Saint Joseph's Dream
1660. Oil on canvas.Room C
An angel appears to Saint Joseph in his sleep, pointing to the dove of the Holy Ghost as the heavens open in a luminous burst of glory. Under the dove, a group of angels carry a mirror and flowers alluding to the fact that Mary remains a virgin despite her pregnancy. On a mat alongside the saint, we see an adze, a hand drill and other carpentry tools.
Saint Joseph’s Dream was a relatively frequent subject in Siglo de Oro Spain, as it combined an interest in that saint fostered by Saint Teresa with a deeply rooted devotion to the Virgin Mary. In most cases, the scene is set indoors, often in a carpentry shop. Here, however, Herrera the Younger sets it outdoors, and that change has very important consequences from an esthetic viewpoint, as it allowed the artist to display his greatest skills. Following his return to Spain at some point before 1654, Herrera became extraordinarily famous for large compositions in which one or more figures are lit from behind by the light shining down when the heavens open. This divine light fills the paintings with light and color and blurs the forms in a manner that in no way lessens the artist’s complete mastery of drawing and composition. With its perfect merging of form and content, the present painting is clearly one of that group of works that launched the high baroque period for painting in Madrid and Seville. And there is no better expression of the ethereal and impalpable nature of dreams, miracles and mysteries than this equally ethereal, luminous and impalpable style of painting.
The rapid recognition of this work’s extraordinary values is reflected in a comment by Antonio Palomino (1724), who saw it in its original location at the chapel of San José in the church of Santo Tomás in Madrid: where the pilgrim can also find a painting of the dream of Saint Joseph (...) on the top of the altarpiece; which I consider the most gifted and tasteful that I have seen of his work. That reference obliges us to date the painting from 1660 or after, when Herrera settled definitively in Madrid. With this work, the Museo del Prado endows its collection with one of the masterpieces of Spain’s high baroque, contemporaneous with paintings by Murillo or Claudio Coello, as well as others at the museum by Herrera himself that demonstrate the degree to which Spain’s finest artists were able to create a powerfully original and distinctive language.
