Master of Saint George and the Princess. Zaragoza, circa 1460-1470
"The Prophet Zacharia"
Panel painting in tempera.
Measurements: 82 x 36 cm.
According to the report prepared by Dr. Alberto Velasco Gonzàlez on this painting, it is the previously unknown fragment of a reredos, which, due to its style, must be attributed to the Master of Saint George and the Princess, one of the most important painters of the late Gothic in the Aragon area. The panel, of rectangular and elongated format, is a fragment of an altarpiece dust cover with the representation of an almost full-length character in a three-quarter position. He wears a green tunic of which we can only see the sleeves, as it is covered with a red cape that opens at the sides. With his left arm he makes an explanatory or argumentative gesture, while with his right hand he holds the lower part of the cloak, which opens and reveals its white inner lining, where we can see the final part of an inscription, “[…]RIA".
In the area of ​​the shoulders the figure wears a piece of fabric, also white, which could be identified as the front part of a hood, while on the head he wears a pink cloth, as well as a type of black Phrygian cap. The prophet's face is striking due to its serene and concentrated expression, and he directs his gaze to the right. The especially prominent nose with a rounded tip is striking. The brown eyes are half-open, the lips separated by a characteristic union of black lines, and the ear almost hidden by the aforementioned cloth.
The expressiveness is reinforced through the pinkish skin tone on the cheek bones as well as the white brushstrokes which are arranged on the face to create the effect of light, especially in the area of the eyelids and nose, a feature which, as we will see, is unique to the painter.
The prophet is located in a neutral space that is determined by the golden background on which it is placed. The figure is also surrounded by golden masonry made up of two moulded lateral uprights and a pointed arch-shaped finial decorated with plant motifs in the interstices. A careful observation of these elements shows that only the uprights are original, while the upper arch and the corresponding moulding were the result of contemporary restoration. The back shows that the original support was made up of a single wooden plank, which was dyed red, although we do not know if it was originally so.
"As has already been pointed out" this is the fragment of a dust cover, the exterior moulding that usually covered the external perimeter of the Hispanic altarpieces of the late Middle Ages”. This was a particularly appropriate place, as well as the predella or entrecalles, to include, for example, the coat of arms of the patron of the work, images of saints, angels with instruments of the Passion, or, as in this case, duly identified Old Testament prophets with inscriptions alluding to their predictions or, directly, with their names.
These images of prophets were made to reinforce or certify what was shown in the main body of the altarpiece, since the prophets of the Old Law had predicted what was explained in the New Testament, the New Law.
In the Aragon area, one of the best examples to illustrate the representation of prophets as a complement to the Christological discourses of the body of the reredos can be found in the main altarpiece of the church of Ejea de los Caballeros, a work begun by Blasco de Grañén around 1438 and completed after the artist's death (in 1459) by members of his immediate circle or workshop. It is a piece with scenes from the life of Christ in the main body and a predella dedicated to the Passion, while there are eighteen prophets on the dust cover. Another interesting work, contemporary to this piece, is a well-known altarpiece predella that has long been related to the Catalan Jaume Huguet and his possible Aragonese period.
Undoubtedly, it is the work of an Aragonese painter who worked around 1460. Since it was first entered into the market, it has passed through different private hands… It depicts six prophets within circles, one of which is, precisely, Zechariah. It should be noted that the double predella, one normally dedicated to the Passion and the other to prophets, was a typical dual structure of late Gothic Aragonese altarpieces.
Finally, there is a small fragmentary tablet (30 x 26 cm) with a depiction of the prophet Daniel which is kept in the Prado Museum, which is not only relevant due to its iconography, but also because it is the work of the same painter who made the panel we have here.
Style and Attribution:
Stylistically, the Prophet Zechariah offers little doubt as to the artist who painted him. This is undoubtedly a work by the Master of Saint George and the Princess, one of the most interesting painters of the late Gothic period in Aragon.
Among the works currently attributed to him are close parallels that justify this attribution. The best of them, surely, is the aforementioned Prophet Daniel from the Prado Museum. The parallels that could be pointed out are many and diverse, such as, for example, the fact that the facial features are completely identical, even in such secondary details as the black lines that can be observed around the lips, or the flashes of light made with fine brush strokes. In white near the tear duct of the eyes and by the nose. We also see the same type of prominent nose, somewhat sharper in the case of Daniel, or the summary depiction of the ear that is mostly covered up. The painter’s characteristic half-open eyes are found in both cases, brown and with a marked black pupil, and there is also the same treatment of the flesh. Finally, we see that the way of representing the eyebrows is repeated, through short brushstrokes that define the hairs.
This confirmed identity also occurs in the painter’s best-known work, the panel of Saint George and the Princess which is kept in the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, where we detect an absolute coincidence in the styles previously noted. The same can be said for the two panels painted on both sides that were part of the same set, and which were kept in Berlin until 1945, when they were destroyed. In them we find different faces whose characteristics refer us directly to those of the Prophet Zechariah, as is the case of Saint Paul or to Saint John the Baptist.
