Madrid School; end of the XVIII century.

Madrid School; late eighteenth century.
"Immaculate Conception.
Oil on canvas.
Presents restorations.
Measurements: 63 x 33 cm.
We are in front of a representation of the Virgin in a moved and agitated attitude, especially visible through the mantle that undulates in the space, corresponding to some concepts that were handled in the Madrid baroque in the XVIII century. We thus see an Immaculate Conception stuck to the schemes of the preceding century, although close to the guidelines established by Salvador Maella, with a scenographic figure supported in cold or warm chromaticism, according to the most useful for the peculiar vision of the painter.
The Madrid school arose around the court of Philip IV first and Charles II later, and developed throughout the seventeenth century, and even during the eighteenth century, continued by the disciples of the painters of the previous century. Analysts of this school have insisted on considering its development as a result of the agglutinating power of the court; what is truly decisive is not the place of birth of the different artists, but the fact that they were educated and worked around and for a nobiliary and religious clientele located next to the royalty. This allows and favors a stylistic unity even though there are logical divergences due to the personalities of the members. In its origin, the Madrid school is linked to the rise to the throne of Philip IV, a monarch who made Madrid, for the first time, an artistic center. This meant an awakening of the nationalist conscience by allowing a liberation from the previous Italianizing molds to jump from the last echoes of Mannerism to Tenebrism. This will be the first step of the school, which in gradual sense, is walking successively until the attainment of a more autochthonous baroque language and tied to the political, religious and cultural conceptions of the monarchy of the Austrias, to go to die with the first shoots of the rococo. The techniques most used by these painters were oil and fresco. Stylistically, they started from a naturalism with a remarkable capacity for synthesis to lead opportunely to the allegorical and formal complexity characteristic of the decorative baroque. These artists show a great concern for the studies of light and color, as we see here, highlighting at first the games between extreme tones typical of tenebrism that later will be replaced by a more exalted and luminous colorism, reflected in late works such as this "Immaculate Conception". They receive and assimilate Italian, Flemish and Velázquez influences. The clientele will determine the fact that the subject matter is reduced almost exclusively to portraits and religious paintings.