The artistic personality of Vicente Berdusán (1632-1697), painter established in Tudela with a B in the second half of the 17th century, monopolized outstanding commissions of his specialization program in Navarre and outside of it, reaching numerous points of Aragón, La Rioja and Guipúzcoa. Born in Ejea de los Caballeros in 1632, he was the last of eight brothers. He moved early to Tudela, where he was orphaned of father and mother, and was tutorial by Juan de Gurrea, founder of a dynamic workshop of retablists in that city. He began painting around 1644 with a relative, Hernando de Mozos, and was absent from the capital of the Ribera during the central years of the century, to fill in his training in the Court, in the orbit of Juan Carreño de Miranda, author of the famous canvas of the Trinitarians of Pamplona -today in the Louvre- that the friars refused to receive and thanks to the judgment of Berdusán was accepted.

The degree scroll of this article is taken from a contemporary source , which deals with the choice of the program of the Villahermosa chapel in San Carlos Borromeo de Zaragoza (1693), where we are informed that it was Father Tomás de Muniesa, Jesuit, who once "having taken the measurements of the canvases to be painted to fill the walls, chose the idea of some saints with special miracles and relation to the Blessed Sacrament, and while these were being painted, entrusting them to the courageous brush of Verdussan, who was the first one to paint them. to the brave brush of Verdussana famous painter from Tudela, was entrusted with the construction of the chapel".

In his work the predominance of color over drawing, the warm, warm and sparkling tones, with unmistakable carmine, three-dimensional spaces, the play of light, the compositional complication based on movements, boiling forms and diagonals, as well as the employment abundant graphic sources, engravings by Collaert, Galle, Pontius, Wierix, Cort. His production was eminently religious and typical of the Counter-Reformation period, with a clientele of cathedrals, parishes, convents, bourgeois and nobles B

As for his prints, drawings and engravings, we know that he owned and cared for them. Nothing is more illustrative than the dowries of his children, made by his widow in the same year of Vicente Berdusán's death (1697). His son Carlos received as a marriage dowry 2000 reales in "value of different paintings and sketches and drawings of those that were left by the death of the said Vicente de Berdusan, his father, from his own hand and Carreño's, of which a report was made ". Felipe, for his part, would receive together with other endowment goods "in paintings and erasures nineteen hundred and sixty-four reals, and in prints and scratches five hundred reals, which both items amount to two thousand four hundred and sixty-four reals".

The then collegiate church of Tudela, its chapter of canons, the parish established within it, as well as some of the capitulars, were responsible for our painter to leave there important sets such as the altarpiece of the chapel of the Holy Spirit, around 1661 and, above all, the magnificent cycle of the chapter conference room , made between 1669 and 1671, Basilio Camargo y Castejón was dean of the collegiate church, collegiate of the Santa Cruz de Valladolid, mayor of the conference room of Hijosdalgo de la Chancillería de Valladolid and Oidor de la de Granada, a man with an extensive curriculum, well acquainted with the artistic environments of Castile and Granada and who possessed a not inconsiderable pictorial collection.

His works in the cathedral of Tarazona - altarpiece of the Virgin of Pilar, canvases of St. Francis Xavier and other saints - must have been related to the fact that his son Gaspar Berdusán became secretary to the bishop of Turiason, Mateo Sánchez de Castelar. The arrival of his works to the cathedral of Huesca was due to his fame among the nobles of those lands and of some B the Aragonese cathedral. They were able to meet the artist through two brothers of Tudela origin who held high positions in the Aragonese church of the seventeenth century, the Francés de Urrigoiti, one archdeacon of Zaragoza and the other bishop of Barbastro.

The altarpieces of the chapel of San Joaquín in Huesca were due to the munificence of Don Bartolomé de Santolaria, maestrescuela of the cathedral of Huesca and Full Professor of canons at the university, promoted to the bishopric of Jaca in 1673, seat of which he never took possession because he died. The other chapel that contains a canvas of Berdusán, signed and dated in the same cathedral of Huesca, is that of San Martín, board of trustees the counts of Atarés, don Juan Sanz de Latrás and his second wife doña Magdalena Sanz de Latrás de Agullena.

The temples of diocesan jurisdiction and of the regulars were regular clients of Berdusán. Some parishes that required his services in Navarra were those of Rosario de Corella (main altarpiece and pendentives), Viana, Roncal and Garde (altarpieces of San Francisco Javier), Caparroso, Milagro, Mélida, etc., as well as some parishes in Aragon, such as Villafranca de Ebro or Magallón. Berdusán's canvases were commissioned by the parish of Azpeitia, in Guipúzcoa, although they perished in a fire of the altarpiece several decades ago.

