At the end of September the Museo Nacional del Prado and Fundación BBVA will present an exhibition on Luis de Morales, one of the most significant and original Spanish Renaissance masters. Featuring this artist’s most representative and best-known works, it will provide viewers with an insight into his skills in two fields, altarpieces and devotional panels.
Nineteen works owned by the Prado, including the Christ on the Cross and the Resurrection gifted by Plácido Arango, will be joined by 35 from national and international museums, private collectors and religious institutions, such as the Virgin with the Little Bird from the parish church of San Agustín in Madrid, the Virgin and Child with the Infant Saint John from the New Cathedral in Salamanca and the Ecce Homo from the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in Lisbon, which was recently restored in the Prado workshops.
Nursing Virgin, Luis de Morales. Oil on chestnut panel, 84 x 64 cm, c. 1565. Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado
At the end of September, the Museo del Prado and Fundación BBVA will present ‘The Divine Morales’, an exhibition intended as a testament to the work and life of Luis de Morales the ‘Divine’ practically a century after the Prado hosted the first monographic exhibition devoted to the artist.
Although Morales’s most representative creations were widely disseminated thanks to the existence of his own studio and through the versions produced by other painters and followers, this show brings together a careful selection solely of works that display the high quality standards of Morales’s extraordinary painting technique, including a sculpture by Alonso Berruguete from the Museo Nacional de Escultura in Valladolid which is closely linked to Morales’s Passion themes on account of the spirituality it conveys and the sculptural values found in this master’s painting.
This selection of works by Morales, mostly small-format paintings and half-length figures, illustrates the images he used throughout his career: the Virgin and Child, such as the popular Virgin Suckling the Child in the Museo del Prado; Christ crowned with thorns, such as the Man of Sorrows in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; tied to the column, carrying the cross or already dead in his mother’s arms, such as the Pietà from the Museo de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. They make up a small repertoire of images that are usually devoid of temporal or spatial references in order to provide perfect conditions for immersing the viewer in religious contemplation.
The Divine Morales marks the culmination of an exhaustive study of the artist, the conclusions of which will be published in the exhibition catalogue.
After running at the Museo del Prado, the exhibition will be shown at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao (9 February– 6 May 2016) and the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (16 June–25 September 2016); the same exhibition layout will be used for all three venues, albeit with slight differences in the selection of works on view at each.
