Spanish Renaissance school of the 16th century.
"Catherine of Alexandria".
Measurements: 99,5 x 56 cm.
Spain was, at the beginning of the 16th century, the European nation best prepared to receive the new humanist concepts of life and art due to its spiritual, political and economic conditions, although from the point of view of plastic forms, its adaptation of those introduced by Italy was slower due to the need to learn the new techniques and to change the taste of the clientele. Sculpture reflects perhaps better than other artistic fields this desire to return to the classical Greco-Roman world, which exalts in its nudes the individuality of man, creating a new style whose vitality surpasses mere copying. Anatomy, the movement of the figures, compositions with a sense of perspective and balance, the naturalistic play of folds, the classical attitudes of the figures soon began to be valued; but the strong Gothic tradition maintained expressiveness as a vehicle for the profound spiritualist sense that informs our best Renaissance sculptures. This strong and healthy tradition favours the continuity of religious sculpture in polychrome wood, which accepts the formal beauty offered by Italian Renaissance art with a sense of balance that avoids its predominance over the immaterial content that animates the forms. In the early years of the century, Italian works arrived in our lands and some of our sculptors went to Italy, where they learned first-hand the new standards in the most progressive centres of Italian art, whether in Florence or Rome, and even in Naples. On their return, the best of them, such as Berruguete, Diego de Siloe and Ordóñez, revolutionised Spanish sculpture through Castilian sculpture, even advancing the new mannerist, intellectualised and abstract derivation of the Italian Cinquecento, almost at the same time as it was being produced in Italy.
A fourth-century Christian martyr, Catherine came from a noble family in Alexandria. Gifted with a great intelligence, she soon stood out for her extensive studies, which placed her on the same level as the greatest poets and philosophers of the time. One night Christ appeared to her and she decided to consecrate her life to him, considering herself his fiancée from then on. She refused to marry the emperor Maximian, and victoriously held a dispute with fifty philosophers sent by him to prove to him the inanity of the Christian faith. Furious, Maximian condemned her to be torn apart by a spiked wheel. The wheel miraculously breaks, and Catherine is finally beheaded. Her iconography is extensive, including the wheel and the sword of her martyrdom, the book symbolising her wisdom, the palm alluding to the victory of martyrdom and the lily as a sign of her virginity. However, one of the most frequent iconographic elements in her representation is the severed head of Caesar Maximinus, which allegorically represents the saint's triumph over the pagan tyrant.