The series that begins today, with monthly contributions from various university professors and other cultural and academic institutions, will focus on the Navarrese masters who made possible the creation of buildings, sculptures, organs, paintings and numerous pieces of sumptuary arts.

A century ago, between 1919 and 1926, Julio Altadill, made a chain of small collaborations for the bulletin of the Commission of Monuments of Navarre, which he entitled "Exhumed Artists". Since then, the knowledge and contextualization about them has grown enormously, thanks to the realization of multiple works and, above all, of doctoral thesis . With the goal to synthesize and disseminate, from the research, their trajectories and significance, the polyhedral figures of some outstanding artists who guided the development of the arts in different periods and styles will be discussed. The reader will also find the professional development of others who, because of their role in the guilds, or in their apprenticeship, or in other aspects, such as the process of execution of the works, will contribute knowledge on the rich heritage of Navarre.

Among the constants that, throughout the past centuries, we will see, in a very closed society, professional endogamy will stand out. Parents, children and grandchildren inherited workshops, abilities, skills, tools and even resources, such as prints and books. In the case of the absence of a male heir, it was customary for the master's daughter to marry the best officer of the workshop, to ensure continuity.

During the Age average, some masters are barely known by the most famous work they left, while the figures of others are outlined more clearly, especially from the fourteenth century onwards. The arrival of the Modern Age brings a greater knowledge of the artists, since the documentary sources are much more abundant to be able to reconstruct their biographies, with sacramental certificates, marriage chapters, letters of apprenticeship and wills, coming from the archives of notarial protocols. Likewise, the existence of contracts, appraisals and letters of payment, as well as account books in civil and ecclesiastical institutions and, more importantly, of rich judicial processes, provide numerous data for the knowledge and future of many masters and their workshops.

In the Middle Ages, the so-called liberal arts were aristocratic, proper of free and educated men that implied a mental exercise, more than guide, (grammar, dialectics, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music). In a lower rank were the mechanics, today called plastic arts. Craftsmen, in general, had little or no social prestige. Only since the Gothic period and in the cities, we will find guilds of corporate character, of help, control and demand. First the masons and stonemasons and, later, the sculptors and painters.

Until the Renaissance, art was a mere skill guide and artists did not have much social consideration. For this reason, artists such as Alberti and Leonardo emerged in this period, who demanded the inclusion of their activity, especially painting, within the liberal arts. The artist had to master mathematics, geometry and Humanities (studia humatinatis), as well as possessing a special talent and skill to create. This progressive autonomy of the artist would increase over the centuries.

In the field of construction, until recent times, traditional and secular methods have been used for the extraction of stone in its quarries, through the introduction of wedges swollen with water and metal rods. The pieces ended up in the ashlars that formed the smooth walls of the constructions, well visible on the exteriors of the buildings. In general, a first roughing was carried out at the quarry, in order to transport regular ashlars and not waste energy and time with disposable materials. The stonemasons, with the help of the chisel, finished the carving of the ashlars, finishing them with great regularity. The aforementioned tool had a handle and was shaped like a flattened double-edged axe. Its imprint is still perceptible in numerous ashlars of other buildings, in which the parallel grooves can be followed in the same direction.

In medieval times, workers and craftsmen of various specialties, together with lumberjacks, forgers and lime kilns, worked on the construction site quotation. Carpenters were indispensable as they were in charge of assembling scaffolding, ladders and pulleys. Blacksmiths repaired all the tools made from iron, staples, wedges and animal horseshoes. The rope-makers made position of the ropes needed to carry up all subject of materials.

The guild legislation, which was in force until the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the following century, left in the hands of those associations everything related to the execution of the works, the possibility of exercising the trades, as well as their apprenticeship.

From the 16th century onwards, important workshops of different artistic specialties were definitively established in Navarre, many of which would be present in the following centuries and in the hands of the same families, among which there would be no lack of sons or sons-in-law to give continuity to the workshop, from agreement with the professional endogamy typical of the guild system.

The apprenticeship charter was the usual form of access to official document through the master's examination. During the years it lasted, the apprentices resided in the houses of their masters and received food and clothing from them. We have been able to follow the list of apprentices of each master quite closely through notarial deeds and above all through a handwritten source hardly used by art historians, the books of enrollment of the different parishes, which provide us, together with the names of the artist's family, the names of those apprentices who shared a roof and food with the master. More difficult is the finding of the contracts, since the children who apprenticed with their parents did not sign any contract.

