June 18, 2009

Global Seminars & Invited Speaker Series

VI CONFERENCE BAROQUE IN CORELLA

Gilded scenographies for the images: Baroque altarpieces in Corella

D. Ricardo Fernández Gracia.
Chair of Navarrese Heritage and Art

The lecture, which took place in one of the rooms of the Arrese Museum of Corella, former chapel of the Convent of the Incarnation, dealt with the origin and development of the altarpieces, executed in Corella at the initiative of individuals, brotherhoods, guilds, convents and the board of trustees of the parishes of San Miguel and the Rosary.

At the beginning of the 17th century the altarpieces had already become enormous machines that sheltered under their Structures, called by some Navarrese masters as "School of Architecture", cycles of painting and sculpture with varied themes. The examples preserved in Corella are one more testimony of how during the centuries of the Baroque, the genre reached its greatest plenitude Degree .

All the Corellan altarpieces of the 17th and 18th centuries were made of wood, generally pine, a particularly ductile material for carving and, above all, susceptible to receiving a layer of gold that turned them into a veritable ember of light. With the coloring and gilding - an operation in which high carat gold leaf was used - the altarpiece, illuminated by the dim light of the candles, glowed like an ember in the darkness of the temples, insinuating itself to the sight of the public like a celestial apparition.

In addition, with the vibration of their forms, the density of their decoration and the multiplicity of their images, they gave the Spanish temples of the time, almost always with rigid, inert walls cut at right angles, a sensation of mobility and expansion of space that they structurally lacked. The altarpieces thus provoked an illusionism very characteristic of the Baroque, in which the dichotomy between background and figure, between surface and reality was only deceptively resolved.

The different artistic moments and types of altarpieces can be contemplated in the churches of the locality. Thus the classicist ones of the first half of the XVII century stand out, both to house paintings and sculptures, highlighting those of Carmen (1639), designed by Fray Alonso de San José, which follow models of the convent of the Saint in Avila and some with notable canvases such as the one in the Escudero chapel, work of Orente. The unity to which these models linked to conventual art tended put an end to the tradition of altarpieces divided into streets and bodies, to which the local masters were still attached.

The great novelty of the Solomonic Baroque altarpiece with rich fleshy decoration was imposed in the altarpiece of the parish of El Rosario, the work of Sebastián de Sola y Calahorra (1671-79), which incorporated the torsa columns, having been used in other altarpieces of the parish, such as those of San Antonio (1671) or San Pascual Bailón (1672), the latter the work of Francisco San Juan.
 

Main altarpiece of the parish of the Rosary of Corella,
by Sebastián de Sola y Calahorra (1671-79)

The great majority of those pieces came from the hands of masters established in Tudela and also in Corella, which throughout some decades, between the end of the XVII century and the beginning of the XVIII century, maintained true active workshops in the city. Among the exceptions in which the altarpieces were the work of foreign authors, the largest of San Miguel and that of the Benedictine Sisters stand out. The first was made between 1718 and 1722, under the direction of Juan Antonio Gutiérrez, and with the participation of a series of carvers ranked according to their specialization program and consequently with a proportional salary. It is a novel example in Navarre, both for its outline, as well as for its decorative repertoire, and it must be related to the French and European influences that were also visible in those same years in the altarpiece of the Calatravas in Madrid, the work of José Benito Churriguera.

High altarpiece of the parish of San Miguel de Corella. Juan Antonio Gutiérrez (1718-1722)

The main altarpiece of the Benedictine nuns was paid for by the heirs of Viceroy Armendariz, the Marquises of Castelfuerte, who had a nun relative in the convent. It was designed by the overseer of works of the bishopric of Pamplona José Pérez de Eulate and made by the master José de Gambarte from Tudela between 1741 and 1744.

Between both foreign altarpieces there are also those of the Carmelitas Descalzas de Araceli, Retablo mayor de las Carmelitas de Araceli de Corella, Carmelite works of the partnership of Fray José de los Santos and Fray Marcos de Santa Teresa, end of the decade of the twenties of the XVIII century.

The rococo period did not produce works of the category of the previous ones and, in part, was under the influence of the Riojan Diego de Camporredondo, author of the traces of the collaterals of the parish of San Miguel.

Former convent of the Encarnación de Corella (now the Arrese Museum).