We can also mention the Saint Sebastian currently kept Gaasbeek Castle (Lennik, Belgium), which also has a human figure similar to that of our Prophet Zechariah, with his ear half-hidden behind his hair, a rounded nose and a troubled look.
The painter: The Master of Saint George and the Princess
As we have already mentioned above, the Master of Saint George and the Princess is one of the most outstanding painters of the late Gothic period in Aragon. However, despite having been one of the most significant artists in that territory in his time, we hardly know anything about him beyond the paintings that are currently attributed to him. For this reason, he is still an enigmatic figure. Future studies will surely shed more light on the artist, either by revealing his now anonymous identity or by discovering previously unknown paintings by him.
To date, little is known about the painter. Neither his name nor the city he must have worked from, although it can be assumed that it must have been Zaragoza, the main artistic hub of Aragon in Gothic times. We do know, however, that he carried out one of his commissions for the monastery of San Pedro de Siresa (Huesca), located in the heart of the Pyrenees. We also know that he worked for the Cabrera family, an important lineage with origins in Catalonia. He created the work that gives the painter his name for a member of this family, the Altarpiece of Saint George and the Princess, of which only one compartment is preserved, in the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, although through old photographs we know of others that were burned in a fire in 1945 in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin.
The painter’s great critical acclaim has been earned by an emblematic work which has been the focus of texts written about the artist by specialists and also a good part of what was written up to a certain point in time about late Gothic painting in Catalonia. We refer to the aforementioned Saint George and the Princess kept in the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, which came to light for the first time in 1884 and was attributed to Jaume Huguet in 1909.
It is in the attribution of Saint George and the Princess to Jaume Huguet that the historiographic significance that the work and its author have had lies. Over time, the panel gained prestige among specialists and became a particularly representative painting of the art of Huguet, one of the emblematic Gothic painters of Catalonia.
The consolidation of these altarpiece fragments as fundamental work in the Huguet catalogue came with the text that Josep Gudiol Ricart and Joan Ainaud de Lasarte dedicated to the master in 1948, a book in which the Altarpiece of Saint George and the Princess were the central focus of the painter’s supposed Aragonese period, along with a series of paintings grouped around it. However, the recent literature on this group of works has established that they were carried out by different masters.
Jaume Huguet's Aragonese journey was a novelty in the artist's historiography, and conditioned the study of Aragonese painting in the following decades. The formal relations between Aragonese and Catalan late-Gothic painting have drawn the attention of specialists for some time, although it must be said that for much of the 20th century a mistaken interpretative paradigm prevailed, as it was considered that Huguet had a decisive influence on a large group of active painters in Zaragoza and Huesca through the works he carried out in Aragon. He was introduced to the main focus of Catalan painting in the second half of the 15th century and a large proportion of the painters active in Aragon at that time were also placed under his influence.
As we can see, the proposal not only implied attributing a series of works to Huguet, but also assumed that a good part of Aragonese painting in the second half of the 15th century was influenced by him.
But time ended up resolving these issues, finally, and what Post had already supposed in 1938 was demonstrated, and affirmed more forcefully in 1941: that the Altarpiece of Saint George and the Princess was not the work of Jaume Huguet, but of an Aragonese painter who was certainly stylistically connected with the Catalan context. The American specialist mistakenly attributed the altarpiece to Martín de Soria, a documented master in Zaragoza between 1449 and 1487. The art historian Joan Sureda took up Post's theory and it was he who in 1991 proposed removing the Aragonese works and the Altarpiece of Saint George and the Princess from Huguet’s catalogue.
More recently, there has been a growing agreement about the attribution of the work to the Master of Saint George and the Princess, who is gradually being revealed as one of the key characters around which Aragonese painting pivoted in the second half of the 15th century.
He is a master who shows subtlety in capturing certain details and a certain skill in the representation of emotion, an aspect that makes him stand out among his contemporaries.
After this long historiographical journey of more than one hundred years, the catalogue of works by the Master of Saint George and the Princess has only been established in three sets of works. As has already been mentioned, the most important was the Altarpiece of Saint George and the Princess, which the painter must have made for a member of the Cabrera family, to which the aforementioned prophet Daniel from the Prado National Museum must have been added, as well as the panels with Saint John the Baptist and Saint James the Elder kept in the church of the monastery of San Pedro de Siresa. It is important to note that the two Siresa panels are preserved in the place for which they were painted, which is an important further argument when it comes to justifying the Aragonese origin of their author.
Provenance: France - Barcelona private collection (2021).
We would like to thank Dr. Alberto Velasco González for identifying and cataloguing this painting.
The lot includes Dr. Alberto Velasco Gonzàlez’s report.