Page 21 - The mystery of faith

Fig. 5a Fig. 5b

1506. In 1505 Bigarny signed a contract for the figures of saints to be placed in the niches of the
altarpiece. The contract was precise as to the scale and placement of the sculptures and specified that
they were to be delivered in plain, meaning unpainted, walnut (nogal liso). The gilding and painting of
the figures and their placement on the altarpiece was not completed until the 1520s.7

The influence of Italian Renaissance art on Spanish sculpture of the sixteenth century was powerful.
Marble was imported from Genoa to Catalonia, together with a number of Florentine artists, including
Domenico Fancelli, who carved the tombs of Isabella and Ferdinand in the Royal Chapel, Granada, and
Pietro Torrigiano, who created in Seville a Saint Jerome (Fig. 4) that became a model for generations of
Spanish artists. Diego de Siloé and Bartolomé Ordóñez were in Naples, then governed by the Spanish
monarchy, in 1516, where they carved the sculpture of the Caracciolo Altar in the Church of San
Giovanni a Carbonara. The classicizing examples by Italian artists influenced Diego de Siloé’s
embellishment of the portals of the Cathedral of Granada with classical motifs – nude athletes, garlands
and dolphins. Alonso Berruguete (Figs. 5a, b) absorbed the lessons of the Italian Renaissance while he
was in Rome and Florence (c. 1508–1516) and brought with him on his return to Spain the Florentine
Mannerism evident in the figures he carved for the altarpiece of San Benito in Valladolid (1526).

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