Granada School, late seventeenth century. "Saint Jerome".

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DECORATIVE ARTS XV-XIX

By Setdart Auction House

Jul 13, 2021

Set Reminder 2021-07-13 07:00:00 2021-07-13 07:00:00 America/New_York Bidsquare Bidsquare : DECORATIVE ARTS XV-XIX https://www.bidsquare.com/auctions/setdart-auction-house/decorative-arts-xv-xix-7201
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• Lot Description
  Granada School, late seventeenth century. "Saint Jerome". Earthenware, modeled and polychrome. It presents restorations in one of the hands and in the tree. Measures: 17 x 11,5 x 5 cm. In this sculpture of devotional character is represented one of the four great Doctors of the Latin Church, Saint Jerónimo was born near Aquilea (Italy) in the year 347. Trained in Rome, he was an accomplished rhetorician, besides being a polyglot. Baptized at the age of nineteen, between 375 and 378 he retired to the Syrian desert to lead an anchorite's life. He returned to Rome in 382 and became a collaborator of Pope Damasus. The famous saint is usually represented inside a cave or in the middle of the desert, in this case he appears with the sacred scriptures, adopting a gesture of meditation, which inscribes the figure within the iconography of the retreat of the Saint in the desert. The red mantle that he wears reflects the tradition that made him a cardinal, and he is represented writing as an allusion to the translation that the saint made of the Bible into Latin, which was considered since the Council of Trent as the only official one. Spain was at the beginning of the 16th century, the European nation best prepared to receive the new humanist concepts of life and art due to its spiritual, political and economic conditions, although from the point of view of the plastic forms, its adaptation of those implanted by Italy was slower due to the need to learn the new techniques and to change the taste of the clientele. Sculpture reflects perhaps better than other artistic fields this eagerness to return to the classical Greco-Roman world that exalts in its nudes the individuality of man, creating a new style whose vitality surpasses the mere copy. Soon the anatomy, the movement of the figures, the compositions with a sense of perspective and balance, the naturalistic play of the folds, the classical attitudes of the figures began to be valued; but the strong Gothic tradition maintains the expressiveness as a vehicle of the deep spiritualistic sense that informs our best Renaissance sculptures. This strong and healthy tradition favors the continuity of religious sculpture in wood and polychrome clay that accepts the formal beauty offered by Italian Renaissance art with a sense of balance that avoids its predominance over the immaterial content that animates the forms. In the first years of the century, Italian works arrived in our lands and some of our sculptors went to Italy, where they learned first hand the new norms in the most progressive centers of Italian art, whether in Florence or Rome, and even in Naples.
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