DESCRIPTION
Following models of TIZIANO (Pieve di Cadore, Belluno, Veneto, ca. 1477/1490 - Venice, 1576);
Spanish school, 18th century.
"The martyrdom of San Lorenzo".
Oil on copper.
It has Repainting.
Measurements: 51 x 36 cm; 73 x 53 cm (frame).
The present work, although executed in Spain during the eighteenth century, was originally conceived by Titian from 1548 to 1559 and is enceunta in the Escorial Monastery in Madrid.painting on copper in which the martyrdom of San Lorenzo is represented. The work shows the protagonist on the grill at the moment when the martyrdom begins, a characteristic feature of the baroque that seeks to enhance the drama of the scenes. The way in which the grill has been represented indicates the quality of the author, since it initiates a marked diagonal that helps to configure the space of a scene completely populated with characters as Titian did almost two centuries before. A deacon born in Aragon, near Huesca, and martyred in Rome in 258, his "Legendary Acts" narrate that St. Lawrence, out of humility, washed the feet of Christians, cured a widow of a headache and gave sight to a blind man through baptism. Three days after the martyrdom of Pope Sixtus II, who had ordained him deacon and entrusted him with the treasure of the Church, he was arrested and ordered to hand over these riches. But there was nothing left of them, since Lorenzo had distributed them among the poor. Furious at seeing his greed frustrated, the emperor Decius ordered him to be scourged with rods, his ribs burned with a red-hot iron and, finally, to be spread naked on a gridiron placed on a mantle of coals. St. Lawrence is the patron saint of the poor, among whom he distributed the treasures of the Church. Tiziano Vecellio was a painter of the Italian Renaissance and one of the greatest exponents of the Venetian school, which explains the use of bright and luminous colors, as well as a loose brushstroke and an innate chromatic molding. He was a disciple of Giovanni Bellini (Venice, ca. 1433 - 1516), an Italian painter of the Fourteenth century renowned for his sumptuous coloring as well as for his landscapes and fluid atmospheres. The death of the main consolidated artists at that time (Giorgione and his own master, Bellini) and the transfers of Sebastiano del Piombo and Lorenzo Lotto to Rome and Bergamo respectively, left Titian without rivals, at which time he began his period of expansion in which the Italian freed himself from the hermetic canons learned during his youth, and began to produce the works that would consecrate him as a key painter in the history of European art: Court portraits for the Duke of Ferrara Alfonso I of Este or his intervention and culmination in the high altar of the Basilica of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice. In 1521 Titian's workshop began to acquire important prominence, receiving numerous commissions such as The Martyrdom of St. Peter of Verona (1530), the year in which began the artist's period of consolidation and in which he cultivated an increasingly dramatic style, increasing the good relations with the court of Mantua, which would mean his consecration as a portraitist, making works such as Charles V on horseback in Mülberg (1548). In his later years, the Italian artist became increasingly self-critical, creating completely perfectionist works such as Danae Receiving the Golden Rain (1553) and working for Philip II, the monarch with whom he maintained an abundant artistic relationship, producing numerous royal portraits.