The apprenticeship period ranged from five to seven years, although the most usual was five years. On some occasions, the newly appointed masters remained working in the workshop of their masters. The age of the young apprentices was usually around sixteen years old and, although this is not usually specified in most of the deeds that we have handled, we have verified it by later statements in many cases.

In the middle of the 18th century, the creation of the Royal Academy of San Fernando offered apprentices another way of training and, at the end of the same century, the liberalization of the arts (1785) and the creation of the School of Drawing opened other new perspectives for the coming centuries.

Despite the efforts of treatises and some educated minorities, those masters who were called imagers, painters or architects had by rule generally the same social status as any craftsman of other manual trades and only some of them are known to have had a certain culture. The contracts place us before some artisans who were obliged to use measurements, iconographies and materials; they were given deadlines, prices, appraisers and even some stylistic indications. In this last aspect, let us remember when the masters were asked to correct their traces or projects in order to cover the Structures with more decoration, in the middle of the Castilian phase of our Baroque, or vice versa, when they were required to purify themselves by imposing more classicist models.

In fact, what today we call artists and who would have, therefore, the ability to create and design works, in the centuries of the Ancien Régime, was called inventing and was only possessed by a minority, the rest were less artisans, more or less skilled and with greater or lesser quality in their production. In the field of architecture, the difference between one and the other was the ability to draw. In the figurative arts and when designing an iconographic program -civil or religious-, if the master did not have sufficient skills training, a person of high cultural level was called upon to act as the real mentor. In most cases, the procedure for the realization of a work was the commission, generally notarized before a notary.

In the struggle for the consideration of the arts, we have different examples, of which we will point out a few. Painters, as in the rest of Spain, were the first to claim their status as practitioners of a liberal art and not guide. The case of Vicente Berdusán, who only went to the notary to contract his works, which were, by the way, signed, can be an example of self-affirmation as an artist. The case of the organ builders is also striking, as Eduardo Morales has studied.

As for the sculptural genres, we will cite three cases. First, that of Bernal de Gabadi, a good sculptor trained outside Navarre, who denounced the contracting of an altarpiece to Francisco Ceballos, who was not a sculptor, only a carpenter. Secondly, what happened in 1697 with a sculptor who lived in Pamplona and Corella, Martín de Tovar y Asensio, denounced by the alcabalero of Tudela for not wanting to pay the tax when introducing a few sculptures in the capital of the Ribera. This gave rise to litigation. The argument he put forward for the exemption was none other than that "the packages and paintings that my part sold in the city of Tudela are worked and painted by me, and in this case it is Exempt to pay alcabala for being, as it is, the painting, liberal and exempt from paying it, by immemorial custom...". A third example is provided by another dispute in 1738 between the sculptor José Ximénez and the guild of San José de Tudela, which did not allow him to work on his "art" and had seized a lump of San Miguel.

The path to architecture and the design of stonemasons and other artisans was, as Fernando Marías recalls, the withdrawal of the work among the stones and move to the internship on the table to draw a plan or a montea. That change must not have been easy in such a closed society and we must presume that only those who were better endowed managed to achieve it.

Of all the professions related to the arts, it seems that the most prolific in making tracings were the so-called architects, far above painters. In this regard, we must remember that the term "architect" was equated in Spain from the mid-sixteenth century, outside the theoretical-artistic context of some minorities, to that of a quality assembler, capable of designing and planning an altarpiece, an organ case, a pulpit loudspeaker or a choir stalls. In addition to the exquisite handling of the gouges, they were capable of tracing and planning the two- or three-dimensional organization of many other works by means of a design. We have not been able to document, as happened for example in the Court, differences and clashes between painters and architects, due to the interference of the former when contracting certain works, given their familiarity with the technical and ornamental resources.

All these traces had a primary function of guarantee and control. The chapters of the contracts insist ad nauseam that everything would be done according to the agreed trace. In documents such as bonds, the aforementioned formula is also usually incorporated and, of course, in the appraisals when the work is to be considered good or when defects or improvements are to be pointed out. subject It goes without saying that the designs are referred to in all lawsuits before the civil or diocesan jurisdiction as soon as there was any disagreement about deadlines, materials, forms or quality.