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拍品专文
This striking canvas depicting Christ Taking leave of His Mother – a subject rarely seen in Spanish painting – can be dated to 1580-85, soon after El Greco’s arrival in Spain. While revealing the formative influence of his early years in Venice, particularly his admiration for Titian, the picture is charged with the uncompromising spiritual potency that would define El Greco’s revolutionary idiom, securing his reputation as one of the great visionaries of Western art.
Before a celestial sky, Christ is shown facing the Virgin, his left hand interlaced with hers, while pointing heavenwards with his right. The proximity of the half-length figures to the picture plane heightens the drama and intimacy of this devotional scene, representing the moment when Christ bids farewell to the Virgin before his departure for Jerusalem, the canonical 'beginning' of the Passion sequence. This episode, often included in the cycle of the Seven Sorrows of Our Lady, served as both a reminder of Christ's mission as Saviour and his eventual sacrifice upon the cross, while also anticipating their eventual reunion in heaven. Although the scene is not described in the Bible, it appears in both the Franciscan Pseudo-Bonaventure’s Meditations on the Life of Christ (c.1300) and the Carthusian Ludolph of Saxony's Vita Christi (c.1330s), arguably two of the most significant and widely read devotional guides during this period.
Interestingly, despite its evident popularity in Northern Europe in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century – with subject taken up in the Netherlands by artists like Gerard David and particularly prevalent in German painting, no doubt due to Dürer's woodcuts of the scene – the iconography was popular neither in Italy nor Spain. The paucity of visual sources for El Greco's composition suggest that the subject may have been gleaned from textural examples. The Vita Christi had been translated into Spanish by the Franciscan friar Ambrosio de Montesinos in circa 1502-3 and the Toledo-born theologian Alonso de Villegas (1533-1603) included the episode in his influential Flos Sanctorum (1578), an expanded vernacular version of the famed Golden Legend.
Leticia Ruiz Gómez, to whom we are grateful, has recently inspected the picture at first hand and considers it to be a work by El Greco with considerable workshop assistance, and one of the artist's earliest renditions of the subject. The head of the Virgin is particularly fine, exhibiting the artist’s masterful, flickering brushwork that is characteristic of El Greco’s evolving style from this period, witnessed in some of the artist’s most celebrated works, including the Martyrdom of Saint Maurice (1580-82), his first royal commission, executed for the Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial (Madrid; fig. 1). In terms of the models for the protagonists, the head of Christ compares closely to that of the eponymous Saint in the Escorial altarpiece, while that of his Mother recalls the Virgin in The Disrobing of Christ, the artist's outstanding masterpiece completed in 1579 for the High Altar of the sacristy in Toledo Cathedral (fig. 2).
While there is no direct compositional source for El Greco’s series of pictures showing Christ taking leave of His Mother, both the palette and the figure of Christ betray the legacy of the painter's years in Venice from circa 1568-70. Indeed, El Greco's Christ bears a number of striking resemblances to that in Titian's Tribute Money (London, National Gallery; fig. 3), painted in circa 1560-68 for Philip II of Spain, and it is tempting to imagine that the Cretan encountered the Venetian master's picture, either towards its completion in Venice or after its subsequent arrival in Spain.
Although Manuel Bartolomé Cossío described El Greco's treatment of this theme as ‘extraña y poética’ (‘strange and poetic’) in 1908, scholars of the artist’s work had, until recently, largely overlooked the various versions of this enigmatic composition, no doubt due to their historical inaccessibility. Ruiz Gómez considers the prime version to be that offered at Christie's, London, 6 July 2017, lot 34 (Private collection), which she dates to circa 1578-80. She believes that it was originally of a format similar to the present work and, like the latter, would have shown Christ and his Mother’s interlacing hands. She further hypothesises that the ex-Christie’s picture was cut down from its original format in the early eighteenth century and placed in the upper register of a retable in the church of San Vicente, Toledo (op. cit., 2012, p. 73). An upright version in the Danielson collection (Groton, Massachusetts, on loan to the Art Institute of Chicago), which she dates to circa 1585-90, previously hung in the Sacristy of the Hieronymite nuns’ convent of San Pablo in Toledo and was described by Harold Wethey as ‘a very impressive and moving work’ (op. cit, no. 70). A related, fully autograph picture of smaller dimensions was formerly in the Royal Collection of Romania. Lastly, a studio rendition, dated to circa 1595, showing the figures in three-quarter-length, is preserved in the Museum of Santa Cruz, Toledo, but had also been previously housed in the church of San Vicente.
As the number of versions of this composition suggest, El Greco must have had an active workshop, even at this relatively early juncture in his career. However, as is the case with many painters from the period, due to the scarcity of surviving documentary evidence, El Greco’s assistants have remained largely elusive figures, with scholars left to speculate on their identities. The three artists who are securely identified as having occupied this role in the Cretan’s workshop over the course of his career were Francisco Preboste (d.1607), Jorge Manuel Theotocópuli (1578-1631) – the artist’s son – and Luis Tristán (1585-1624). Preboste was almost certainly El Greco’s main collaborator in Toledo, from at least 1580 until 1607, the probable year of his death.
