This full-length portrait by Pompeo Batoni shows a young English nobleman dressed in a scarlet coat, posing against the Roman countryside. The picture conforms to the Grand Tour portrait model of which Batoni, together with other artists such as Anton Raphael Mengs, became a leading practitioner, attaining success particularly among British patrons. Here the sitter is holding a walking stick and a
Hunting subjects are rare in Meléndez's work. Here, two multicolored partridges are the composition's main theme. Alongside them, in the foreground, are two cloves of garlic, some paper packages and the onions. In the middle ground, two Alcorcón-style earthenware bowls hold three crockery plates with poppy decorations, probably from Talavera or Puente del Arzobispo. The painter's customary method
Saint Anthony of Padua (1195-1231) wears a Franciscan habit and meditates before a book over which the Christ Child appears. This is one of the miracles of that saint´s tradition. The spray of lilies in the foreground is one of his iconographical symbols, and is accompanied here by the basket that symbolizes the alms on which that saint lived. This work was designed for an altar in the church of S
Presented almost half-length with his face turned to the viewer, Mengs wears a velvet gown and holds the tools of his trade. The panel was painted shortly after the artist’s arrival in Spain and uses a distinctive, sketchy technique that allows the underlayer of priming to show through. The artist reappears in the Prado’s Adoration of the Shepherds (P-2204).
This is a fragment of Saint Joseph with the infant Christ, painted for the convent church of San Pascual in Aranjuez, and now in Detroit. Although Giambattista required the help of his son Domenico to undertake the project, this small angel seems to be entirely painted by his own hand.
With the luminous serenity typical of Venetian painting, Fontebasso depicts this parable from the Gospel of Saint Matthew (25: 1-13). The bridegroom, who resembles standard images of Christ, has already allowed the wise virgins to enter but closes the door on the foolish ones. Invited to the wedding, they forgot the oil for their lamps and were obliged to go out and buy some, thus arriving late. T
This majestic image was part of a cycle of seven altarpieces commissioned in 1767 for the new royal church of San Pascual Bailón at Aranjuez, founded by Charles III in the same year. The altarpieces comprised the entire pictorial decoration of this Alcantarine Franciscan church, which was built in an austere classical style. The subjects of the altarpieces reflected some of the most importa
A depiction of a miracle in the life of Saint Francis of Assisi that took place in 1224 during the Celebration in Praise of the Holy Cross. When the saint withdrew to pray, he received the stigmata from a seraph: the same wounds suffered by Christ on the Cross. An angel holds him so that his body doesn´t collapse in ecstasy. The varied blue tones and their contrast with the very dark palette used
This vigorously modelled study, in which the priming of the canvas is left visible, relates to Mengs’s great canvas of The Ascension. Painted for the high altar of Dresden cathedral, it survived the devastation of the city in the 1945 bombings. It reflects Mengs’s profound knowledge of Italian Renaissance and Baroque painting, particularly the work of Guido Reni.
This highly finished study, in which the priming of the canvas is left visible, relates to one of the heads in The Ascension, painted by Mengs for the high altar of Dresden cathedral. He began the final work around 1755 in Rome, inspired by “the divine Raphael” in his own words. It was completed in Madrid in 1766 and sent from there to Dresden.
This canvas presents one of the most persistent subjects in Pedro Orrente´s substantial output: the Nativity and the Adoration of the shepherds, a popular theme among seventeenth-century Spanish painters. Bucolic scenes were also captured successfully throughout the sixteenth century and much of the seventeenth century by the influential family of Italian painters: Jacopo, Leandro and France
This composition with an arched top appears here in a preparatory sketch for the corresponding canvas of the Ascension that forms part, along with the Annunciation, the Nativity and Pentecost, of a series made in 1769 for the cloister of the convent of San Pascual in Aranjuez.
While this work has traditionally been identified as one of the sketches that Francisco Bayeu made for the lost compositions he painted in 1796 for the cloister of the convent of San Pascual in Aranjuez (Annunciation, Nativity, Ascension and Pentecost), that identification is actually erroneous, as Morales y Marín discovered in his two studies of that artist (1979 and 1995). After studying
Una inscripción en su reverso vincula este óleo sobre cobre de pequeñas dimensiones con la pintora Caterina Cherubini Preciado, esposa del también pintor Francisco Preciado de la Vega desde 1750 y junto a él residente en Roma durante la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII.Caterina fue hija, como recuerda Urrea, de Giuseppe Cherubini, nacido a su vez de Giovanni Valentino Cherubini, ambos establecidos en
Giordano was particularly gifted at imitating the style of some of the celebrated masters of the past, as evident in this work which evokes Raphael’s pictorial language. More than a mere exercise in imitation, the presence on the rock on the right of two monograms with the letters “RSF VB” (Raphael Sanzio Faciebat Vrbinas) indicates the painter’s probable intention to produce a forgery.
El cuadro muestra a la futura reina de España, hija de Felipe de Borbón (1720-1765) y de Luisa Isabel de Francia, duques de Parma. Nació en la capital del ducado el 9 de diciembre de 1751; contrajo matrimonio con su primo el príncipe de Asturias, más tarde Carlos IV, el 5 de septiembre de 1765; fueron reyes entre 1788 y 1808; falleció en el exilio, en Roma, el 2 de enero de 1819, unos días antes q
The Apostle James can be identified by the pilgrim’s staff in his right hand and the cockle shell on his breast. Standing firmly before a dark background, his face and powerful body indicate the lessons that Murillo and fellow Spanish painters absorbed from the work of Ribera.