Page 59 - The mystery of faith

FROM POLYCHROMY TO LANDSCAPE PAINTING

Orozco Díaz emphasized just how important polychromy was to the quality of the brothers’
sculpture, appreciating that their expressive refinement derived as much from the painting as from
the modelling or carving. However, interestingly, the brother’s first biographer and critic did not
examine the role landscape painting played in their work, and among the works attributed by Orozco
Díaz to the brothers there is not one of this type, that is, a high relief against a painted background.
Nevertheless, the three dated works exhibited here include painted backgrounds of great refinement. In
fact, these works are, in effect, a sort of refined sculpted miniature, and their use of colour and natural
detail are on a par with the work of two artists who are practically synonymous with the development
of naturalism in Spanish painting: Juan Sánchez Cotán, a contemporary of the brothers in Granada,
and the Madrilenos painter Juan Bautista Maíno.20

The development of landscape in Spanish painting was part of the general evolution towards naturalism
in art, as it was initiated by Italian artists, such as Correggio in his versions of the Virgin with Child
with the Infant Baptist and Ganymede, and continued by Veronese in his canvases of The Mystic
Marriage of Saint Catherine and Saint Jerome in the Desert, and further disseminated via the
interpretations of Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness painted by Adam Elsheimer, Annibale
Carracci and Michelangelo Merisi, il Caravaggio.21

The two versions of Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness exhibited here, dated respectively to 1625
and 1628, both include painted landscapes, which, in the celestial blues of the skies, the deeper blue
tones of the rivers, and the range of greens in the trees and plants, strongly recall the landscapes of
Sánchez Cotán, such as those included in his Saint John the Baptist and The Rest on the Flight into
Egypt, both in Granada, and his Saint John the Evangelist in Toledo.22 Moreover, in the landscape of
the 1628 version the brothers included a detail also found in Sánchez Cotán’s composition for the same
subject in Granada: two minuscule figures by the riverbank, which refer to the saint’s future baptism of
Christ.23 Equally, the sinuously winding river in the background in both of the present works is similar
to that included in Sánchez Cotán’s Saint Bruno cycle (c. 1617).24

However, the delicate and refined execution of the landscapes in the present works also present certain
parallels with two oil-on-copper versions of the same subject by Juan Bautista Maíno – one in Madrid,
the other in Malaga – which not only share similar dimensions, but also exhibit a miniaturist approach
to landscape.25 While in his monograph of the artist Peréz Sánchez drew close parallels between
landscapes by Maíno and those by the Garcías,26 it should be remembered that Maíno learned his
landscape technique in Rome and was strongly influenced by the Bolognese artists active there in the
first years of the seventeenth century, most particularly Guido Reni. The distinct directions taken by
Spanish and Italian artists in their development of landscape painting is one that Pérez Sánchez
recognized early on. When he organized the 1973 exhibition entitled Caravaggio and Spanish
Naturalism in Seville, he included in the catalogue a section dedicated to examination of the evolution
of naturalism in Spanish painting from the second half of the sixteenth century and cited several works
by Sánchez Cotán, Maíno, Francisco Ribalta and Pedro Orrente, as well as artists from the following

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