This panel is part of the altarpiece or altar of repose from the Guisando Nativity (P00683-P00690), a common structure in numerous Spanish monastic cloisters. This one comes from the Hieronymite monastery in Guisando (Avila), where it was mentioned by Ponz in 1773. There, the altarpiece was set into a wall, forming a sort of box whose doors bore The Visitation, with Saint Jerome, Penitent and The Presentation of Jesus in the Temple on the outside and an Agony in the Garden on the inside, although the latter was cut off the door with a saw. The group was completed with four prophets (David, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Habakkuk), on the sides of the altar, where they took the place of the smaller sides of an altar’s normally cuboid shape. The customary form of such altarpieces suggests that the present one would have been topped by a sculptural or pictorial image- possibly a God the Father. With the ecclesiastical disentailment, the altar was dismantled and its panels were scattered. In that process, its creator, Juan Correa de Vivar, and even its original location, were forgotten. Eventually, the panels were thought to be from the church of San Martín de Valdeiglesias, a town near the city of Madrid in whose monastery Correa worked between 1545 and 1550. A reconstruction of the Nativity Altarpiece on the basis of Ponz’s description has been proposed by researcher Isabel Mateo. Given its stylistic similarity to the painting of Juan de Borgoña, a leading figure in the emergence of Renaissance forms in castile, via Toledo, Mateo sustains that the altarpiece was made between 1533 and 1535. The adaptation of the new Italian Quattrocento manner to Borgoña’s northern personality proved easy in an area with an underlying Gothic tradition, and it involved adjusting it to include Borgoña’s evocative Tuscan contribution. The Guisando Nativity clearly shows what Correa had learned from Borgoña, who was still active in Toledo at that time (he died in 1536), including a marked sense of drawing linked to a localized use of color, which was somewhat bitter at that time but later grew softer and lighter. His compositional sense is elemental and markedly geometrical, drawing on classical architecture without a clear understanding of the one-point perspective employed. Coming after other commissions -Griñón, Mora and Guadalupe- this group of paintings of the Nativity clearly shows the artist’s early process of maturity, with a correct artistic practice that builds on the basis of Juan de Borgoña’s teaching without yet showing posterior influences.

Museo Nacional del Prado, El Greco y la pintura española del Renacimiento: guía, Madrid, Museo del Prado, Aldeasa, 2001, p.52-55