Before a celestial sky, Christ is shown facing the Virgin, his left hand interlaced with hers, while pointing heavenwards with his right. The proximity of the half-length figures to the picture plane heightens the drama and intimacy of this devotional scene, representing the moment when Christ bids farewell to the Virgin before his departure for Jerusalem, the canonical 'beginning' of the Passion sequence. This episode, often included in the cycle of the Seven Sorrows of Our Lady, served as both a reminder of Christ's mission as Saviour and his eventual sacrifice upon the cross, while also anticipating their eventual reunion in heaven. Although the scene is not described in the Bible, it appears in both the Franciscan Pseudo-Bonaventure’s Meditations on the Life of Christ (c.1300) and the Carthusian Ludolph of Saxony's Vita Christi (c.1330s), arguably two of the most significant and widely read devotional guides during this period.
Interestingly, despite its evident popularity in Northern Europe in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century – with subject taken up in the Netherlands by artists like Gerard David and particularly prevalent in German painting, no doubt due to Dürer's woodcuts of the scene – the iconography was popular neither in Italy nor Spain. The paucity of visual sources for El Greco's composition suggest that the subject may have been gleaned from textural examples. The Vita Christi had been translated into Spanish by the Franciscan friar Ambrosio de Montesinos in circa 1502-3 and the Toledo-born theologian Alonso de Villegas (1533-1603) included the episode in his influential Flos Sanctorum (1578), an expanded vernacular version of the famed Golden Legend.
Leticia Ruiz Gómez, to whom we are grateful, has recently inspected the picture at first hand and considers it to be a work by El Greco with considerable workshop assistance, and one of the artist's earliest renditions of the subject. The head of the Virgin is particularly fine, exhibiting the artist’s masterful, flickering brushwork that is characteristic of El Greco’s evolving style from this period, witnessed in some of the artist’s most celebrated works, including the Martyrdom of Saint Maurice (1580-82), his first royal commission, executed for the Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial (Madrid; fig. 1). In terms of the models for the protagonists, the head of Christ compares closely to that of the eponymous Saint in the Escorial altarpiece, while that of his Mother recalls the Virgin in The Disrobing of Christ, the artist's outstanding masterpiece completed in 1579 for the High Altar of the sacristy in Toledo Cathedral (fig. 2).
While there is no direct compositional source for El Greco’s series of pictures showing Christ taking leave of His Mother, both the palette and the figure of Christ betray the legacy of the painter's years in Venice from circa 1568-70. Indeed, El Greco's Christ bears a number of striking resemblances to that in Titian's Tribute Money (London, National Gallery; fig. 3), painted in circa 1560-68 for Philip II of Spain, and it is tempting to imagine that the Cretan encountered the Venetian master's picture, either towards its completion in Venice or after its subsequent arrival in Spain.
Although Manuel Bartolomé Cossío described El Greco's treatment of this theme as ‘extraña y poética’ (‘strange and poetic’) in 1908, scholars of the artist’s work had, until recently, largely overlooked the various versions of this enigmatic composition, no doubt due to their historical inaccessibility. Ruiz Gómez considers the prime version to be that offered at Christie's, London, 6 July 2017, lot 34 (Private collection), which she dates to circa 1578-80. She believes that it was originally of a format similar to the present work and, like the latter, would have shown Christ and his Mother’s interlacing hands. She further hypothesises that the ex-Christie’s picture was cut down from its original format in the early eighteenth century and placed in the upper register of a retable in the church of San Vicente, Toledo (op. cit., 2012, p. 73). An upright version in the Danielson collection (Groton, Massachusetts, on loan to the Art Institute of Chicago), which she dates to circa 1585-90, previously hung in the Sacristy of the Hieronymite nuns’ convent of San Pablo in Toledo and was described by Harold Wethey as ‘a very impressive and moving work’ (op. cit, no. 70). A related, fully autograph picture of smaller dimensions was formerly in the Royal Collection of Romania. Lastly, a studio rendition, dated to circa 1595, showing the figures in three-quarter-length, is preserved in the Museum of Santa Cruz, Toledo, but had also been previously housed in the church of San Vicente.
As the number of versions of this composition suggest, El Greco must have had an active workshop, even at this relatively early juncture in his career. However, as is the case with many painters from the period, due to the scarcity of surviving documentary evidence, El Greco’s assistants have remained largely elusive figures, with scholars left to speculate on their identities. The three artists who are securely identified as having occupied this role in the Cretan’s workshop over the course of his career were Francisco Preboste (d.1607), Jorge Manuel Theotocópuli (1578-1631) – the artist’s son – and Luis Tristán (1585-1624). Preboste was almost certainly El Greco’s main collaborator in Toledo, from at least 1580 until 1607, the probable year of his death.