Granadina Granadine of Sculpture – Wikipedia, free encyclopedia

The Granada sculpture school It is defined through the 16th century, until fully concretized in the seventeenth century. The extraordinary artistic activity developed in the Renaissance Granada, with the presence of great national and foreign artists, was the one that prepared the basis for this sculpture school to emerge.

The names that mark the three moments of initiation, development and culmination of these Granada features are, respectively, Diego de Siloé, Pablo de Rojas and Alonso Cano. The features set by the last style are those that we properly attribute to the Granada school.

Gothic images brought to Granada at the time of the Catholic Monarchs, even if they focused devotion, could not act on the development of a local sculpture. It was the aforementioned activity of the Emperor years that, having as an initial nucleus the works gathered or carried out in the Royal Chapel, acted in the development of the artistic life of Granada. The tomb of the Catholic Monarchs, the work of Fancelli; that of Don Felipe and Doña Juana, due to Bartolomé Ordóñez; The great altarpiece -revator of trace and sculptural conception- made by Felipe Bigarny and the works such as “incarnation” and the “burial of Christ” – today in the museum – due to Jacobo Florentino, constituted master realizations of New and Varied Orientation . To this we must unite the immense work that Siloé does, especially in the monastery of S. Jerónimo and in the cathedral; And as a focus, more isolated, the decoration work of the Palace of Carlos V, in which Nicolao de Carte, the flamenco Antonio de Leval and the disciple of the former, Juan de Orea, in which a vigorous realism with a sense of composition and Italian style movement.

Of all the aforementioned artists is Siloé who, not only because of his settlement in the city, but for the power and variety of his art, managed to attract and create a group of followers with whom a local school begins. The most faithful continuator was Diego de Aranda; But those who give the most personal note are Baltasar de Arce and Diego de Pesquera. The first with his “Christ to the column” of the Church of the Hospitalicos, which offers us a figure of violent concentrated movement, typically mannerist, but of pre -jarque expressive intensity. With more brío and grandiosity it is shown in the central figure of the fragmented main altarpiece of the church of S. Cristóbal.

Pesquera, formed in Rome according to Gómez Moreno, came to work with Siloé, achieving within the style of this accentuated effects of modeling finessee with expressive features of tender and fainted sensitivity. He worked in the cathedral, and highlights among his work the cover of the Chapter Room, with virtues figures in which these features are extreme. The artist later passed to Seville and his footprint is lost in 1580.

Contacts with this city, in an exchange of artists and influences, constitute a distinctive feature of the final decades of the 16th century. Thus, as an important example for the development of both schools, we have to highlight the monumental altarpiece of the monastery of San Jerónimo made around 1585. The waiter has been attributed to Vázquez, but it could very well be the work of Granada Melchor de Turin -o Torines- that began in Seville in the workshop of Vázquez el Viejo, with whom he later collaborated in some important work. His style responds to a temperate mannerism, seduced by the clear composition and the noble beauty of types and attitudes.

At that time corresponds Rodrigo Moreno, from which we know he made a “crucified” for Felipe II and what is said he was a teacher of Pablo de Rojas, figure that marks the passage to a new era and the emergence of the great Andalusian imagery. He focused the sculptural activity of Granada and was a teacher of Juan Martínez Montañés, who retains traits of this formation.

To Rojas corresponds in 1605 the expansion of the aforementioned altarpiece, where his collaborators also work. Of these, Martín de Aranda stands out, which collects his art, although without his vigor and nobility, and, above all, Bernabé de Gaviria, with whom his style evolves with a freedom, verve and dynamism of Baroque breath. We know by Gómez Moreno some dates of his activity between 1603 and 1622 in which he died. From his works, the colossal “apostolate” in golden wood – finished in 1614- in the main chapel of the Cathedral stands out. The ten figures they made surprise by the grandiosity of their types and the courage and dynamism of their gestures and attitudes, which in some cases imply a violent mannerist complication, others have an impetuousness of baroque full movements. It is also known by contract held in Granada on May 25, 1615, preserved in the Archive of the Notarial College of Granada, the order of the image of Our Lady of the Patron Snow of Gabia, by the then ordinary mayor of the place of Gaviar the Great, Don Luis Sánchez de Castro. In this contract, the amount of 36 ducats for the execution of the work was established and that it would be used as a model: The Ymaxen of Our Lady of the Antigu

As contemporaries of Rojas we must also highlight the brothers Miguel and Jerónimo Francisco García who, detached from the life of the workshops, worked together and that in 1600 they were famous, especially for their mud sculptures. It stands out between everything that an important group of ecce-homos is attributed to them, of a great variety of types and all of them of technical care and deep emotion. Some are very small, fine modeling and polychromy; But in contrast we are offered that of the Cartuja, greater than the natural, where noble and muscular forms are twinned with realistic observation details, chords with a popular devotional intention. The close relationship with this work forces us to attribute the great “crucified” of the sacristy of the cathedral that constitutes the immediate antecedent of the “Christ of Clemencia” of Montañés.

