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Lot Essay
This remarkably preserved and recently re-discovered panel is an impressive addition to the work of the late fifteenth-century Aragonese master, Miguel Ximénez. Of Castilian origin, Ximénez is known to have collaborated with Martín Bernat on a number of altarpieces in the Aragonese capital, Zaragoza, between 1482 and 1496. Bernat, an artist of somewhat lesser abilities, had previously worked with Bartolomé Bermejo – the leading Spanish painter of his generation whose works are heavily indebted to Early Netherlandish masters – in the 1470s and early 1480s. Indeed, the Flemish characteristics – including the use of oil rather than tempera, the remarkable attention to detail in the depiction of clothing and facial expressions, the angular drapery folds and the relatively naturalistic landscapes – found in paintings by Ximénez are more likely the result of Bermejo’s influence, as filtered through his collaborator Bernat, than the artist’s firsthand knowledge of Northern prototypes.
The great twentieth-century historian of Spanish painting Chandler Rathfon Post aptly described the Aragonese ‘proclivity for coercing a composition into a formal pattern’ (see C.R. Post, A History of Spanish Painting, Cambridge, MA, VIII, Part I, 1941, p. 75). Here, Ximénez has developed a schema by which he has clearly divided the figures into an upper and lower register, each composed of three distinct figural groups centered around the main protagonist in order to create a coherent, dramatic narrative. In the upper register, an entourage of saints – including Saint James the Greater, an especially important saint given the painting’s Spanish origins, who can be identified by the scallop shell on his cap – surrounds Christ, who sits in judgment atop a crystal orb and raises his hands to display the stigmata. Below, Saint Michael appears as a holy knight in a gleaming suite of armour and a red velvet-lined cope with gold fringe holding a balance with two diminutive figures representing souls. While the righteous woman at left clasps her hands in prayer and gazes upward toward heaven, the man at right appears to squirm as the scale dips perilously close to the devil’s mouth. At Christ’s right, three angels usher three souls into Heaven, while at His left, various demons cast the damned – including one woman seen upside-down – to Hell, whose leaping flames billow between rocks and cracks in the barren ground.
This painting compares closely with one depicting The Fall of the Rebel Angels (fig. 1; New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery), which Post associated with a series of panels that belonged to an altarpiece believed to have been produced for a church near the town of Daroca, approximately eighty kilometres southwest of Zaragoza (op. cit., pp. 117-119). Due to the similarities in the figure types and handling of drapery in this panel and the one in New Haven, it has previously been suggested that the present panel likewise belonged to the same altarpiece. However, it is somewhat larger than the New Haven one and its subject matter cannot easily be situated with the other panels for that altarpiece, suggesting that it instead belongs to an as-yet unidentified work.
Ximénez painted at least one other panel of the Last Judgement, a work that once formed part of the artist’s celebrated altarpiece of The Holy Cross painted in the mid-1480s for the parish church at Blesa and today in the Museo de Bellas Artes, Zaragoza (fig. 2). With more than two-thirds of the composition given over to the static figures of Christ and his attendants, and without the panoply of visually arresting demons, the Zaragoza painting lacks the dramatic intensity and emotional impact of the present composition.
The great twentieth-century historian of Spanish painting Chandler Rathfon Post aptly described the Aragonese ‘proclivity for coercing a composition into a formal pattern’ (see C.R. Post, A History of Spanish Painting, Cambridge, MA, VIII, Part I, 1941, p. 75). Here, Ximénez has developed a schema by which he has clearly divided the figures into an upper and lower register, each composed of three distinct figural groups centered around the main protagonist in order to create a coherent, dramatic narrative. In the upper register, an entourage of saints – including Saint James the Greater, an especially important saint given the painting’s Spanish origins, who can be identified by the scallop shell on his cap – surrounds Christ, who sits in judgment atop a crystal orb and raises his hands to display the stigmata. Below, Saint Michael appears as a holy knight in a gleaming suite of armour and a red velvet-lined cope with gold fringe holding a balance with two diminutive figures representing souls. While the righteous woman at left clasps her hands in prayer and gazes upward toward heaven, the man at right appears to squirm as the scale dips perilously close to the devil’s mouth. At Christ’s right, three angels usher three souls into Heaven, while at His left, various demons cast the damned – including one woman seen upside-down – to Hell, whose leaping flames billow between rocks and cracks in the barren ground.
This painting compares closely with one depicting The Fall of the Rebel Angels (fig. 1; New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery), which Post associated with a series of panels that belonged to an altarpiece believed to have been produced for a church near the town of Daroca, approximately eighty kilometres southwest of Zaragoza (op. cit., pp. 117-119). Due to the similarities in the figure types and handling of drapery in this panel and the one in New Haven, it has previously been suggested that the present panel likewise belonged to the same altarpiece. However, it is somewhat larger than the New Haven one and its subject matter cannot easily be situated with the other panels for that altarpiece, suggesting that it instead belongs to an as-yet unidentified work.
Ximénez painted at least one other panel of the Last Judgement, a work that once formed part of the artist’s celebrated altarpiece of The Holy Cross painted in the mid-1480s for the parish church at Blesa and today in the Museo de Bellas Artes, Zaragoza (fig. 2). With more than two-thirds of the composition given over to the static figures of Christ and his attendants, and without the panoply of visually arresting demons, the Zaragoza painting lacks the dramatic intensity and emotional impact of the present composition.