The Virgin Mary, turned slightly to the right, has her hands clasped in an imploring attitude, her gaze absent and her eyes flooded with tears. She wears a bluish-green robe, a violet tunic and a white coif. The iconography of the Mater Dolorosa does not appear in the gospels, but is a creation that emerges from the exaltation of pathos at the end of the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, the episode always comes after the death of Christ, whether she appears with her crucified Son, after the Descent from the Cross (with the corpse on her lap), or displaying a mother’s grief in solitude. In the last case, the suffering stems both from the present martyrdom and death in the future.

The typology of The Virgin Dolorosa has various influences. On the one hand, it can be related to the Virgin and the Magdalene on Van der Weyden’s triptych of the Crucifixion with Saints and Donors at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, of about 1443-45. On the other, it has a connection with Lombard art through the Mater Dolorosa by Solario, mentioned above, whose probable influence on Venetian art is exemplified by Piombo’s Pietà at the Museo Civico in Viterbo (1515-16)22 or the Dolorosas by Titian. There are also various examples of Moralesque Dolorosas, one of which is at the Hermitage in St Petersburg. Although the Virgin here wears the same apparel, is painted with almost the same chromatic palette, and has her fingers intertwined in a similar fashion (found again in the Dublin St Jerome), her pose is nonetheless different, as is clear from the movement of the shoulders and a more frontal position. A closer posture, though of inferior quality (a workshop piece or the work of a follower) and with the hands situated lower down, is seen on the Dolorosa in the Colección Olga de Sandoval in Barcelona. The most similar Virgin in terms of costume, pose and human model is the one appearing in Christ Carrying the Cross from the former Colección Mayorga in Madrid, whose current whereabouts are unknown. The same face can moreover be seen in a totally different composition, on the exhausted St Anne of the Birth of the Virgin at the Museo del Prado (P07859).

Morales’s renditions of the Ecce Homo and The Virgin Dolorosa were extremely popular, a fact proved by the large number of known versions, whether by the artist himself, workshop pieces or copies. The paintings from the palace of El Pardo (P00942 and P00941) are autograph works by the master, and their authorship has never been questioned. They clearly form a pair, but it is not so obvious that they should be regarded as a diptych, since there are no traces of hinges on the panels. They are superbly executed pieces which transmit the drama with great elegance and speak directly to the hearts of the faithful of the anguish and torture suffered by the characters. They are painted with cold colours (greys, bluish whites, deep blues, pale crimsons) on a smooth black background, and this, together with the expressiveness of the figures, communicates a highly emotional pathos that escapes from the ordinary to enter mystic experience (Text drawn from Yeguas Gassó, J. in: The Divine Morales, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2015, pp. 133-136).