The Right of Asylum
1892. Oil on canvas.On display elsewhere
The declamatory expressiveness of the characters is brought to an extreme by Amérigo in this painting, for which he won the top prize at the 1892 Exhibition. It depicts a medieval episode in which an absconder from civil justice avails himself of the ecclesiastical privilege of the right of asylum on sacred ground, under the protection of the privileges of the own jurisdiction of the Church during the Ancien Régime. Among the figures depicted in this sacred asylum is a prisoner at the gates of a monastery of friars, pursued by his guards, to whom his desperate wife, with their infant son in her arms, pleads. The artist solved the composition with undoubted dramatic effect. The scene takes place in a snowy setting. The realistic determination of the painter is taken to the extreme by leaving his ‘sculpted’ signature on one of the ashlars of the church, half-hidden by the snow accumulated next to the door.
Museo Nacional del Prado, Maestros de la pintura valenciana: del siglo XIX en el Museo del Prado, Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado Autoridad Portuaria, 1997, p.66
