Page 250 - The mystery of faith

DOMèNEC ROVIRA

(Sant Feliu de Guíxols 1608 – 1678 Barcelona)

28. Pair of Atlantes - Allegories of Virtue

c. 1640–1650
Wood, polychromed
Each 147 cm (approx. 57 ¾ in.)
PROVENANCE: Santa María del Mar, Barcelona?; Collection María del Carmen Alfonso, Madrid;
Juan Salas; Pedro Gento

T hese two figures of atlantes were sculpted for a single location by Domènec Rovira, an artist
whose surviving works are extremely rare. Even photographic evidence is rare since the
majority of his work was destroyed during the Civil War. The use of male caryatid figures,
or atlantes, was not uncommon in Catalan art and there are several other published examples
of this type, such as the single surviving (in photograph) element of Rovira’s Sant Pau altarpiece1 for
Santa María del Mar, Barcelona (Fig. 1). Generally incorporated into the lower level of a retablo or
flanking the central elements therein, these figures could take the form of herms, if engaged, or
caryatids and atlantes, if free-standing.

As with Italian examples of the form, these figures were derived from those known ancient examples,
the most iconic being the classical sculptures of the Erechtheum on the Athenian Acropolis, and in Villa
Albani, Rome. According to Vitruvius, caryatids originally represented the women of Caryae, who were
doomed to hard labour because the town sided with the Persians in 480 BC during their second invasion
of Greece, and therefore are iconographically slaves. He went on to elaborate that this motif found
further variation in the wake of the Greco-Persian wars,2 when these female figures became male figures
that, in their capacity to support a roof, recalled Atlas supporting the Earth, hence atlantes.

While there are some medieval examples of atlantes, they were primarily revived during the
Renaissance, both as an architectural element and as a feature of wall paintings, and often carried
various symbolic meanings. During the sixteenth century, when, as part of their artistic training, artists
made studies after the antique, they also made studies after Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine
Chapel, his sculptures for the tomb of Julius II, Raphael’s frescoes in the Vatican – which also featured
atlantes – and Giulio Romano’s herms for the ‘secret garden’ at the Palazzo del Te, Mantua
(1528–1530), the first true anthropomorphic supports to appear since the ancient world. It was through
these careful, if subjective, studies after ancient, Renaissance and Mannerist models, which were
engraved (and often re-engraved) and then published individually or incorporated into editions of
Vitruvius and other architectural and decorative canons, that atlantes became widely known outside
Italy and eventually emerged in Spanish Baroque art, albeit to varying degrees of formal accuracy and
logic.3

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