and Alumbradism to the more genuine mysticism and Trentism. Morales, called the Divine by his first biographer, Antonio Palomino, because he painted only religious subjects with great delicacy and subtlety, reached his peak from 1550 to 1570, when he painted numerous altarpieces, He painted numerous altarpieces, triptychs and isolated canvases that were widely distributed because they satisfied the popular religiosity of the time, although some of his canvases contain quotations and information of literary erudition, the result of his contact with enlightened clients, primarily the bishops of the diocese of Badajoz, in whose service he worked. On the other hand, his presence in the monastery of El Escorial, called by Philip II, is not documented, although it seems that the latter acquired some of his works to give them as gifts. The enormous production and the continuous demand for his most frequent and popular iconographic themes obliged him to maintain a large workshop in which his two sons, Cristóbal and Jerónimo, collaborated; a workshop responsible for many copies that circulate and are still considered to be Morales's autograph works.