17 July 2007

Global Seminars & Invited Speaker Series

AROUND THE EXHIBITION FITERO: THE BEQUEST OF A MONASTERY

Around the main altarpiece of the monastery

D. Pedro Luis Echeverría Goñi
Dept. of Art. University of the Basque Country

The main altarpiece of the former monastery of Santa María la Real de Fitero is an exceptional late 16th-century Mannerist ensemble whose components, of international affiliation, are Italian, Flemish and courtly. Its author, the painter Rolan Mois, was Flemish by birth, had been to Rome and Naples and was well acquainted with the art of the Escorial, following his visit to the Court ( visit ). Its Viñolesque and Palladian design has already been appreciated, which represents the first transfer of the altarpiece from San Lorenzo de El Escorial to the lands of the Old Kingdom. The sculptural groups are stylistically ascribed to Michelangelo's Romanism, while Rolan Mois's panels denote their Venetian origin and the first Pretenebrist essays in relation to Escorial painting, as has been analysed by authors such as Angulo Iñiguez, Pérez Sánchez, Morte García, García Gainza and Fernández Gracia. On the other hand, the delightful friezes have gone practically unnoticed in almost all the programs of study dedicated to this altarpiece. It should be pointed out that the polychromy is the only specialization program that does not conform to the dictates of the Counter-Reformation, incorporating grotesques inspired by drawings from the Codex Escurialensis and Nordic prints of fantastic Mannerism. For this reason, this polychromy also has, if not a style, then an Escurialesque filiation, as this notebook or book of Roman antiquities, drawn up by Domenico Ghirlandaio around 1493, entered the Library Services of the Royal Monastery in 1576.
 

Main altarpiece of the Fitero Monastery
 

The most obvious novelties in its 1580 design, the work of Diego Sánchez, are the use of the giant order of columns, exceptional in Navarrese altarpieces, the superimposition of orders, the use of netos, the generalised lintelling, the subdivision of streets and the pyramids of the Escorial style. As befits an altarpiece dedicated to Santa María la Real, the central street is dominated by the carved groups, the work of the Romanist sculptor Antón de Zárraga, of the Assumption, which repeats the outline of Michelangelo's Rachel, and the Coronation, to culminate the story of redemption with the Calvary in the attic. The Marian and Infancy cycle is composed, as in the La Oliva altarpiece, of the nocturnal and naturalistic scene of the Adoration of the Shepherds and a colourful Epiphany, according to a composition by Martin de Vos and Cornelis Cort, identical to that of La Oliva. Symbolic seats in the church building are the Virtues Faith, Hope, Fortitude and Temperance, St. Peter and St. Paul at the gates "of heaven", the Fathers of the Church and the Saints John. The intercessory role of the saints is emphasised here by the paired figures of Saint Lawrence, titular saint of the monastery of El Escorial, and Saint Benedict, founder of the order, and the local devotions of Saint Lucy and Saint Agatha. The founder of the Cistercian Order, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, is given a privileged place in the attic at reservation with the two most famous visions: the Apparition of the Virgin with the Lactation and the Crucified Christ embracing the saint, inspired by engravings from a hagiography of Saint Bernard, published in Rome in 1587.
 

Rolan Moys, "Epiphany", 1590-1591

position Under the direction of Rolan Mois and with his drawings, the gilding and estofado painting was carried out by several Aragonese painter-decorators such as Felices de Cáceres, who should have finished the work in 1592, after the master's death. These motifs, concentrated as usual in a reading by registers, in friezes, pedestals and counter-pedestals, form a Neoplatonic programme that develops the ascent of the soul to heaven, after a process of purification of the subject that imprisons it until the liberation of the spirit. This content was undoubtedly well known to Fray Marcos de Villalba, the learned abbot of the monastery proposed by Philip II. If the friezes of the doors, bench and first section symbolise the oppression of the soul by the subject with vegetalised figures, the dominion over the passions and psychomachias, the brushstroke miniatures of the second section and, above all, of the attic, transport us to heaven through the recumbent angels and the heads of winged cherubs, symbols of the soul and eternity. Several of the drawings in the Codex Escurialensis are taken from the Golden conference room of Nero's Domus Aurea and are reproduced here in an archaeological painting. Among the extensive bestiary of real and fantastic animals depicted here, the real and fantastic birds, some of them inspired by series by Virgil Solis, such as the phoenix and the pelican, Christian symbols of the Resurrection and the Eucharist respectively, are striking for their issue .
 

Rolan Moys and workshop, "Grutesque", 1590-1591

Codex