JUAN ANTONIO FRIAS Y ESCALANTE (Córdoba, 1633 - Madrid, 1669). Untitled. Oil on canvas. Relined.

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Córdoba: 2,000 Years of Art

By Setdart Auction House

Dec 21, 2021

Set Reminder 2021-12-21 07:30:00 2021-12-21 07:30:00 America/New_York Bidsquare Bidsquare : Córdoba: 2,000 Years of Art https://www.bidsquare.com/auctions/setdart-auction-house/c-rdoba-2-000-years-of-art-8049
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• Lot Description
  JUAN ANTONIO FRIAS Y ESCALANTE (Córdoba, 1633 - Madrid, 1669). Untitled. Oil on canvas. Relined. Provenance: Sotheby's London. Presents restorations. Measurements: 62 x 54 cm; 69,5 x 90,5 cm (frame). Member of the known as "truncated generation", Antonio Frías y Escalante was a disciple of Francisco Rizzi, with whom he worked from a very young age. The brevity of his life prevented him from developing an artistic maturity that augured great achievements, as his contemporaries expected, but from the beginning his works show his admiration for Venice, especially for Tintoretto and Veronese. Thus, his followers would take from him his characteristic and personal chromatic range, centered on cold colors, a very refined palette of pinks, blues, grays and mauves, which we see in part in this canvas, especially in the cloths and flowers that surround the composition, although here the cold tones are offset by the warmth of the golds and carmines. Also typical of Escalante will be the light, delicate, almost transparent brushstroke, in which the example of Titian is manifested filtered by the elegant classicism of Cano. Here this lesson of Escalante can be appreciated especially in the treatment of the flesh tones, executed with enormous delicacy. The Madrid Baroque school arose around the court of Philip IV first and Charles II later, and developed throughout the seventeenth century, continuing well into the eighteenth century. Analysts of this school have insisted on considering its development as a result of the agglutinating power of the court; what is truly decisive is not the place of birth of the different artists, but the fact that they were educated and worked around and for a nobiliary and religious clientele located next to the royalty. This allows and favors a stylistic unity even though the logical divergences due to the personality of the members can be appreciated. This meant an awakening of the nationalist conscience by allowing a liberation from the previous Italianizing molds to jump from the last echoes of Mannerism to Tenebrism. This will be the first step of the school, which in gradual sense, is walking successively until the attainment of a more autochthonous baroque language and linked to the political, religious and cultural conceptions of the monarchy of the Austrias, to go to die with the first shoots of the rococo that are manifested in the production of the last of its representatives, A. Palomino. Stylistically, it starts from a naturalism with a remarkable capacity for synthesis to lead opportunely to the allegorical and formal complexity characteristic of the decorative baroque. These artists show a great concern for the studies of light and color, as we see here, highlighting at first the games between extreme tones typical of tenebrism that later will be replaced by a more exalted and luminous colorism. They receive and assimilate Italian, Flemish and Velázquez influences. The clientele will determine the fact that the subject matter is reduced almost exclusively to portraits and religious paintings.
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