With echoes of these artists, but with direct and strong enthure with the art of Rojas, the sculptor Alonso de Mena is offered, which marks with his style a process of naturalistic observation, although of a static realism of the external with impassive gestures. He lived until 1646 and in his workshop, the center of the Granada artistic activity, his son Pedro, Bernardo de Mora and Pedro Roldán were formed. The first managers of the workshop to the death of Alonso, and also other multiple mediocre disciples, changed their style with the return of Alonso Cano to Granada in 1652. The style of this great teacher was imposed in a decisive and tyrannical way in all the arts. Thus, the young Mena evolved according to this influence, although giving a vigorous personal note of intense realism. After him as the last great disciple, José de Mora, the son of Bernardo, who stylizes the types and subtiles the expression until mystical reverie. With his brother Diego Canesco art becomes superficial and decorative; But from him the art of José Risueño sprouts, who returns to Cano and directly studies the natural, giving a note of sober realism, but with sensitivity also open to delicate grace and beauty.

Century XVIII [ To edit ]

Independent of the echoes of the Italian Baroque and the French Rococó, Torcuato Ruiz del Peral, maintains the Granada types, especially of José de Mora, but looking for new compositional and expressive effects in which the softness of faces is joined with the vigorous movement of Great folds with violent polychromy effects. It is explained that the most processional image of the entire school will carve, which is the “Virgen de las Angustias” by S. María de la Alhambra. Among its varied production highlighted the set of small figures of the Choir Sillería de la Cathedral de Guadix -dorted in 1936-, where he carried out other important works. Together with the aforementioned, his best creation in Granada is the «S. Joseph with the child by the hand »in his parish church. His workshop was of great activity until his death in 1773.

Coming from the same workshop you have to mention Agustín de Vera Moreno, less personal in his art, but with some successes, especially in images of San José -in the Carmelites shoes. He stood out above all in stone sculpture, as we see in the images made for the Church of the Tabernacle and the Traschoro of the Cathedral, and died in 1760.

The other sculptors who work in Granada in the years of Peral and Vera give an analogous note, but with little personality. Thus Juan José Salazar, Ramiro Ponce de León, Pedro Tomás Valero and Martín José Santisteban. In a different meaning is the work of the painter and sculptor Diego Sánchez Sarabia, of cult formation and academic number of the Royal of S. Fernando.

Between 1714 and 1718 he worked in Granada and left good works by Cordoba Pedro Duque Cornejo, but his vigorous art, with baroque vessel of Italian ancestry, left little mark on the work of all those named sculptors. Nor did the French sculptor Miguel Verdiguier, who worked in the cathedral in the reliefs of his facade and in the chapel of S. Cecilio, weighed in the evolution of the school, with art that marks the passage of Rococó to neoclassicism. Less even the art of the neoclassical sculptor Juan de Adan, who worked in the cathedral, and after him the Catalan Jaime de Folch, although the Granada’s disciple of the first Pedro Antonio Hermoso, died in 1830.

The Granada school continued its evolution with modest artists followers of Peral, among which Felipe González stands of Los Angeles and the “loneliness” of the church of S. Domingo, which we would believe to be works from the middle of the previous century. It occurs as a return to Cano and its disciples, a feature that lasts in the imagery even in the barristas sculptors in the second half of the 19th century, Francisco Morales and Fernando Marín, with relatives and disciples who follow the art of both and that maintain The school features until the end of the century. These last include Pablo de Loyzaga and his disciple José Navas-Parejo as the last exponents of this school.

See also [ To edit ]

Bibliography [ To edit ]

• E. Orozco Díaz. Granada sculpture school
• M. Gómez Moreno González, Granada Guide, Granada 1892
• M. Gómez Moreno Martínez, Renaissance sculpture, Barcelona 1931
• M. E. Gómez Moreno, Stories of Spanish Sculpture, Madrid
• ID, seventeenth -century sculpture, in Ars, Madrid 1963
• A. Gallego weed, Ruiz del Peral, «Cuaderno de Arte», Granada 1936

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