HERITAGE WITHIN EVERYONE'S REACH. FROM ROMANESQUE TO BAROQUE IN THE AREA OF TAFALLA

September 21, 2005

The Recoletas Altarpiece: The Triumph of Renaissance Painting
Mrs. Asunción Domeño Martínez de Morentin

Organised by the Chair de Patrimonio y Arte Navarro and Tafalla Town Council.

The altarpiece that today presides over the convent of the Franciscan Conceptionists was commissioned in 1571 by the community of monks of La Oliva to preside over their church, to two Flemish painters who settled in Zaragoza: Rolan de Moys and Pablo Schepers. The two artists had arrived in 1559 from Brussels as part of the entourage of D. Martín de Gurrea y Aragón, Duke of Villahermosa and Count of Ribagorza, to work in his service making the decorative programs of his palaces in Zaragoza and Pedrola. Moys specialized in court portraits, an occupation that brought him great prestige and social recognition. The portrait galleries of the Duke's genealogical house are famous. For his part, Schepers. Schepers, "painter of stories" was commissioned to carry out the mythological paintings of the Marquis's decorative program. Neither of the two neglected in their production the religious commissions where they left important testimonies in easel painting as well as in altarpieces. One of them is the main altarpiece of the monastery of La Oliva, through which the painters introduced a new aesthetic language in Navarre, that of Counter-Reformation Mannerism, of evident Italian filiation, in which they used compositions of great apparatus and scenography, pretenebrist lights, and changing or atornasolados colors. The altarpiece that today is venerated in the church of the convent of Recoletas of Tafalla constitutes one of the best examples of religious painting of the third third third of the 16th century, of all the Aragonese and Navarrese school.