Brotherhoods, such as that of Saint Teresa of Fitero, which grouped the local espadrille makers, commissioned the superb canvas of the Transverberation of Saint Teresa, and other brotherhoods of Saint Francis Xavier in other towns did the same with their patron saint. Special accredited specialization deserves the paintings of the Shrine of Our Lady of Fair Love of Our Lady Shrine of Our Lady of Fair Love Zuberoa, of Garde, for its location, where the brotherhood of Santiago and the Assumption made possible that in plenary session of the Executive Council Roncal valley we find paintings of Berdusán, known in those lands by the connections of the Roncal shepherds with the Bardena and diverse localities of the Ribera.

Monasteries, such as the Cistercian monastery of Veruela, entrusted him with a cycle of the life of Saint Bernard, under the mandate of two distinguished abbots, and the convents of Tudela have works by him of some relevance, especially the Dominican nuns in their main altarpiece, made under the auspices of the secretary of the universal office of Carlos II, Don Manuel de Lira, who had close relatives in the convent of Tudela. Carmelitas calzados and descalzos, clarisas, capuchinas or jesuitas - today San Jorge el Real - put us in relation with their work in their different times.

The relationships of brotherhood of the convents with their respective orders explain the presence of Berdusán in Santo Domingo de Huesca, in the disappeared group of the Friars Minor of Zaragoza or in the Discalced Carmelites of Lazcano (today Benedictines).

We have already mentioned the counts of Atarés as responsible for the commission of the canvases of the chapel of San Martín in the cathedral of Huesca. A sister of the count, Doña Ana María Latrás, founded the Capuchinas de Huesca, where the canvases of the disappeared altarpieces of the convent, dedicated to the Coming of the Virgin of Pilar, St. Francis and St. Clare, are located.

Other important personalities of wealthy families from Tudela also required Berdusán's canvases. Thus, Don Domingo de Rodas ordered in his will to be buried in his chapel of the Jesuits of Tudela, with the invocation of the conversion of San Pablo, the canvas bears the signature of the painter in 1677. Shortly before, another nobleman from Tudela, the treasurer of his collegiate church, Don Agustín de Baquedano, ordered him to paint the canvas of Saint Thomas of Villanueva for his chapel in the backchorus, which he endowed with an altarpiece of classicist lines in which his coat of arms can be seen.

Finally, among the nobles, we will highlight one of the families with the most lineage in Aragon and with relations with Navarre, the Dukes of Villahermosa, who commissioned the series of paintings of Eucharistic motifs, related to saints of other religious orders, which are kept in the chapel of the Communion in the seminar of San Carlos Borromeo in the Aragonese capital. From the texts of the time we know that that noble family was inclined to commission the "brave brush" of Vicente Berdusán.

Given that the immense production of Vicente Berdusán's workshop consists of religious themes, it is easy to imagine that among his clients were different religious institutions that, following the customs and manners of those times, had their churches and convents upholstered with canvases of different quality and origin. Many of these clients were, in the words of Antonio Acisclo Palomino, who wrote shortly after our painter's death, "very difficult to please". With this he alludes to his traditionalism on some occasions, to the appraisals and disagreements in subject of price on others and, finally, to some iconographic interpretations.

Series such as those of Veruela dedicated to Saint Bernard, the Villahermosa chapel to the Eucharist or the Virgin in the cathedral of Tudela place him in parallel to what the great painters of the century, such as Zurbarán, did. The same happens with the great altar paintings such as the Coming of the Virgin of the Pillar of Zaragoza of the Capuchins of Huesca or the Assumption of the Virgin of the same city and the Triumph of St. Francis Xavier of the Jesuits of Tudela. In the small paintings for devotion, such as the Inmaculada Niña de Tudela, delicacy is sample in this subject of painting destined to the imago pietatis.

The other great genre that the painters of our 17th century faced was the portrait. It is certain that Berdusán practiced it but, for the moment, we have not been able to attribute to him with great certainty other than that of Brother Juan de Jesús San Joaquín (†1669), a discalced Carmelite layman with a life full of extraordinary phenomena. The prioress of Recoletas, Teresa de los Angeles requested the portrait, as did others in the city and other towns, in this case carrying the image of the Virgin of Wonders. The realism and verism of the portrait is striking, in keeping with the engravings and paintings of the sitter. The attribution to Berdusán of the painting of Recoletas is based on several reasons. In the first place, in the conformation of the Virgin's face, with a very repetitive outline in the painter, with ample flesh and carmine in the small mouth. Likewise, the configuration of the heads of the angels on the pedestal and the Child Jesus, all of them very sketchy. The pinkish colors of the Virgin's tunic are similar to the shirt of the poor man helped by Saint Thomas of Villanueva in his altarpiece in the cathedral of Tudela (1671) or the curtain of the carriage of Saint Bernard in the canvas of Veruela (1672). Finally, the landscape is in total harmony with the one that the painter puts in the background of the figure of St. Francis of Assisi in the Capuchin nuns of Huesca (c. 1672) or the canvas of St. Peter of Verona in the altarpiece of the Dominican nuns of Tudela (1689).