Page 224 - The mystery of faith

ESTEBAN DE RUEDA

(Toro, Zamora c. 1585 – 1626)

23. Busts (‘imágenes de vestir’) of Jesuit Saints.
Saint Francis Xavier (?) and Saint Aloysius of Gonzaga

c. 1620–1625
Wood, polychromed
45.3 x 36.5 cm (approx. 18 x 14 ¼ in.); and 44 x 36 cm (approx. 17 ½ x 14 ¼ in.)
PROVENANCE: possibly from the Convent of the Carmen, Toro (Zamora)

E steban de Rueda was a prolific artist, whose potentially fruitful career was cut short by illness.
It is partly for this reason that his career has always been linked to that of his master Sebastián
Ducete (Toro, 1568–1619), and any analysis of his work was therefore somewhat subject to
this artist. Ironically, Ducete’s own truncated career might have allowed Rueda a certain
artistic independence, if only he had managed to survive his master for any productive length of time.

Rueda entered Ducete’s studio in 1598, and six years later had earned the right to officially open his
own studio, but chose to remain working for Ducete. By the end of the 1610s, Ducete had become
aware of the challenge Rueda could pose to his own professional standing, should he open an
independent studio. Moreover, being childless, he was increasingly concerned with ensuring the
continuity of his workshop. Therefore, Ducete took a decision that was most unusual in the rigidly
hierarchical milieu of the guilds; he hired Rueda formally as a teacher. It was not the norm for a
workshop to use two or more independent artists to implement their commissions, but in the Toro
workshop, Ducete and Rueda formed a partnership working as teachers under the same conditions, and
using the same models and drawings.

The two sculptors retained a close working relationship up until 1620, when Ducete died. Thereafter,
Rueda, as heir to the workshop, also retained possession of all models, prints and drawings by Ducete
and his assistants that had been made over three decades of activity, and that had largely formed his
own work. Throughout his later career, Rueda displayed in his religious subjects a marked tendency
towards the burgeoning Baroque realism of his age and a visible shift away from the Juni Mannerism
more typical of his former master’s sculpture.

Indeed, it is still unknown just how much influence Rueda was able to exercise in the stylistic
development of the Toro workshop during the second decade of the seventeenth century. In any case,
around this time artists had already began to move away from late Mannerist images of idealized
beauty, which were characterized by an abundance of rich drapery and an absence of facial expression,
a style that typified the work of Gregorio Fernández. Other artists who were also attuned to this shift
in current tastes began to eschew the extravagantly modelled drapery of Fernández in favour of the use
of forceful gestures within static poses.

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