Page 18 - The mystery of faith

sculptor, Martínez Montañés, was called to Madrid to model the portrait of the king for Tacca to
follow. When the Bourbon dynasty ascended the Spanish throne after the death of King Charles II, the
last of the Spanish Habsburgs, in 1700, they brought French artists to Madrid. The court was an artistic
world apart from the rest of Spain, however, so this essay will focus on the development of sculpture,
predominantly religious in subject matter, in regions beyond the court.

The techniques of coloured, or polychromed, sculpture were brought to Spain in the fifteenth century
by Northern European, mostly Flemish, artists. The Hispanicization of their names often barely
conceals their origins. Juan de Colonia, born in Cologne, came to Burgos around 1440 to work on the
cathedral there, and he began construction on the Carthusian monastery at Miraflores. Queen Isabella
had his son Simón de Colonia (d. 1516) complete the church of the monastery. Simón’s son Francisco
de Colonia (c. 1470–1542) collaborated with his father, thus extending the work of this family of
architects and sculptors over a century. It was not unusual for an artist to establish a family workshop
that continued to be active for years.

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T he outstanding figure in Burgos and its satellite cities in the late fifteenth century, however, was
another immigrant, Gil de Siloé (active 1486–1501). In some documents he is called ‘Gil de
Emberres’, suggesting that he was a native of Antwerp. Two of his works, the carved, gilded and
painted altarpiece in the Chapel of Saint Anne in the Cathedral of Burgos (Fig. 2) and the carved
alabaster tomb of King John II and his wife Isabel of Portugal in the Charterhouse of Miraflores
exemplify both the late Gothic style and artistic techniques in Castile around 1500.

Gil de Siloé’s principal collaborator on the altarpiece dedicated to Saint Anne was the painter Diego de
la Cruz, but naturally the great scale of these Spanish retablos required many hands. The immense
structure was usually designed and always constructed by a specialized carpenter called an
ensamblador. Decorative motifs were carved by an entallador. The sculptor who created the carved
figures and narrative scenes, in this case Gil de Siloé, was called an imaginario (the term escultor was
not prevalent until the sixteenth century). Modelli in wax or clay were often created for the approval
of the patron and for the workshop to follow. Various kinds of wood were used. If the sculpture, as in
the case of choir stalls, was not to be polychromed, the wood selected was of the highest quality, with
walnut especially favoured. Castilian pine was widely used. In Seville sculptors used borne, a kind of
oak,2 as well as mahogany and cedar imported from the Spanish Americas.

After the sculpture was carved, the wood was prepared to receive paint and gilding through an
elaborate process detailed by Francisco Pacheco in his Arte de la pintura published in 1649.3 A
preparer, called an aparejador, applied layers of glue size and white ground and layers of plaster of Paris
to the wood. His particular skill consisted in maintaining the details of the wood carving in the process.
Only then did the process of gilding (by a dorador) and painting (by a pintor de imaginería) get
underway.

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